Abbie Hoffman famously said "Never trust anyone over 30." In his later years he revised it as "Never trust anyone under 30." That he was being facetious both times is something you'd hope that history will pick up on, but you never know.
In any case, my own version is "Never tell anyone under 30 that you don't have a cell phone." I don't have any great desire to order kids off my lawn. It's a simple matter of personal preference and being, at this juncture, able to choose. But I think if a lot of younger people hear that you walk around phoneless they'll expect you to go into a jeremiad about the modern world and all its electronic evils.
Tonight I picked up one of the last editions of The Onion, which is http://www.jsonline.com/news/the-onion-to-cease-print-editions-b99137985z1-231144331.html">ceasing
print publication, essentially because the papers are given away free and they want to increase the ad value of the website, which would be nice if they'd come out and say instead of talking like the self-important slicksters that they should instead be making fun of. But anyway, a cashier at CVS saw it in my hand and said she loved the Onion. I agreed and said I'd miss the print edition, for the reason that even though I knew about the website I rarely found time to go there. (This is true. For some reason I'm much better about visiting its sister site the AV Club, despite its recent and hideous layout makeover.) She told me about an app that you can download so that you can read Onion articles at lunch. Pretty much irrelevant to me but I appreciated the attempt to be helpful and thanked her.
2 comments:
I can understand your reasons for not wanting to carry one and thankfully, so far anyway, they aren't compulsory. I well remember sitting on a bus in Portland years ago next to a woman who pulled her ringing phone out of her bag and said, 'I told you never to call me here'. When 'here' can be anywhere you have to wonder.
I've never seen a print edition of the Onion here. Your response to the girl's helpful advice about getting the app was appropriate.
If I do ever get one I'm thinking it would be a very basic plan. It's best not to have a gizmo amusing you 24/7. Maybe the lady on the Portland bus thought the caller could see where she was all the time.
I think I've heard that the Onion had print editions in three cities: Chicago, Madison, and Providence. Providence seems to have been part of an abortive national rollout, and it only lasted a couple of years.
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