Day: May 8, 2010

I realized upon seeing these teabagger bumper stickers early this afternoon on 81 South (“I want you to fight socialism,” etc.) that I’d never been within actual spitting distance of a live teabagger. A minority voice wanted to roll down the window and flip this guy off and scream “eff you!” The majority sentiment ruled, of course, so I slowed down, waited for him to pass on the right, got behind him and took a photo…except my Canon digital was dead so I hastily used the iPhone.

There are probably thousands of exceptionally bright kids attending Syracuse University, but the important thing in life isn’t innate brains or an elegant education — it’s curiosity. Curiosity is perhaps the most attractive human trait, and there seems to be a whole lot less of it now than before. Basic logic, it seems, is also on the ropes.

Example: Four minutes ago I ordered some breakfast at a local Syracuse U. bagel joint. I then asked the girls at the counter — one blonde, pigtailed and zaftig, the other fat and brown-haired with slightly blemished skin — if they knew of a local copy joint. “Copies?” the brown-haired girl said. Yeah, you know…a place that prints computer files on paper or make copies or whatever. “I’m not sure that they have that here,” she said. No copy place in a major college town? “I don’t go to college here,” she said.

This, I submit, is a blade of grass that indicates where a lot of kids are at today. If they’re not getting paid for it, and if it doesn’t feed into their immediate interest or friend-sphere or family environment or is otherwise right in front of their face, they don’t know about it and they don’t care to know. How many brain cells does it take to surmise that a college town will definitely have two or three copy places?

That said, I sympathize with anyone who isn’t the least bit curious about higher math. I hugely resent being put through years and years of torture in math and algebra and geometry classes in junior and senior high school because they’ve had any practical application in real life. If I have a math issue, I use my calculator — end of story. The educators who put me through my pre-pubescent and teenaged math classes were sadists, pure and simple.

A 5.7 N.Y. Times story by Patrick McGeehan reports that Verizon, the dominant local phone company in New York State, “asked regulators on Friday to allow it to end the annual delivery of millions of White Pages to all of its customers in New York. The company estimates that it would save nearly 5,000 tons of paper by ending the automatic distribution of the books.

Which means that those “those inches-thick tomes of fine-print telephone listings that may be most useful as doorstops, could stop landing with a thud on doorsteps across New York later this year,” McGeehan reports.

I haven’t skimmed through a paper phone book in well over a decade, but now they’re really history. McGeehan’s story signifies that the above joke in Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily? (1966) — one of the funniest lines I’d heard when I first saw Allen’s film on the tube in the early ’70s — is about to become extinct. It will no longer have even a fragmentary sense of relevancy or meaning in the physical world. It’ll be like a joke about hoop skirts or Model Ts or straight razors or bathtub gin.

“Only about one of every nine households uses the hard-copy listings anymore, according to Verizon, which cited a 2008 Gallup survey. Most have switched to looking up numbers online or calling directory assistance. The phone book for many people, it seems, has gone from indispensable tool to unavoidable nuisance.”