Things

How cool was it when we could load the family in the car and go to the drive-in theater and watch Charleton Heston play Moses? A screen the size of a building and our own speaker hanging on the window. A short walk took us to the concession stand and we brought back that hot, buttery, salty popcorn and sat there in the dark to watch “The Ten Commandments.” And then somebody had an idea -What if we could put some kind of a projector into a cabinet the size of a china hutch and put it in our very own living room? After all,  we’d made computers small enough to occupy only the entire floor of office buildings, with huge reels of tape spinning endlessly, accessing stored information and flashing lights indicating where they were in their relentless search of data? Why not shrink this huge thing to fit in our house? Then we could watch whenever we wanted!

And then – we figured out how to make less do more! We made the components smaller, the cabinet smaller, and the screen even a little larger! Hot dog, we’re on a roll now! As if we hadn’t already discovered the best thing since buttered popcorn, pretty soon everyone could have one in their living room!

What if we made solid state components do the same thing as all those tubes? We could make the mechanics even smaller, and the screen even larger! What if we made it… COLOR! And I’ll bet we can come up with a way to change the channels without having to walk all the way across the room! After all, we’ve got more than three channels to choose from now!

That’s all well and good, but if bigger is better, even bigger has got to be even better! Imagine having a televisionn that you could hang on the wall like a picture! It’s thin, but huge! We’ve got this whole “make things smaller but make things bigger” down pat, why don’t we just take it to the next step?

Wow – can it actually get any better than this? Vibrant color, remote controls that handle all of the finest details of the razor-sharp picture – zoom, picture-in-picture, automatic correction, closed captioning, even ambiance lighting of the room based on what’s on the screen! But, you know what? You can’t take it anywhere.

Since computers are no longer the size of office buildings, and everyone has one on their desktop and most of us can now carry around our own laptop, and alomst all of our laptops have a disc drive anyway, why don’t we make it so we can watch movies on that – and it’s portable!

But if we make it a little simpler and take away the computer part, we could just have a little DVD player that fits in the palm of our hand with a little smaller screen so that it’s even a little less ungainly and a little more manageable.

And since we’ve got this miniaturization down so well, and everybody’s got a cell phone now – let’s make the screen just a little smaller so we can watch television and movies on our phone!

You know – I’ve been thinking… what if we made the screen just a little bit bigger so that we could see it better. Maybe we could even put it with a computer or something so that we can watch tv and play games or something.

What if we make it big enough to set on a stand? What about making it a major piece of furniture in the living room? What if we hang a screen on one wall and a projector from the ceiling to make it even bigger? How about really amping it up and putting some power behind the projector – we could take it outside, build a huge screen the size of a building, let people park their cars and hang little speakers on their very own windows!

Is it just me? Suddenly, I feel like having some hot, buttery, popcorn.

Now if I could just figure out a way to compress a skillet with oil into a small pan – or better yet, just a bag – that I could put in a really small oven and call it… Oh, I don’t know… maybe… a microwave! Yeah!

He’s not saying much. He doesn’t have to – it’s all in his eyes. “It hurts. Make it stop.” No fever, no obvious injuries, very lethargic, growling at everyone but me. He doesn’t want to be petted, he just wants me close by. And those eyes. “Make it stop.”I wonder if I can call out sick – for my poor dog.