There was something big behind the iPhone, and it wasn't just Apple

     Alexander Graham Bell was not trying to invent the telephone when he did just that. What he was trying to do, at first, was make a better telegraph. It was the 1870s, and the telegraph was 30 years old — about as old as cellphones are now. Like cellphones, the telegraph had become enormously popular, so popular that messages backed up at telegraph offices, waiting to be sent. The problem had to be solved; there was no point in telegraphing a message from Washington to Baltimore if it took three days for operators to get around to tapping out your message. You could walk it there in two.
     Bell was working on sending many messages simultaneously through the same line in the form of different tones, then stumbled onto the idea that these tones could be a voice, a reminder of the often accidental nature of technological advancement.
     So it is fitting that when Apple  founder and

chief executive Steve Jobs began to develop the iPhone, which he unveiled on Jan. 9, 2007 — 10 years ago Monday — what he was trying to do was safeguard the iPod, his wildly popular music player responsible for nearly half of Apple's revenue. Jobs saw how cellphones decimated the digital camera industry, and worried his competitors would include music too. Then Apple might become Kodak: just another once-hot tech company.
     Jan. 9, 2007, was also the day Apple dropped the word "Computer" from its corporate name, because it was going to be more than a computer company. You can't sail across the ocean without leaving the shore.
     When Jobs announced the iPhone, at the company's MacWorld convention in San Francisco, he telegraphed his priorities by the order he listed them....

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Too bad we're not as clever as our tools

    Life isn't fiction, but sometimes it'll arrange itself thematically, or seem to.
     For instance, on Christmas Eve, we met some old friends who lived in the city, took in a movie, then headed to their place to scarf Chinese chow. Their son, to my surprise, opened the front door by pulling out his cell phone and tapping a few buttons. I'm not sure how that's an advantage over a key, but it is different. 
     Golly, I thought, or words to that effect.
     Technology seems the same for a while, then it changes. Not so long ago I'd plot out where I'm going on Google Map before I left. Now there's no point, I can just plug the address into my phone—it takes a few seconds—and, should I need directions, it'll tell me where to go. 
     The other day, I was picked up in a new Audi A4, a sleek piece of German engineering. I was intrigued to notice that the cabin temperature registered on the climate control knobs. I admired the economy of that—the knob surface was just wasted space before; why not put some data on it? Countless engineers gazed at those fat blank buttons, until one day, one engineer thought, You know....
     The display reminded me of bathroom sinks that so charmed me in the tiny bathrooms of Japan—built into the back of the toilet tank, they not only saved room, but the water you used to wash your hands helped fill the tank. Amazing.
    The New Technology Chapter came to a close, for my purposes, Saturday, when I heard a report on the radio about the Consumer Electronics Show, now going on in Las Vegas. LG unveiled its OLED "wallpaper TV" which is only 1/10 of an inch thick. That's really thin. 
     Which leads to the obvious closing question: why can't people be as clever as the technology we create? It might have been stronger to end on that note, but let's make it an actual rather than a rhetorical question. Why? Maybe because a gizmo, no matter how wondrous, is a lot simpler to put together than a society. Maybe because a society is comprised by the whole jumbled bell curve of people, some of whom are staggeringly dumb. Maybe something else. Maybe the gizmos should reflect a bit of wonder back on our staggering society because, without our current culture, flawed though it is, there would be no cool technology to feel good about.

