Fifty Shades of Black

by Arthur Black

  Feels good, but it’s bad for the blood pressure.

  Problem is, even if we shout or curse or use technological voodoo to bypass most of the commands, they’ve still got us dancing like trained monkeys—when all we really want is to connect with another human being with a brain and a heart.

  Is that really so much to ask?

  We could always take our business elsewhere—providing there is an elsewhere. But with businesses going global and conglomerating like cancer cells, too often Robovoice is the only game in town.

  My friends say I’m a Luddite when it comes to phone technology. They say I’d be happier if the world communicated by smoke signals.

  To which I say: Nonsense. I’m an up-to-date guy when it comes to telephone technology. After all, I do have Call Waiting.

  If you call me and you get a busy signal it means you wait until I’m through.

  Come On—Get Real!

  Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

  —T.S. Eliot

  I don’t get reality TV.

  Oh, I understand why it’s popular with television producers and entertainment conglomerates—they get entire TV series delivered to their door without having to pay for writers or expensive studios and sets; they get to use non-union “actors” willing to perform for free or next to it.

  But why does anyone want to watch the result?

  To see what happens when a gaggle of strangers gets marooned on a desert island? Puh-leeeze. That’s no desert island and nobody’s marooned. This is a celluloid entertainment, remember? At the bare minimum there’s a camera operator, a lighting technician and a sound person riding the levels on hidden microphones. I’m also willing to bet there’s a director, an assistant director and a gaggle of college dropout “special assistants” clutching clipboards just off-camera.

  Not to mention a helicopter and crew on standby in case somebody wants fresh croissants with their coffee.

  It’s a shuck, folks—and the French, bless their mercenary hearts, appear to have figured that out. Last year the highest court in France ruled that contestants in the French version of Temptation Island were entitled to contracts and employee benefits, including a thirty-five-hour workweek, overtime . . .

  And oh, yes. A base pay rate equivalent to nineteen hundred dollars per actor per day. French production company executives sobbed that they’ll have to come up with nearly seventy-one million dollars in back pay.

  Cry me a rivière, chéri. The Idol franchise brought in that much in just three months on air.

  But when it comes to reality TV, the money is just, well, unreal. Consider the maximally mammaried, minimally talented reality TV star Kim Kardashian. Estimated salary for last year: six million dollars.

  And then there’s Planet Calypso, a mineral-rich frontier on which investors around the world have been snapping up properties and leases for the past few years. One of those investors, Hollywood filmmaker/entrepreneur Jon Jacobs, recently cashed out his Planet Calypso properties for a cool $635,000 US.

  Not bad, for an investment of a mere hundred grand.

  Especially not bad when you consider that Planet Calypso doesn’t exist.

  It’s an imaginary asteroid, part of an online game called Entropia Universe. Jon Jacobs pocketed more than half a million real dollars by selling fictional real estate on a make-believe celestial body.

  As usual, you and I are slightly behind the curve. Planet Calypso is only one of many mythical marketplaces on which online investors are actively “doing business.” A marketing firm called In-Stat estimates that online players spent seven billion dollars last year on the purchase of non-existent property and goods.

  Which brings us to the Toronto Public Library. Thanks to the introduction of an innovative project, TPL patrons with an active library card can partake of a project called the Human Library. Participants don’t take out a book, a tape or a CD; they take out a living, breathing, interacting human being. Some of the people waiting to be “signed out” (for a half-hour at a time, conversation only) include a retired police officer, a comedian, a former sex worker, a model and a person who has survived both cancer and homelessness.

  The idea is to facilitate conversations between library patrons and people from other walks of life whom they might not otherwise get to meet. The Human Library is an attempt to “travel back in time,” in effect, to an age when, as a TPL official put it, “storytelling from person to person was the only way to learn.”

  Sounds like a great idea, the Human Library.

  No doubt some Hollywood hotshot is figuring out how to turn it into a reality show.

  Dear Siri: Please Marry Me

  Pssst. You lonely? Looking for a little ... female companionship? Have I got a girl for you.

  She’s not cheap, but she’s very, very good. Knows how to . . . take care of business, if you get my meaning.

  No, I mean really take care of business. She’ll call a cab, text-­message your kids, book you a table at a good Thai restaurant and make sure you remember your dentist’s appointment. When you’re heading out the door she’ll remind you to take along your wallet, your travel mug and the car keys.

  She’s sharp, reliable, available 24/7 and what’s more she’ll never quit on you, no matter how big a jerk you are. If you curse her out, she just tut-tuts and says, “Now, now.” If you’re a perverted jerk and ask her to “talk dirty” to you, she sighs and says, “Dust. Silt. Gravel. Mud.”

  And if you really go bananas and start cursing her out she’ll say, “How can you hate me? I don’t even exist.”

  Well, yeah . . . there’s that.

