Juxtapositions to delight and depress you

(Agnes)

(You Damn Kid)

I've said many times that I don't have a smartphone because it's not worth another $60 a month for me to have Internet access the three or four hours a day I'm away from my computer, and that my clients know, if they don't get an immediate email answer, to call me, because I'm rarely more than 20 minutes from the house, either picking up groceries or walking the dog.

And let me add this: There are not a lot of problems I could fix from a smartphone that I can't fix on a flip phone, which is to say, by talking the client through it. A missing file, perhaps.

But unless I threw everything up on the cloud every time I went to get a loaf of bread -- and had a smartphone that could run programs like Photoshop and InDesign -- most things would require my going back home anyway.

However, I'm about to head out to Kenosha (blatant plug of the day) and whenever I hit the road for a few days, I have this moment of "This would be a good time to have a smartphone" because now I'll only be able to check email when I can find a hotspot and have time to whip out my tablet or laptop.

But it only takes a few minutes to realize that a couple of days off the leash isn't such a bad thing. There used to be these things called "vacations" where people were not at the constant beck-and-call of their employers, but I guess you have to be an old fart to even remember that.

Yes, the kind of old fart who carries a flip phone.

The "oooo, he's still got a flip phone (snicker snicker)" is just one of those lemmingesque hipster fads one ought not to take seriously, like the War on Crocs that broke out a few years ago, and the current War on Cargo Pants. 

And relevant to my immediate plans, the War on Reclining Airline Seats, which thankfully has subsided, perhaps because even the hipster doofi began to realize that the damn things only recline about two inches and they should get over themselves. 

Well, the first part, anyway.

Because I'm also old enough to remember when Time magazine started running lists of "what's out" and "what's in," which is such a stupid concept that Stan Freberg was mocking it more than half a century ago, only to have two entire generations of hipster doofi spring up in his wake, still taking themselves, and their lists of what to like and what not to like, very, very seriously.

Anyway, I have a flip phone, and I disagree entirely with Nana because evidence to the contrary is all around us.

 

Which brings us to

(Adam@home)

(Dustin)

I have had the Internet go down a few times, and it's annoying because then I have to saddle up my laptop and go find access.

If my house were about 150 feet further north, I could connect with the library from here, which would pose a moral dilemma, because why would I then purchase my own service?

But I've driven half a block to sit in the car outside when they were closed but their connection was up, and we've all survived. Once I had to drive to the other side of town, but that was because of a power failure rather than an actual loss of connectivity, the two being obviously connected.

Or, at least, for those of us dependent on cable access.

I like gags about total panic when the connection is lost, but this old flip-phone-bearing-fart wonders how much they work any more?

Now, even if you don't have cable television anymore, I'm given to understand that Roku and X-Box and things like that are cable-dependent.

I have an Amazon Echo and a Fire Stick and they'd both be useless if the power went out or the Internet connection were lost.

But my flip phone would still work, and, in a world in which everyone between the ages of 10 and 60 has a smartphone (and an apparent willingness to stream "Lawrence of Arabia" on a three-inch screen), would anybody even notice?

 

Which leads to this final juxtapostion:

(Tom Toles)

(Clay Jones)

I probably would have led with Clay Jones' piece of wishful thinking, and then laid in the Tom Toles panel, which is more sweeping, except that not getting how the Internet works is one of the current things the hatemongers are exploiting.

The slavering knuckledraggers have been shown pictures of refugees with smartphones and told that, obviously, then, they aren't really refugees after all and we should hate them.

This depends on two things:

1. The theory that proper refugees are desperately poor, because middleclass people actually enjoy having no food available, having shells blow up their houses and watching their daughters being dragged off to be raped and murdered.

2. Being ignorant of the fact that much of the world is connected by cells and not cable, so that having a smartphone is not remarkable and certainly not elite, since most nations see keeping their citizens connected as a matter of public safety and sensible economic development, not as a profit center to be ruthlessly exploited.

Clay Jones further comments on life in the Idiocracy, pointing out the immediate danger of letting gullible paranoid people get their hands on weapons.

Indeed, the same jackasses who are braying about there being nothing in the Constitution about marriage seem content to let the Supreme Court interpret the document's phrase "well regulated militia."

Though the idea that these people have any concept of what the Court does, how it works and its significance in our system, is itself -- judging by their notions about religious freedom and birthright citizenship -- an incredibly foolish idea.

Never mind. I'm sure they're well intentioned, patriotic people, and we can straighten it all out after things calm down a bit.

We always have.

Comments

[ANDREA DENNINGER]

I agree about not wanting to be ONLINE all the time, which is why I still have a Nokia phone - no texting, no camera, no internet. Just takes and makes phone calls, which is all I need.

Just 'cause it's new doesn't meant it's better!

[Richard John Marcej]

I also agree about not wanting to be online all the time, which is why I own an iPhone.
I can text, take pictures, search the net and use it to make phone calls.

But I also can NOT text, take pictures, search the net or use it to make phone calls.

Just because you have devices that do these things doesn't mean you have to.

I live by the credo; "Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you have to."

[Mike Peterson]

I'll admit that I'm not the sort who has a box of cookies just sitting around for weeks untouched, and, if I had a smartphone chirping away to tell me I just got an email, I'd take it out of my pocket to look. I'd also look things up instead of just pondering them as I wandered the woods.

We can debate whether that is an issue of personality or of character another time, however, as well as whether being chirped at is annoying even if you don't answer. Still, another good credo is "Know thyself."

The fact remains that I am only away from my desk for brief periods anyway, and, as said, the only time portable email and Internet would be useful is when I'm on the road, which doesn't happen often. I'd be a damn fool to pay double what I do simply for the 10 or 15 days out of the year it might prove useful.

If I had what we used to refer to as "a straight job" that involved going to an office for several hours every day, I'd probably have a smartphone.

And an ulcer, but that's a different conversation.

[Dann]

Thanks for the re-introduction to YDK.

My comics reading is a little less broad these days and I have missed that nugget.

Regards,
Dann