The Tin Lizard

How Hi Should Hi-Tech Be?

Hi-tech.  It's on everyone's lips.  Yes, hi-tech lipstick does exist, but that's not what i'm talking about.  Looking beyond that -- "hi-tech" is the fab fad of the decade, perhaps of the century.  But how hi should hi-tech be?

For me, the answer is, it should be what's sensible and useful.  Nearly everyone is prepared to accept something that's truly a help ... something that makes their lives easier, helps them do their jobs more effectively, maybe even makes their relationships work more smoothly.  That's been my approach.

So I have a cell phone, but use it for actual phone calls. My phone will take pictures, it will text, it will hook up to GPS direction-finding for a price.  I don't use those features; they're not useful to me.  I have a camera for pictures, e-mail for messages, and am fully capable of interpreting a map to find where I need to go.  In fact, most of the time, even my cell phone is either turned off or not on my person.  Technological advances are fine if they serve our needs, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to adopt something -- usually more expensive and less WYSIWYG -- that really doesn't represent an improvement. 

HDTV, for example - at the cost of replacing all our existing equipment, it provides a slightly clearer, but distorted, picture.  Not worth the trouble but it's been shoved down our throats anyway.

I can learn things that I need... when I got into a job where spreadsheets were useful, I taught myself Excel.  When I needed to prepare a brochure for a charitable organization, I learned to use Microsoft Publisher.  I've given up on calling in to those India-based help lines for advice on computer problems because i usually find that I know more than their first-tier "tech support" staff. 

But I like to keep a sense of proportion.  Not everyone does.  I have to chuckle to myself in meetings when I see people taking notes on a laptop or tablet computer.  Some are very effective at it, but most people can't keyboard nearly as fast as they need to for this task.  Besides, computers are obtrusive in a meeting, and I'd argue that in focusing on the computer, you're missing the sense of what's being said.

I belong to a small charitable organization.  We keep attendance at our meetings with a simple check-off sheet so that those who didn't come can be informed of what happened.  Last week, one member was enthusiastically promoting a system that would electronically scan members' name tags and record their attendance.  All we needed was to buy the scanner, equipment to put bar codes on the name tags, a thumb drive for the data, and a computer in which to enter it.  But we have only about 50 members -- the hi-tech "solution" in this case is slower, more costly and more troublesome than a simple, old-fashioned piece of paper.

Tonight's news brings another example of bone-headed tech density.  Sarah Palin.  In general, or course, she defines the term; but also specifically, in the trial of the kid who tapped into her e-mail accounts a while back and embarrassed her (as if she weren't embarrassed enough).  Palin claims that this guy's intrusion destroyed her "only means of contct" with her children.  Whoa!  Poor baby! Don't they have telephones in Alaska?  Well, maybe not, but I'm sure if they don't, they must have a system of communication by some code of rifle shots.      

In short, there are various approaches to the adoption of technology.  Most of us need to remain levelheaded and resist the blandishments of the overeager.  Still, the "early adopters" have a role -- they forge ahead because of their fascination with the technology, without reference to its direct applications.  They can help sort out the bugs, and eventually, the technology that seems laughably unnecessary now may develop into something that makes sense.

A Historic Magazine Survives, Barely

I chanced upon the website of the Saturday Evening Post recently.  Surprise!  I didn't even know they still existed but here they are, a trip into yesteryear, right down to the Norman Rockwell illustrations and the eclectic content (crochet, botanical gardens, sports) that used to be the mainstay of many a mag. 

We seldom see this sort of broad-focused magazine any more.  Today, everything is specialized -- The Journal of Left-Handed Baseball Pitchers, Pine Tree Fanciers' Monthly -- that kind of thing.

In fact in the venerable SEP we can see the ravages of time and changing tastes.  It is the apotheosis of how not just magazines, but our society, have changed.  In its heyday, the magazine was a mass-circulation weekly offering fiction and political commentary; now, it's published six times a year with a far blander content.  The title itself tells a tale of multileveled anachronism:  Post?  Many people get their magazine fare on line these days.  Evening post?  A commentary on our postal system, harking back to a day when there were two deliveries per day (that practice ended in 1950).  And Saturday?  With changes pending at USPS, that too will soon be a thing of the past.   

Chinese Food

Back in the 1960s, when America's concept of "Chinese food" was a can of slimy, saline cooked vegetables containing some bean sprouts and water chestnuts, dumped over a can of crisp "chow mein" noodles, the joke used to be that you could eat a meal of Chinese food but an hour later, you'd be hungry again.  Maybe that was a reference to all the vegetables, without any red-blooded American meat.

In the 1970s and 1980s, our concept changed considerably, as hifalutin chefs from China and Hong Kong appeared in the U.S. in droves, opening fancy restaurants, each usually devoted to the cuisine of a particular region of China -- Szechuan, Hunan, Canton, and so on.  These chefs proved to most foodies in the U.S. that Chinese is indeed one of the world's great cuisines.  But they seem to have disappeared as quickly as they came.  Although good Chinese restaurants do exist still, no one talks about Chinese any more, it's passé.