  “Siri,” as she’s known, is not a living breathing human; she’s a voice-activated app that comes along with Apple’s iPhone 4S. But she doesn’t talk in that familiar, annoying automaton drone we all know from bad movies and our GPS. Siri’s voice is unnervingly warm and real. What’s even freakier: Siri is actually getting smarter all the time. Not only are her canned answers updated by Apple experts regularly, Siri can also store the questions to and answers given from her tens of millions of customers and draw on that info to answer your queries. And Siri is fiercely loyal even if it means a walk on the wild side. “Where can I hide a dead body?” one owner facetiously typed. Siri responded with a list of nearby municipal dumps, metal foundries and swamps.

  Many customers have come to rely on their new best friend Siri rather a lot. This trend could have been predicted. Last year, Martin Lindstrom, a consumer advocate, recorded the responses of subjects when they heard their cellphones ring. Magnetic resonance imaging detected a frenzy of brain activity, normally associated, says Lindstrom, with feelings of intense love and compassion.

  Big surprise. Remember Tamagotchis? Back in the 1990s a craze swept Japan (and eventually much of the world) for a tiny gizmo about the size of a rabbit’s foot that you could attach to your key chain. Owners were encouraged to feed, train and even medicate their Tamagotchis every day.

  They had to—otherwise the Tamagotchi could sicken and even “die.”

  This, remember, was not a gerbil, a cricket or a teddy bear. It was an electronic gadget that changed its image depending on what its owner did (or didn’t) do with it. Neglect your Tamagotchi even for a few hours and you could come back to find that it had “grown wings” (in other words, died).

  Tamagotchis were not remotely human-like, yet many owners developed alarmingly deep personal relationships with them. There were stories of owners attempting to adopt their Tamagotchis as members of the family.

  Tamagotchis were a passing fad that waxed and waned, like the hula hoop and Britney Spears. But Siri? I’ve got a feeling she’s going to be around for a while.

  Siri’s persona is so lifelike, says one customer, “you almost forget that the intelligence we’re dealing with is artificial.”

  That’s no big surprise either—but
apparently Siri can handle it. She’s already fending off marriage proposals.

  Yael Baker, a New York media consultant, was so smitten with Siri’s expertise that she impulsively typed, “Siri, will you marry me?”

  To which Siri responded, “That’s sweet, but let’s just be friends.”

  A Dear John letter from your phone app. How lame is that?

  The Father of the Couch Potato

  How long have we had TV remotes to play with? Ten years, you figure? Twenty, maybe? You’re way off. TV browsers were around before most of the people reading this were born. Before man walked on the moon. Before the Toronto Maple Leafs won their last Stanley Cup, even. We’re talking Mesozoic here.

  The TV remote has been around since 1955 when a Chicago engineer named Eugene Polley invented it. Polley’s prototype wasn’t exactly the sleek plastic pellet with eleven dozen buttons that we’re used to losing in the sofa pillows nowadays. His invention looked like a ray gun from sci-fi special effects. It had a pistol-grip handle and a trigger and it was called the Zenith Flash-Matic. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job.

  Well . . . sort of. Polley’s ray gun worked a bit like a flashlight. The viewer pointed it at one of the four corners of the TV screen and pulled the trigger. The top left-hand corner of the screen contained a photocell that would turn the TV on and off. You aimed at the top right-hand corner if you wanted to go to the next channel; the bottom left-hand corner if you wanted to go back to a previous channel; and the bottom right-hand corner if you wanted to mute out what Polley called “those noisy TV commercials.”

  Or perhaps I’ve mixed up the corners. A lot of viewers did, which was one big complaint about the Flash-Matic. Another was the fact that the TV photocells frequently reacted with ordinary sunlight to change channels, go on and off, or mess with the volume, all on their own.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was revolutionary. Eugene Polley modestly suggested his invention was “the most important invention since the wheel.”

  Well, hardly—but it was a major influence on television productions and the way we watch the box.

  Before Polley’s Flash-Matic, viewers who wanted to adjust the volume or change the channel were forced to put their feet on the floor, levitate to a vertical position, walk across the room and interact with the TV manually. Humans, being the lethargic creatures we are, often elected to put up with whatever drivel was emanating from the screen, rather than, you know, actually getting off our lard butts and moving.

  The result was some astonishingly mediocre television fare (anyone remember The Arthur Godfrey Show?). Eugene Polley’s Flash-Matic changed that. It allowed viewers to be discriminating AND lazy. We swiftly developed into a species with the attention span of a fruit fly. Horatio flapping his gums on CSI Miami? Zap it in favour of the Nature Channel. Oops, a pollution special—bo-ring! ZAP! Check ESPN. Uh-oh—Jeep commercial. ZAP.

  The Flash-Matic is no longer with us, but its heirs and successors are. Back in its day Flash-Matic had to contend with no more than twelve channels, maximum. Today’s browsers navigate a universe of hundreds of channels, not to mention computer games, the Internet and our personal music libraries.

  No need to get off the couch at all, really. We hardly need our legs anymore. Perhaps over the next millennia or two our DNA will morph and mutate so that those massive, now useless thigh and calf muscles get diverted to where they’d really be of use—in our thumbs.

  Eugene Polley won’t be there to see it. He died recently at the age of ninety-six, still convinced that he’d made a seminal contribution to human civilization. “The flush toilet might be the most civilized invention ever devised,” he told a reporter, “but the remote control is the next most important.”

