Dear KMAG: 20190917 Open Topic

Off that particular grid, anyway.
Pretty sure they can’t track my daily driver either. V8, rear wheel drive, just old enough to not have an onboard computer that sends out signals to every government (or corporate) Tom, Dick and Harry. That’s not why I have it, it’s just hard to find newer cars that are ‘me’, if that makes sense. I just can’t rationalize spending the amount of money a car costs, and get something that isn’t me. Everything looks the same today. It’s either an SUV or some Prius lookalike. And stick-shift is nearly extinct. A car is supposed to have a gear shift, on the floor (transmission tunnel, technically) and a clutch, unless it’s your grandparent’s car.
And even those would be a lot better with a stick shift.
The new generation of sports/muscle cars are great performers, and i appreciate the retro-styling efforts a lot, but it just reminds me how great (and even better) the originals looked from the 60s and early 70s.
And it seems like most of the designers are heavily influenced by ‘Transformer’ toys and cartoons. You can tell the ‘Transformer’ toys were really popular when today’s car designers were kids, because everything is starting to look that way, whether it’s all the angles in the body lines that have no purpose (Corvette… Camaro…), or the design of the headlights and tail lights, especially.
I’m not off the cell phone ‘grid’ in an effort to purposely avoid it either, it just kinda worked out that way. When cell phones started to become popular, there just wasn’t anyone I needed to talk to so badly that it couldn’t wait until I got home. I didn’t need the extra utility bill either. By the time I could more easily afford it, there were lots of warnings about potential negative health affects, and from an ‘outsider’ perspective, I could see lots of negative ‘social’ affects that ‘users’ probably didn’t.
It’s annoying as *&^% to be in public around someone talking on his phone like he’s in his own home, but I have to listen to some stranger babble for 20 minutes, or get up and leave. So I don’t want to be that guy. Or to have your phone go off in church. Or at a theater (not that I’ve been to one in years), or any other place where it would be inappropriate. I don’t want to be that guy, either. I don’t want to be a hypocrite, and do the same things that annoy the crap out of me when other people do them.
Another clue that something is seriously wrong (or at least has gotten way out of hand) is seeing a line of kids walking home from school, in a group, with nobody talking to each other. Total silence. All of them looking down at that infernal contraption in their hand, lost in their own alternative world.
And it’s not just kids, it’s practically everybody. When they’re driving, even when they’re crossing the street — just trusting that somebody isn’t going to run them over, because they sure didn’t look both ways, they just moved with the herd!
Do you even realize how HARD it is to NOT look both ways when you cross a street? Try it. And don’t cheat. I bet you can’t do it! But people today do it all the time, looking at their phones instead of what’s going on in the world around them.
I’m not those people. I’m the guy paying attention to what’s going on around me. Not because I’m anticipating anything bad might happen (though that’s certainly a benefit), but because being aware of what’s going on around me was NORMAL when I grew up.
And the camera aspect of cell phones… I hate it that everybody has cameras with them 24/7. When I was a kid, that was a Japanese stereotype. Always with the cameras, click click click! I’ve never been a big fan of having my picture taken to start with. No specific reason, except having to put on a ‘camera smile’ when the person taking the photo says ‘cheese’. It irks me, because it’s ‘phony’, it’s not real. You can’t just have a blank expression, so you pretty much have to smile, but it’s not genuine — it’s for a camera.
I’ve always been terrible at doing what the crowd does, whenever I stopped long enough to think about it — which I always do, sooner or later. Because a lot of the stuff the crowd does, doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t think it would make much sense to them either, if they actually stopped long enough to think about it.
It’s no different than I do here most days. People do things, it gets reported, it’s in an article here, and I’m just asking the obvious questions to all kinds of behaviors and conduct we see ‘in the news’ 😁