Unfortunately we appear to be in a new frame of reference now when it comes to Chinese -- one of suspicion and doubt.  The U.S. is, and has always been, one of the few countries in the world blessed with the land, climate, and soil to feed itself; to be nutritionally self-reliant.  So why should we be importing foodstuffs from China?  If we can't trust them to produce unpolluted pet food, why is it that we see so many products (if we read the labels carefully enough) appearing in our markets, on our pantry shelves, and in our refrigerators, from China?

One small example is this bottle of "edamame" (basically, soybeans) roasted and salted as a snack.   

It looks harmless enough, even has one of those vaguely wholesome, "country"-sounding names.  And if we were to think of a foreign country in connection with edamame, it would be Japan.  Yet the small print on the back label tells the real story:  These come from China. 

Not to pick on one product.  There are many examples.  Check the backs of those packaged frozen food products you pick up at the supermarket - you may be surprised.   Or here's another:  For a while, Costco was selling "Virginia" peanuts under its Kirkland brand name; then they switched to a different brand name which gave us "Virginia" peanuts from China; they must have had complaints, because they now sell something they call "Virginia variety" peanuts that are a "product of the USA." 

So, nothing personal against China, but until they clean up their act, I'm more comfortable with food items grown a little closer to home.  For U.S. food processors, the answer to "why import from China" is "because it's cheaper."  That means fatter profit margins.  The Costco case suggests that public reaction can bring change.

Hardscrabble Existence

Can the rules of Scrabble change?  Today, reports filtered out that they could, and had, with the introduction of new game rules that would permit the use of proper nouns.  The game's fans across the country reacted with groans of agony.

It turns out, though, they needn't have bothered. The report of new rules wasn't true...well, but it wasn't exactly false, either.  It was kind of a rumor...but more than that.

The interesting factoid of the tale is that different companies own the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada (Hasbro) and in the rest of the world (Mattel).  Mattel is indeed talking about introducing a version of the game with different rules calculated to attract kids and new players.  But (second factoid) it wouldn't just allow players to slap down a proper noun any time; they might occasionally draw a card that would give them the right to do so on one turn of play.  Whatever the nature of the new Mattel game, though, it won't be available in the U.S. (because of factoid # 1).

I thank writer Montgomery for clearing all this up.  Otherwise,

I can see the arguments now:  "Alturba! - What's that supposed to mean?" -- "That was my dear maiden aunt's first name."  Other arguments could develop over the spelling of many, many foreign words, especially those from languages like Chinese, Arabic, or Russian who don't share our alphabet and are transliterated into English, often in wildly different ways.  What version of a word from such a language would be accepted in "proper name Scrabble"?  All of them?  Is the capital of China Peking, Peiping, or Beijing?  All have been used as "authoritative" in the past fifty years.  

It's not hard to see why the original writers of the Scrabble rules chose to omit proper names; they demonstrated a foresight at least as remarkable as that of the "Founding Fathers" who wrote our Constitution.

If there's a serious side to this, it's that allowing proper names to be used would make the game easier.  And that is certainly in keeping with trends elsewhere.  Look at a simple TV show like "Jeopardy," where the questions by and large are pretty simple, but often made even simpler by hints contained in the clue; and compare that to earlier quiz shows like "The $64,000 Question," where contestants actually may have had to know something (in fact, they had to know so much that it's no wonder some of them cheated).  The regrettable trend, to make shows palatable to the masses, is to dumb them down.  Now, Mattel seeks to do the same with board games; it's a natural progression.

An American Life

I don't have a lot of time to write today but I thought this obit of Eugene Allen, former White House butler who served eight Presidents,  made for very interesting reading - a success story of sorts, a tale of the low and the mighty; an object lesson in how our country has changed.  Also a very "Washington" account, not something that those of you outside the DC area would probably see otherwise.

Selling Cars

The latest market statistics say that car sales are rebounding; all makers except Chrysler seem to be enjoying much improved sales. 

One thing that struck me in these reports was the statement that GM in particular (with a less robust increase than some others) is now saying they're trying to back away from the give-away tactics nearly all manufacturers have pursued in the past:  the huge discounts, give-backs, and low-cost financing arrangements.  According to one intrepid reporter, GM has realized that these deals sacrifice profits for volume to the point where it makes no sense.  

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that a company, and an industry, that made so many bad decisions in the past, would have overlooked this rather commonsense point for so many years, too.  The irony may be that as GM finally learns this lesson, Toyota -- which for many years didn't appear to need such deals -- last month managed a significant uptick in sales despite the trouble over recalls.  How did they do it?  By offering greater incentives.