Can You Hear Me Now? May 2, 2006March 4, 2017 JACK BAUER’S CELL PHONE Need I say more? The TV show ’24’ is so heart pounding it could bring back the dead. But of all its harmless reality suspensions, the veritable Verrezzano of them all is Jack Bauer’s cell phone. Its battery never runs low, it never lacks 5 bars, it works in the cargo hold of a jet at 30,000 feet, and you can download massive data files to it in a second and a half. What’s more, he never loses it. I don’t know who makes this phone, but I want one. STEPHEN COLBERT’S ROUTINE It may have been offensive or inappropriate – or funny and courageous – depending on your point of view (or it may have been all those things and overlong) . . . but one thing it was not was routine. When was the last time a sitting President had to sit through something like this? So the real question: how come no one reported on it? This was the White House Correspondents Dinner, after all – it’s not as if the press wasn’t there. Mary: ‘I hear C-Span – C-Span!!! – cut this out of its rerun, so the blackout was near complete.’ According to this site, the New York Times didn’t even mention it. I thought parts were funny, parts inappropriate (though spot on if he hadn’t been there) – but click the link if you want to judge for yourself. SELF CLEANING’S FURTHER USES Jacques Levy: ‘Take advantage of the self cleaning oven to clean barbecue grills cooking grates, just stick them in the oven while you’re running the clean cycle.’ Peter Thibeau: ‘You write: ‘If only our government were self-cleaning.’ I say it is. It just must get very, VERY dirty before it self-cleans.’
Self-Cleaning Government May 1, 2006March 4, 2017 I was reading the control panel of the GE Profile range that came with our condo some years ago and discovered a touchpad option labeled ‘Self Clean.’ I’m sure I must have seen it before – it’s right next to ‘Start/Stop,’ which is the only control on the touch pad I ever use, and then only quite rarely (we have a microwave, so who needs an oven?) – but I had never really taken it in. SELF CLEAN. If only my car had such a setting. And shouldn’t kitchen floors have this option? I noticed this button because I have very high ‘good cholesterol,’ achieved because I eat a lot of salmon, mostly smoked and ready to eat, but occasionally bought straight from the fish counter in its natural fishy state. Broil enough of it over the years, and even the most casual of housekeepers – if he or she has any olfactory sense – will come to the conclusion that something needs to be done. In this case: pushing ‘Self Clean’ on the touch pad. I had never done this and had no idea what to expect. (Are you supposed to put detergent inside the oven first?) I was expecting orange digital instructions, but all I got was a blinking: LOCKING OVEN DOOR . . . followed a few seconds later with a solid: LOCKED. That’s all it said, although I sensed a ‘Step Away From the Oven’ message, undisplayed but implied. What it should have said was: ‘Are you sure you want to proceed? Have you read all the warnings? Have you someplace else to live for a few hours?’ And then . . . if you pressed YES . . . it should have issued one final instruction: ‘Flee!’ A noxious odor quickly permeated the condo that – even with the windows flung wide open – was surely life-threatening. What are they doing in there, I wondered? (By ‘they,’ I refer to the hamsters who used to power 5-1/4-inch computer disk drives, but were repurposed to clean ovens when the disk drives were miniaturized.) And here’s how amazing our world is. To find out just how all this works, I typed self-cleaning oven into Google and clicked ‘I’m feeling lucky.’ As I clicked, I realized Google would probably just take me to some on-line appliance megasite to compare prices and features. But no. Google must have Mind Meld in beta (it reads your mind) because I got this. (And yes, the oven ultimately unlocked its door and was clean as fresh fallen snow.) ELECTRICITY Dave Davis: ‘I found this terrific web site that explains everything you’ve always wanted to know about electricity but were too intimidated to ask. I thought it was worth sharing. There are a lot of money-saving tips.’ GAS Your oil stocks have done well (APC up from $56.50 to $105, TXCO up from $4.50 to nearly $12), which is some consolation. But one marvels at the short-sightedness of Detroit – and Washington and (I’m sorry) the electorate. I had a chance to interview the Secretary of the Treasury in 1974, after OPEC had quadrupled the price of oil to $12 a barrel. Shouldn’t we raise the puny gas tax by a dime a year for a couple of decades – using every dime collected to lower the tax on things we wanted to encourage, like work and investment? Yes, of course, he said, dismissively (how naïve could I be?); but it’s politically impossible. (Even President Clinton’s 4.3 cent gas tax hike produced howls.) Yet if we had done that obvious thing, look where we’d be today. We would lead the world in fuel efficiency technology – Toyota would be licensing hybrid technology from us – and we would be hundreds of billions of dollars less in debt. Here’s Arianna’s take on $3 gasoline. If only our government were self-cleaning.