Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Bender Bending Rodriguez and Baum edition

Page @ Pierce, San Francisco.

“Who knows?

Our big world rolls over as smoothly as it did centuries ago, without
a squeak to show it needs oiling after all these years of revolution.
But times change because men change. The impossibilities of yesterday become the accepted facts of to-day.

Here is a fairy tale founded upon the wonders of electricity and
written for children of this generation.

Dortman, Germany.

Yet when my readers shall have become men and women my story may not seem to their children like a fairy tale at all.

Perhaps one, perhaps two–perhaps several of the Demon’s devices will be, by that time, in popular use.

Who knows?”

(L. Frank Baum, Introduction, The Master Key. Bowen-Merrill (Indiana): 1901.)

There is a bright flash, and a being who calls himself the Demon of Electricity appears. He tells [young protagonist and electrical experimenter] Rob that he has accidentally “touched the Master Key of Electricity” and is entitled to “to demand from me three gifts each week for three successive weeks.”

Rob experiences adventures exploring the use of the Demon’s gifts, but eventually concludes that neither he nor the world is ready for them. Rob rejects the Demon’s gifts and tells him to bide his time until humankind knows how to use them. The Demon leaves.

With a light heart, Rob concludes that he made the right decision, and that “It’s no fun being a century ahead of the times!”

(the wiki.)

Who knows … ?






*”‘Others’ may read it.” rad.

Monocle Monday: Monocle application by Idea Machine edition

Monocle is a simple search tool that puts a universal search field at your disposal. When you want search, you can choose from a number of engines to perform the search in different places. Monocle comes preloaded with engines for Google, Wikipedia, Windows Live Search and Yahoo! Search. You can easily add your own engines by performing an example search inside a web browser window in Monocle. (source)

This is in no way an endorsement of that Mac App. I have never used it and likely never will, as I have had the same phone since 2005 and will probably continue to have it until it literally falls apart in my hands because I have grown to believe that I, myself, am built-in obsolescence personified, and everything I learn to use and grow accustomed to must immediately fall out of human use and knowledge, so that I remain freakishly anachronistic in my understanding of technology.

Et tu, Bender, my metal and small and doesn’t judge me at all robot friend? Then you can all keep your fancy-dancy iPhones and droids, and be sure to bite our shiny metal asses.

I believe there is always a person like this in every group that is behind the crest of the trend by deliberate choice, a lone cowboy on an uneasy horse at the edge of the horizon, never quite part of the pack of trailblazers, always slightly at a remove from the rest of society just in case this next invention is that society’s downfall, and in this generation among those I am close to, I apparently have taken on that mantle. Mmm, Apocalypse Bean Soup — with hamhock, even? Wow, thanks, cowpoke! Just like I like it!

So, yes, I know nothing about this newfangled Monocle app folderol. I just like the ads, don’t you?