The Coolest

The Coolest

Today we live in the gadget age.  We have gadget for everything.  The wizards of technology simply keep amazing us and we keep opening the checkbooks to buy more.  The Flat screen with HD, man that makes watching the tube (can you call it a tube anymore, I don’t think they come with tubes inside of them), into another different realm and everyone has a home movies theater.  You add your surround sound, a pair of 3D glasses all you need is popcorn in a bucket and a big dill pickle, and some junior mints, and some chocolate covered raisins, and…well close enough.  You don’t even have to have a VCR or DVD player anymore you can download movies right into your living room.  Wow!

With the computer, the internet, what can you not find these days?  I am sure that Wikipedia has put the door to door encyclopedia business out of business.  Everything and anything I want or need to research is at the tip of my pecking fingers.  We have web cams if you need to see a face or should I say more.  We have cell phones that do everything!  We have PDA’s and GPS’s.  Our cars can park themselves.  Our planes can fly and land themselves.  There are voices, digital read outs, bells and whistles that tells us when we are getting low on fuel, how many miles till DTE (distance to empty), you left your lights on, a door is not shut properly, car seats for kids that are designed by Nasa engineers (or so it seems, have you tried to buckle an infant in lately?), Doppler for the weather channel geeks, Ipods for the no more need to buy CD groups, home shopping networks for the I  don’t want to leave the house groups, *Note this is not a guy thing*, and safety devices that keep NASCAR drivers alive in 200 mph crashes. 

The advances in medicine are off the medical and stock market charts.  There seems to be a new drug for everything, except obesity (that means for the every body- crowd…exercise and diet), some cancers, AIDS, junk mail, junk email, telephone solicitors, nagging people, pessimistic people (no wait…you can find those in the depression section), politicians, addicts, mean people (no wait…you can find those in the anger management section of pharmaceuticals of course), and anyone else that can annoy us.  That section is the Dr. prescribed not over the counter section and we do have access. 

Technology helps us spy on spies.  Google just watches everything.  Our enemies love to tease and outrage us with our own technology, hoping they won’t be on the end of the next laser guided smart boom.  Our high tech weaponry has literarily protected the innocent and the term collateral damage anymore.  We hit what we shoot at.  Our kids and adults play video games that make Pong and Atari look like Jurassic Park creations.  I still miss Pac Man though, maybe it was the eating with out gaining any weight mind set of the eighties, nineties, new millennium…still looking for that pill.  But all in all technology is great.  Technology is fun.  Technology makes our lives easier and less hectic.  Technology keeps us safe.  Technology teaches.  Technology prepares us to go to places we have yet been and make sure we have the right currency in our wallets and clothes in the suitcase.  Technology illuminates the future and keeps us climbing to greater heights.  Just for the record I am technology challenged and most of the time dazed and confused, yet somehow it and I make it work to my needs. 

Yet I am concerned about the loss of human touch.  Dear John or Jane, should not be a text or email.  A pink slip should not be an email.  In many areas bring back the face to face in the human race.  After all we can’t let machines do everything for us, though I greatly desire their input and output.  I can microwave an egg in 40 seconds, bacon in 4 minutes, but the toast still has to be toasted.  This I call a nice compromise. 

Yet still of all the great inventions in my life time, there is one that stays closest to my heart.  And as silly as it might seem too many, I think many can and will agree.  My most loved invention is the refrigerator magnet.  I am not kidding you.  The refrigerator magnet may hold some to do list or grocery list or 911 and poison control list, but what is the main thing they hold?  They hold the artwork from our children in school.  They hold our child’s creative expressions.  They hold report cards.  They may even have been made by our children in a crafts workshop in school.  They hold photos and our kids sporting events schedules.  They hold reminders of a certain place and time that will never be again.  They hold our hearts.  They are there to remind us everyday of the beautiful blessed gift our children are and I don’t know about you but I open the fridge plenty in any one day.  So I am please with my choice of gadgets for my own reasoning.  Other gadgets may hold untold magic, but there is no magic like our children.  In all to me it is the coolest.  Get it…the coolest…it’s a refrigerator thing.