We finally got the Iphone. The acquisition was anticlimactic. There was this big long wait for it and a ton of publicity and people waiting in lines like the cure for their itch was being given away for free. I’d been through this before. In 1984, I was 7 years old and the Transformers landed on these shores. I saw the reports that no stores had them. I saw the commercials, the cartoons, but I’d never seen one in person. I wanted one more than anything I had wanted in my life up to that point. When the day came when all American children get what they desire, for no reason at all, other than they are American and their parents got it for them (Christmas), I felt deep down that there would be no Transformers coming. Santa was good, but he didn’t shop at Child World, and I knew Toys R Us was flat out. There was no Ebay or Amazon to the rescue. I didn’t even know what shape a transformer would be (I had never seen one!). So when I opened the package and there was Megatron and my brother MH opened up Optimus Prime, I think a part of me died a little. I knew now that all I had to do was wish and hope and miracles would happen, forever destroying my work ethic. That’s what I think. What I know happened is that pure chaos erupted. I am getting goose bumps just writing this, remembering the pure adrenaline tail wagging barking giddiness that only a small child can feel. I also remember completely breaking down and crying in frustration when I couldn’t make Megatron turn into his robot form because I tossed the directions aside. It took my mechanical engineer father what seemed like hours to figure it out so he could teach me. Does anyone remember what Megatron’s non-robot form was? Anyone? A Walther P38. That’s a gun. A life-sized gun. There are a few iconic guns out there, the cowboy and his colt, 007 and his PPK. You know who made the P38 famous? The Wermacht, i.e. Germany’s Army circa WWII. So I essentially got a nazi war toy for Christmas that turned me from a happy innocent child into a greed loving frustration case overwhelmed with joy and excitement. So here in 2008, 24 years later, those Transformer (and Cabbage Patchers, 1984 was a good year for toys) kids got a new toy, the IPhone. The phone costs roughly 20 times as much (with a 2 year subscription!, monthly rates vary), but you can sign up for a list and instead of rioting in the aisles when they arrive you simply show up and claim your prize like Ed McMahon sent you a letter. We picked it up, did the paperwork, paid another chunk for a holster (yes a holster, I am a yuppie cowboy and my phone is my pistol) and that was about it. There were no screams, no instruction book, we casually went shopping afterwards as if nothing had happened. There were nearly some tears though, when I tried to get it to work with my employer’s email. I am still capable of childish temper tantrums when I can’t get my toys to work, which is good to know. I’ve spent the past few days buying music and generally learning how to use it. Overall I’m happy, but I don’t get any goosebumps when I look at it. M and I will be able to get our intended use from it and that’s the most important bit. And I get a little bit of cool out of it for a few more weeks, which ain’t bad.
In other news, I saw a ghost. Not a real ghost. Is that even possible? Can you see a ‘real’ bigfoot, or the ‘actual’ loch ness monster, or an ‘ethical’ republican? Anyway, I saw a Rolls Royce Phantom being parked in a lot around the corner from my office. I don’t work in a particularly pimped area, although I do see the occasional nice car. The Ferraris and Bentleys usually get parked in the valet spaces underground. This was out in the open, in a scrub lot with a teenager running it. I had to stop and take a picture because I found it hard to believe that someone gave the keys to their $300,000.00 car to a teenager, but they did. I looked it up - RR has sold only 3703 of these things worldwide since 2003. I know most of them to the middle east and Asia. Let’s say that half of them are. That’s 1850 for Europe and North America. I’ll pretend they’re distributed evenly and being that there are about 250,000,000 cars in North America alone, that would give me a .00037% chance of seeing one of these cars. I don’t want that kind of luck. If I’m going to overcome incredible odds, I want to win the Mega Millions. The fact that I managed to buy a home and get married to M should tell me that my winning lotto tickets have already been cashed, but that damn transformer just made be greedy. As an aside to the Rolls story, one of the features of the Rolls is that the back seat is nicer than the front, because you’re so stinking filthy rich that you pay someone to drive you around and the owner shouldn’t get the crappy seat. I wonder what these rich folks do with their sports cars? Do they drag Jeeves into the backseat so they can show everyone they are so rich that they drive their sports car with a guy in the back who is paid to be there? But I digress. There’s supposedly some snob joke that one drives a Bentley but gets driven in a Rolls. There were no chauffeurs to be seen on this day. So there’s a broke Rolls owner driving his own car, parking it in a budget lot downtown. Somewhere a violin weeps.
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