Robert A. Mills, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Robert A. Mills
UGA 12/8/2012 8:20:37 AM
Thought occurs, I was only 10 years old when the Japanese sneaked up on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. My grandmother, the omnipresent Brit, ran through the house shouting we would all be slaughtered in our beds: “Those people fight with hatchets and swords!” she screamed, scaring my little brother (he will be 76 tomorrow) and me pitifully. Remember Pearl Harbor? We do.
Well, anyway, my wife and I did not get back to Atlanta after Thanksgiving 2012 at the daughter’s with her husband and new son until Tuesday, December 4. Thanx to Delta, my wife’s flights to and from Debi and Bob’s wedding in Toronto were a trip from Hell, but despite my PLS and tumble in the daughter’s new home and the subsequent broken collar bone, we made it back from Birmingham to Roswell . . . finally.
Then there was the phone call this morning from my neurologist saying he was no longer taking Medicare patients, and I was being thrown to the dogs as of Jan. 1. On top of that, my old, retired buddy Tom Decker sent me an email from Florida telling me growing old was a bitch.
Like it was supposed to be news!
“There are things that will disappear,” he said, “as we get older.” Like the USPS. “They are so deeply in financial do-do there is nothing that can save them. E-mail, UPS, FedEx et al have nearly wiped them out; not even junk mail, dunning letters from collection agencies, ads for this and that, political garbage, and more bills can save them.”
Stop and think about banking — especially checks. Great Britain has agreed that by 2018 checks will become like dinosaurs. Already costing Brits billions of pounds to process, they say online transactions and credit cards are much easier to keep track of — and this goes hand-in-hand with the P.O.’s death rattle.
Nobody, he goes on to say, under the age of thirty reads newspapers anymore, and of course they never subscribe to the dailies. Newspapers are doomed to go the way of the milkman, and as for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The popularity of Internet devices and “e-readers” has led the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. (As I reported in an earlier column, they have already met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop subscription services.)
“What about books, you old, unpublished hack?” Decker says he will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hands that allows you to turn literal pages. Shoot, I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving my rocking chair.
The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you decide to buy — and the price is less than half that of a real book! And what about the convenience? Once you start flicking your fingers on a screen instead of a page, you will get lost in the story and cannot wait to see what happens next. You just forget you are holding a gadget instead of a book.
If you have a big, inconsiderate family and you make a bunch of calls, you do not need a telephone landline anymore. Most idiots keep one because their parents did — but you are paying double for the privilege. All the cell phone companies will charge only their normal fees.
Music seems to be the saddest scene in Decker’s story. Music is dying a painfully slow death and not just because of illegal downloading — it is the simple lack of innovative melodies being heard by the masses. Like I already stated, the dilemma stems from corruption and greed. 42.7% of purchases by music lovers today are “catalogue items” by established recording artists everyone one is familiar with, and this is also a fact among live concert people. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book (on your Nook?) “Appetite for Self-Destruction” by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, “Before the Music Dies.”
Revenues to TV networks are down dramatically (where is Apple when we need em?). It is not just because of the economy, either. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they are playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Primetime shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 3 minutes. I say good riddance to most of it. It is time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix and Red Box.
Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them anymore. They may simply reside in “the cloud.” Today our computers have a hard drive and you can store pictures, music, movies, and documents. Software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install them if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest “cloud” services. That means that when you turn on your computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet “cloud”. If you save something, it will be saved to the “cloud”. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the “cloud” provider.
In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever, from any laptop or handheld device. That is, it seems, the good news. But, will you actually own any of this “stuff”, or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big Poof? Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert!
If there was ever a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be “privacy”. Is it gone? Well, it sure seems to be, for the time being, anyway. There are cameras on the streets, in most of the buildings, and even built into our computers and cell phones.
You can be damned sure that “they” know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you go out and buy something, your purchase will be put into zillions of profiles, and the ads you cannot wait to see will reflect your choices. And “they” will do all possible to get you to buy something else. Again and again.
All we have left are memories. Like the University of Georgia being beaten for the SEC Championship by the University of Alabama in a game watched by more people in Birmingham and Atlanta than saw the 2012 Super Bowl.
I wonder if as many will watch the Capital One Bowl on New Year’s Day when Georgia meets Nebraska in Orlando — and the Orange Bowl when Alabama plays Notre Dame in Miami January 7— or when Barack Obama pontificates on his 2nd Inaugural Address on the 23rd?