  Um, actually Eugene, there are those among us who wouldn’t have minded if that first remote control had been accidentally flushed down the first flush toilet.

  When Ya Gotta Go . . .

  I can’t go to the bathroom anymore.

  No, no, it’s not that. There’s nothing wrong with the personal plumbing; it’s the public washrooms that don’t work for me anymore.

  I hail from the horse-and-buggy days of public washrooms. In my day, if you wanted to flush a toilet, you pressed the shiny doohickey on the tank and you were done. To wash your hands, you turned on the hot-water tap (left) and the cold-water tap (right) until an agreeably comfortable flow gushed from the spout and you scrubbed away. Drying the washed hands was a simple feat: a couple of paper towels from the handy wall dispenser would do the trick.

  That’s not how it works anymore. Approach a sink in a modern public washroom with your hands lathered up in supplication and you trip a sensor—which decides how much water you will get, and what temperature it will be. Usually that means a tepid squirt that wouldn’t wash the lint from a gerbil’s navel. No matter—your hands are at least dampish now, which means you need some paper towels to . . .

  Not so fast, forest killer! Modern public washrooms don’t do paper towels. They provide eco-friendly, environmentally responsible sanitary hand dryers that produce warm air to dry your hands.

  Theoretically.

  The machine wails like a banshee; you look like an idiot trying to shake hands with yourself and your hands remain wet and dripping. No problem. Now you can wipe them on the inside of your pant legs and creep out of the washroom, trying not to look like a pervert.

  Of course I haven’t even mentioned those most inconvenient of all the public conveniences—that sombre line of metal stalls ranged against the back wall.

  The toilets.

  They’ve been modernized too. Gone is the shiny, manually operated flush lever on the toilet tank. It’s been replaced by another sensor. A very sensitive sensor. It responds to your every bodily movement. Thus, when you open the stall door, the toilet flushes. When you take off your jacket, it flushes again. It flushes when you sit down; it flushes when you stand up. The water I waste in one trip to a public toilet stall would probably irrigate a Saskatchewan wheat farm through a drought.

  That’s one scenario. Often the sensor doesn’t work. At all. And you are left with a toilet you would dearly like to flush . . . but there’s no flush handle.

  Perhaps if you waved your arm. Or your leg. Or both legs and both arms.

  This helps to explain those noisy, desperate shuffles you occasionally hear emanating from the stalls of public washrooms. It sounds like some So You Think You Can Dance hopeful in there, executing a complicated routine but no, it’s just some poor schlub trying to activate a balky toilet stall sensor.

  They’re not done tinkering with our public toilets either. Toto, a Japanese toilet manufacturer, has unveiled a model they call the Neorest AH tankless toilet. No toilet paper with this baby—instead the “client” is treated to an extremely personal wash and blow-dry all activated by, yes, an unseen sensor. Cost of the Neorest AH tankless toilet? Four thousand dollars.

  All so I can experience what happens to my jalopy in a hands-free car wash? No thanks.

  I’ll just hold it until I get home.

  If the Phone Rings, It’s Not for Me

  People ask me if I have a cell.

  Trillions, I think. But I know what they mean. I tell them yes, I have a cell.

  Oh, good, they say, and they ask me for the number.

  It doesn’t matter, I tell them, because I never have my cellphone on.

  Then why do you have one, they ask me. So I can call someone if I need to, I say.

  But . . . if somebody wants to get hold of you, they can’t, they point out.

  Exactly, I tell them.

  The reason I carry a cellphone is that I’m a geezer who likes to walk in the bush, sometimes on pretty sketchy trails. One of these days I might slide on a root, trip on a rock or fall down a hill. If my luck continues to deteriorate, chances are I’ll break something. When that happens (assuming I surv
ive) I’d like to be found by Search and Rescue, not turkey vultures. Ergo, my cellphone. It’s for emergencies.

  Contrary to popular belief it is not that life-threatening to be “out of touch” with the rest of the world for brief periods of time. Humankind managed brief forays into solitude for millennia before Samsung and RIM and Nokia came along. For most of my life it’s been the norm to rely on land lines, Canada Post, a loud wolf whistle or a polite “ahem” when one wanted to make contact with somebody else.

  Otherwise, you were on your own.

  Nowadays people are seldom on their own except when they’re asleep. People check their BlackBerrys in restaurants and theatre lobbies, on buses and subways, in elevators and waiting rooms. When my plane touches down—as soon as the wheels touch the tarmac—there’s an in-cabin frenzy as passengers paw for their smart phones to see if they’ve missed any calls or text messages while they were temporarily aloft and out of contact.

  What did they do before cellphones? They thought, I suppose. They daydreamed and fantasized, stargazed and woolgathered.

  They retained some mental space in their life.

  Seems to be out of fashion now. Recently we had a guest (I’m not naming names but you know who you are) over for dinner and a TV movie. The dinner went well; the movie not so much. Said guest sat hunched over his smart phone furtively text-messaging for an hour and a half.

  Such behaviour would have been considered boorish even a decade ago but it’s rather commonplace now. People think nothing of being in your company and talking to somebody else who’s not present. Weird.