Wow indeed. Trump's tweets truly terrifying

     One of the most significant of the many wonders about our president-elect is the genius Donald Trump has for instilling sincere amazement into the discovery, or I suppose "re-discovery," of what we already know.
     By Friday I, along with half the county, had spent 19 months taking an intensive cram course in just how brittle, vindictive, mean, petty, and small focus Donald Trump can truly be. We knew. 
     At least we thought we knew. 
     And yet. 
     Here, maybe you missed them. First this:

     
     Followed by:

    In case you haven't heard, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the one-time box office action hero and former governor of California, is the host of "The New Celebrity Apprentice," the post-Trump reboot of the reality TV show that The Donald stared in for 14 years, before being elected president of the United States.
     Schwarzenegger's "Apprentice" turn was panned by the critics, and if Trump is to be believed—did I just write that?—also in the ratings.
      Let's ponder these tweets a moment, shall we? The strange use of quotations around "swamped,"--an odd usage when referring to getting killed in the ratings, assuming that happened (checking ... in the real world ... yes, "opens weak" according to Variety) then the helpful parenthetical, "(or destroyed)", to shed light for those confused. 
    Then a reference to the "ratings machine, DJT" -- that would be him, Donald J. Trump, referring to himself in the third person. Quite regal, or pathological, of him. Would you call yourself by your initials? I wouldn't do that on a bath towel.
     Ending with the truly strange "But who cares"-- you, obviously, Donald, since you're tweeting it to your 18.9 million followers—and the dismissive "he supported Kasich & Hillary," which explains the whole score settling motivation (Variety doesn't mention Hillary or Kasich, but suggests that opening against "The Bachelor" might have been a factor). 
    But that isn't the incredible part, at least not to me. The incredible part, again to me, is this: he's being inaugurated president in two weeks. He sent these Jan. 6. He stands in a morning coat with his hand on a Bible in 14 days, on Jan. 20.
     A few thoughts:
     A) You would think the man had better things to do, more pressing matters to occupy himself with.
     B) He's executive producer of the show. He's attacking the star of his own show. Which, again, should not be surprising. There was an odd resonance with his attacking the intelligence community for revealing how his buddy Putin skewed the election in Trump's favor. He'll undermine his own business interests if ego is involved, he'll blind our nation's eyes and ears rather than acknowledge he was Moscow's puppet of choice.
     C) I've never been elected president and never will. But you think it would make you a little satisfied. A little safe. A bit above the fray. That it would float you beyond the schoolyard payback of Trump's tweet. That it would make you happy.
    No. Trump is impervious to experience. The wound never heals, the thirst is never slaked. Whenever I write about Trump, I hear from haters who support him claiming that I "hate" Donald Trump. Not true. How could you hate someone so pitiful? So broken? He's King Midas, breaking his teeth on gold food, starving amidst the riches he craves. Nothing is enough.
     I've seen a number of Facebook postings asking why the media doesn't just ignore such tweets. And I can see the logic -- why even bring up something so trivial? And the answer is, because the guy who is rolling in this triviality is going to be leader of the free world in 168 hours. Because his doing so speaks to how completely fucked the country is. 
    Which brings us full circle to my observation at the beginning, that Trump can make the familiar seem fresh. You've barely processed this hour's shock when the next comes whistling overhead, exploding like a shell. People are worrying about "normalizing" this? We can barely perceive it, barely register what he's done before he's off to the next folly.
     Yes, hope is necessary -- I sincerely hope that Trump proves so fraudulent, erratic and deceptive that little of what he actually claimed he will do will get done. But don't confuse hope with expectation. To look at that pair of tweets is to feel true despair, to see the image of the freight train bearing down on us, forming in the dark, light growing larger fast, horn blasting. 

Are you shunning Trump to hurt him or help you?

     The Amish withdraw from the wicked world, but the wicked world goes on without them.
     Just as well, since the Amish don't reject cell phones and SUVs because they want to undercut modern life, but for their own benefit.
     That question — am I withdrawing to help myself or hurt someone else? — is worth bearing in mind as Donald J. Trump is inaugurated president two weeks from today, and we judge who participates and decide how much we will own the country shaping up before our startled eyes.
     A tough call. It was almost shocking when Barack Obama welcomed Trump into the Oval Office immediately after he squeaked out a victory with the help of neo-Nazis, the FBI and Vladimir Putin. But a victory nonetheless, and as pained as Obama's expression was, treating Trump with dignity seemed smart. It preserved a tendril of influence, and Trump could at least glimpse what class looks like.
     On the other hand, you had to feel good when stars turned down offers to entertain at the inauguration. Nobody who loves Bruce Springsteen would want to see him crooning "Born in the U.S.A." for Donald Trump. Yet Hillary Clinton will be there. Bad for her, good for the country.
     There will be big protests. I'm glad Trump might see the majority who voted for someone else. Though I also sense that many protestors are the same folks who backed Gary Johnson because they believe all politicians are the same. Had they cared less about their own moral purity and more about the country's fate, maybe we wouldn't be in this mess.

