Somebody remind me to buy an old-fashioned can opener, will you?
Some of you will know what I'm talking about: the old-fashioned "church key" can opener that beer drinkers used to use before they invented pull-tabs. It was about four inches long. At one end it had a rounded do-hickey, a hole the size of a bottle cap with a little nub underneath for popping the tops off soda bottles. At the other end it had a curved, pointed end, also with a nub underneath for grabbing the lip of a can while you poked a hole in it.
Yes, I know they stopped making the kind of beer cans that require a "church key" in 1963 or so. (That's in America, by the way. When I was in Brazil, from 1988 to 1991, you needed one in order to open cans of Antarctica and Brahma, the local brews.)
But there are other beverages out there besides beer, you know, and I have found that technology has left the beverage industry behind. I went to open a can of grapefruit juice this morning and found that I had completely forgotten what happened the last time I went to open a can of grapefruit juice, which was that I had to go and find a hammer and a phillips screwdriver and pound two holes in the top of the can so I could get some grapefruit juice out of it.
Why does industry do this to people? I mean, it's a given that once we get used to a certain product they'll stop making it. That never fails. But what is this business with the Pied Piper of Progress tootling his way merrily down the road and completely ignoring whether or not the consumer-rats are keeping up with him?
Take Bill Gates for example. (Please!) I wanted to cold-cock that s.o.b. when I heard he had announced that Microsoft was no longer going to include floppy-disc drives on its computers. Why? "They're obsolete," we were informed from on high.
Maybe for you, Mr. Haircut-that-looks-like-it-was-performed-with-a-$30-hedge-trimmer, but not for me. Not only was I accustomed to using them, but I happen to have boxes and boxes of floppy discs to which I have been archiving important files for years. What do you suggest I do, ask Martha Stewart how to turn them into a decorative wall-hanging? What would have been the harm in just leaving the damn floppy drives in place? People who don't want to use them don't have to.
I tell you, it's nothing but an abuse of power. Gates threw millions of computer-users a Jim Palmer Slurveball just because he could.
I have something in my basement of which I would not be the slightest bit surprised to learn that you have the counterpart in yours: I call it the Kelley Dupuis Memorial Power Supply Collection, AKA the AC/DC graveyard. It's an entire cardboard box filled with power supplies for computers, monitors, cell phones, boomboxes, digital cameras and whathaveyou, all of which are totally useless. Why? Because the manufacturers of all those computers, monitors, cellphones, boomboxes, digital cameras and whathaveyou, do NOT want you to be able to use their power supply with any other appliance. They want you to have to go buy a new one, so every last one of these damn things is proprietary, the male end of the Sony model just a zillionth of a millimeter too small for the female end of your Canon digital camera.
I can tell you what's going to happen: one of these days everyone's going to start throwing these things out because they can't use them anymore, and we're going to have city councils across the land passing emergency ordinances forbidding the placement of used, obsolete power supplies in your trash.
Now everyone's being told that if you haven't yet gone out and bought a digital TV set, come February, 2009 you're going to be basically S.O.L. I'm not getting too excited about this myself, since we already have a flat-screen digital TV at our house, and even if we didn't, I never watch the damn thing anyway. But it's the same story as with the power supplies. Americans have been watching analogue-style, curved-screen TV sets for more than fifty years. There must be millions of them in attics, basements and guest rooms all over the country. And it's not going to be the way it was when television supplanted radio in the 1950s. Old radios could still be used, after all, people were watching Jack Benny now instead of listening to him, but radio itself was still out there. Even today, collecting old radios is a popular hobby. You can fix them up and listen to them. Who's going to collect old TV sets if they're nothing but big doorstops?
Occasionally there's a healthy backlash against all of this "progress." Last week I spotted an article in the Washington Express about a group calling itself the Vinyl Preservation Society of Idaho. This is a gathering of audiophiles who have awakened to the fact that the 40-or-so-years of the vinyl LP era in the recording industry had yielded countless treasures which had more-or-less gotten shoved off the poop deck and into the drink when Compact Discs and then downloads came along and took over the recording industry. As a dedicated lover of vinyl (as opposed to a dedicated follower of fashion) I fired off an e-mail to these guys, applauding their efforts and inquiring as to how one might start one's own chapter of vinyl-preservers. Just as immediately, I posted a message on Washington, D.C. Craigslist seeking other vinyl-LP buffs out there who might be interested in joining up with the cause.
I got a mighty blast of silence in reply.
But I'm not giving up. The Idaho society is going to send me its start-up kit, and by hook or by crook I'm going to find some like-mided souls here in the mid-Atlantic region. I know they're out there. They have to be. Because just as I know there are boatloads of soon-to-be-obsolete TV sets out there, I'm also aware that in the dusty alcoves of homes all over the land there are cardboard boxes tucked away containing everything from an out-of-print pressing of Die Goetterdaemerung from the 1954 Bayreuth Wagner Festival to Boots Randolph Plays Guy Lombardo.
Oops. Here's the hammer and screwdriver I was looking for. I think I'll go make a grapefruit daiquiri.
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