Everything's just too damn small

By DOLPH HONICKER

My wife Jeannine and I own a cell phone (one). We share it. If she’s out, it’s attached to her purse, which means she has to drag her purse up to her ear if anyone calls. People stare when she’s at a restaurant and appears to be talking into her purse while leaning under the table.

If I’m out, she still has the cell phone with her. I haven’t quite got the hang of it. My fingers fumble.

It’s a remarkable device. Fits in the palm of your hand. It can take photos. It has a button that turns it into a video camera. I think it can add, subtract, divide and multiply (not like rabbits but with numbers). It may even have a timer and a button to get the latest stock market reports.

We use it to call people and receive calls from other people. That’s it. The luxury services remain unused.

If we had a flat tire on the highway or saw a traffic accident, our cell phone would come in handy. Unless we were in a dead zone, we could call 911 and tell them where we were -- if we had a global positioning system.

But, even if we saw a spectacular accident, worthy of CNN coverage, I wouldn’t know how to photograph with a digital camera which I usually leave at home.

Many years ago, I had a Rolliflex camera. I never used a flash. I learned to use available light. A light meter gave me settings for Tri-X film which I could juice up to an even higher speed.

Our digital camera fits in the palm of your hand. We ordered it over the internet. Yes, I’ve learned how to use the internet. Small as it is, the ad said the camera can turn out images of 10 pixels, which means it can cram a bunch of dots smaller than a period at the end of this sentence so tightly the photo would be almost as sharp as an old-fashioned darkroom photo -- so sharp you could blow up the image into a poster.

By the time I added a battery charger and lots of other stuff to my order, the bill came to $318.

We’ve had it for almost a year now. Every time I take it out and look at it the damned thing intimidates the hell out of me. It came with a manual. The manual also intimidates the hell out of me. It also came with a CD of instructions. But I’ve lost it.

With my Rolliflex all I had to do was look down, focus, set the shutter speed and snap. I could develop and print my own pictures. I was no Ed Weston or Ansel Adams, but some of my shots looked pretty good. Or, as Larry David would say: “Pretty, pretty good.”

Today everything technical seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Next year I may be able to watch Lawrence of Arabia on my thumbnail.

But do I?

Technology is passing me by. I have no idea what an iPod is. It sounds like one of those old black-and-white horror films where giant ants from outer space land in pods, hatch and then begin gobbling all the people in their path until a handsome young scientist develops a death ray that kills the ants.

Apple (not the edible type but the Silicon Valley version) is coming out with an iPhone that’ll sell for $500 to $600. What will you get for your money besides a mobile phone? Here are the other features: music player, camera, wireless e-mail, Web browser and video player.

For that money, it ought to have a device that will burn in CDs, although I have no idea how to burn in CDs. However, there’s a lot of rap music I’d like to burn. I come from an era of 78-rpm records with one song on one side and a second on the flip side.

Forget this high tech stuff. In my book, the greatest invention of the modern era was the flip-top can that replaced the ubiquitous “church key,” once a must at all beer busts.

And forget about making things smaller. Give me something Big like Sharp’s 108-inch flat panel television, the largest ever made. Of course, the only place we’d have to put it would be on our roof.

If we sat out chairs in the backyard and charged admission, it might be worth it.

Pythian Press