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How many calories was that forbidden fruit?

     Not to put you on the spot or anything.
     But do you remember why God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden?
     Yes, Eve gave Adam a bite of the forbidden fruit—we're not sure what that fruit was, maybe a pomegranate, maybe a fig, maybe an apple.
     But where was that fruit from? 
     Right, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (There is a theory that medieval artists settled on an apple for the forbidden fruit because evil in Latin is "malus" and apple tree in Latin is, well, also "malus.") 
     As to why God didn't want people to have knowledge, well, that's religion for you. Some things never change.
      Although, the first thing, the very first thing that eating from the tree causes Adam to do is to be ashamed of being naked, so he fashions clothing for himself, which spills the beans to the Lord about what he's been up to. Small wonder our society is so massively screwed up.
     But I digress.
     The focus on health being what it is, many restaurants, such as the Au Bon Pain Bakery pictured above, have taken to posting the calories of the items they offer. Helpful to those watching their weight, which is just about everybody nowadays. 
     Though it led me to a puzzlement. The pecan rolls above are 740 calories, about a third of the entire daily caloric intake an average-sized man, such as myself, should eat. Who, I wonder, would ever order and consume a pecan roll, knowing they're ingesting 740 calories worth of butter and glaze and pecans? I sure couldn't. 
     Then again, the world is not me. Notice that most of the pecan rolls are gone. If posting the calories of the things killed sales, then businesses wouldn't do it. 
     A few theories:
    1) People don't notice. The numeral is, you will note, in a different, thinner, lighter font.
    2) People don't care. Some blessed portion of the population is thin, no matter what they eat. 
    3) They do portion control. You could of course buy the roll, eat half, and save the other half for a treat the next day. Or if it constitute your entire breakfast write the thing off as a spree.
     The human mind has an infinite capacity for tuning out information that contradicts its desires—obviously, since we elected Donald Trump—and what is a tiny clutch of numbers compared to the deep satisfaction of snarfing up a pecan roll? Although some people do perceive information and act on it. Fifty years ago about half of Americans smoked. Then decades of information campaigns had their effect, and now the number is less than a quarter. Which is both heartening and depressing, in equal measures, both true progress and, well, that lingering 20 percent who'll happily buy a burst of cheap contentment now for the risk of painful, prolonged expensive death later. That's people for you.

If Trump won't lead, there's always Pope Francis

  

     If you visit the University of Notre Dame, located near but not actually in South Bend, Indiana, as I did a few years ago, scouting colleges with my boys, you might be surprised, as I was, by the Jordan Hall of Science.   

     Though opened in the relative yesterday of 2006, Jordan Hall is a gorgeous brick edifice with crenelated ramparts, Gothic tracery windows and arched doorways festooned with carved stone statues. Not statues of Catholic religious saints either, but the Catholic saints of science: Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, and, I noted with amusement, Galileo.
     Galileo Galilei, you may recall, ran afoul of the church by claiming the Earth revolves around the sun; heresy because it implied that little old us are not the center of the universe, the hub of God's creation.     

      The church has come around since then, and admitted the Earth does indeed revolve around the sun whether the pope says it does or not, just as — and you saw this coming, didn't you? — the Earth's climate is heating up because of the carbon emissions humanity has been spewing into the atmosphere for the past 200 years whether Republicans acknowledge it or not.
     Most of the world accepts this, but the GOP — in the lazy denialism that also elects a Donald Trump to the presidency — are loath to recognize this ...

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"Hillary Clinton will beat him"

  
     I've pretty much tuned out the second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking on why Hillary Clinton lost. Stabbed in the back by the FBI? Too wooden and a woman? The world turning on expertise in a populist rebellion of the feeling against the thinking? 
     Doesn't matter. The American people threw in their lot with a fraud, and now we have to face the consequences. We're on to the next crisis. 
   Although.... When clearing the decks over New Year's, I was going over some old recordings on my Olympus, and came across Nancy Pelosi's Oct. 7 visit to the Sun-Times.  The minority leader reflected utter certainty about Clinton.
   "Hillary will win," she said. "The question is, will the American people win in the embrace of the future in a bipartisan way."
     The column I wrote at the time focused on why Clinton's possible election wasn't more of a milestone — the true answer turned out to be "because she wasn't going to win." Pelosi focused on Obama already "kicking the door open" for other marginalized minorities to flock in (women are not, technically, a minority — actually they're in the majority, barely. But heavy on the marginalized). 
    She flatly stated Clinton's certain victory several times, the only question being how big her win is and whether she takes one or both houses of Congress with her. That wasn't the world I was seeing, and even though I saw my role at the meeting was to keep my mouth shut and fill out the room, eventually I had to call her on it. This part I didn't print at the time but, with all this post-morteming of What Went Wrong, seems worth sharing.
    "You're certain Trump is here today, gone tomorrow," I said. "But people were certain that Britain would reject Brexit. If you look at the world, there is a right wing  xenophobic surge: Duterte in the Philippines. People are electing madmen. If the unthinkable happens, what would a Donald Trump presidency mean for the this country?"
    "It's not going to happen," Pelosi replied. 

     "So it's impossible?" I pressed.
     She scoffed at me. 
     "I could do brain surgery on you in the next half hour.," she said, groping for other examples of things that were ludicrous yet possible. "But it's not going to happen."
      "They were neck-and-neck before the debate two weeks ago," I continued. 
     This is why I don't write politics. It's hard to have one foot in the real world and one foot in the political. They tend to drift apart and drop you in the water. 
    "You know what — what does 'neck and neck mean?'" Pelosi said, launching into a little lesson on political wisdom for the benefit of this dolt spouting nonsense. "Let's talk baseball. This is not how many home runs you score in the series, it's how you do in each game. This is how you do in each state, and Hillary Clinton will beat him in enough states in order to win. At the end of the day she will also win the popular vote. Why? I have confidence in the American people. They may want to send a message. They might be sick and tired of Washington — and by the way, they have been sick and tired of Washington forever."
     Here she laughed.
     "This is not anything new."
     There you have it. "This is not anything new," is the reason Hillary Clinton lost. Because we were so obviously into something new, where the old verities no longer mattered. Clinton was playing the old game when the new roles had already fallen into place. Thus she could be tarred with the most amorphous scandal — something about her emails being not to State Department guidelines, laughably trivial non-issue, had it happened previously. While Trump committed gaffe after horrendous gaffe — again, on the old standard — from dissing American POWs to boasting about grabbing pussy. Jarring missteps that would be unbelievable in a Christopher Buckley novel. Didn't matter. The public flocked to him. Not a majority, but just enough. 
    Although Pelosi was right about one thing. Clinton did win the popular vote, for all the good it did. 
     The lesson here: if you want to win, run like you're losing. Especially if you think you're winning. The election is past, but it's also a good life strategy. Sometimes friends will accuse me of not being sufficiently satisfied with whatever career I've managed to mound up,  and I'll try to explain I'm not humble, God knows; I'm trying not to be smug, not to stand top my little pile of crumbs and pretend it is the mountaintop. 
    Clinton didn't feel the panic that she was losing to this fraud who would lead the nation over a cliff. Or if she felt it, she didn't show it, which was a big mistake.