"Sonny and Cher sing 'All I Ever Need is You' as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see..."

"... a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls" (from rogerebert.com):

 

The NYT reports on the backlash and Apple's caving to (hydraulic) pressure: "Apple Says Destructive iPad Ad ‘Missed the Mark’/People in the creative world widely panned a commercial showing a giant hydraulic press squishing objects ranging from paint cans to a piano":

"Airline lounges, bastions of civilization in airport terminals that are now often overstuffed with irritated passengers, thanks to flight delays and cancellations..."

"... have long been the retreat of the frequent-flying elite, forward-class ticket holders and those with expensive credit cards. Now, with leisure travelers leading the recovery of the airline industry as business traffic lags, some clubs have made it easier for relatively infrequent fliers to claim a few predeparture perks, while others — including Delta Sky Club, which adopted a new rule that no user may enter the club more than three hours ahead of their scheduled flight — grapple with growing pains.... Historically, legacy carriers... have operated lounges for passengers flying in first and business classes.... Increasingly, lounge users are not airline devotees, but holders of expensive credit cards.... 'Everybody has some kind of privilege now with Amex or miles or buying in,' said Patrick Rollo of Providence, R.I., who travels frequently for his work in real estate. 'So, everybody’s going to the lounge.'"

From "The Democratization of Airport Lounges No longer just for the flying elite, these havens from chaos are easier to get into now, with the crowds to prove it" (NYT).

Forward class? The top-rated comment:

At the Screen Time Café...

... is this how you want to live?

Get out there... into the world...



... before it's too late.

"The [20-pound] blanket enacts a fantasy of immobilization that is especially seductive in a world of ever-expanding obligations—to work, to monetize, to take action, to perform."

"Last weekend, a friend came over and tried out the blanket. 'That’s really good,' he said, eyes closed, unmoving. '“I kind of want more. I kind of want to not be able to move at all.'"

From "The Seductive Confinement of a Weighted Blanket in an Anxious Time" by Jia Tolentino (in The New Yorker).

Had you ever heard of weighted blankets? Here's an example of one on Amazon: "Weighted Blanket by YnM for Adults, Fall Asleep Faster and Sleep Better, Great for Anxiety, ADHD, Autism, OCD, and Sensory Processing Disorder." The weight is "sand pellets."

I've never thought about weighting myself down as a way to fall asleep, but I have noticed that if I'm reading my iPad and get drowsy, putting the iPad in the center of my chest seems to help me go right to sleep. Something about the weight?

At the Soft Organs Café...

... it's the first open thread of the year. Enjoy the true empathy and paradoxical intercourse.

And do consider getting your supplies for the new year through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"She found him sitting up in his bed staring wide-eyed, his bloodshot eyes looking into the distance as his glowing iPad lay next to him."

"He seemed to be in a trance. Beside herself with panic, Susan had to shake the boy repeatedly to snap him out of it. Distraught, she could not understand how her once-healthy and happy little boy had become so addicted to the game that he wound up in a catatonic stupor."

From "It’s ‘digital heroin’: How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies," by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras in The New York Post.

ADDED: The purple-prose description, oddly enough, makes the mother sound more psychotic.

"The iPad Pro will get a Smart Keyboard and a stylus, which has been dubbed Apple Pencil."

"Perhaps to make us forget that Steve Jobs once mocked the stylus?"

Robots on the march.

1. The return of the automat: "Last week, I was in a fast-moving line and browsed on a flat-screen monitor the menu of eight quinoa bowls, each costing $6.95 (burrito bowl, bento bowl, balsamic beet). Then I approached an iPad, where I tapped in my order, customized it and paid. My name, taken from my credit card, appeared on another screen, and when my food was ready, a number showed up next to it. It corresponded to a cubby where my food would soon appear. The cubbies are behind transparent LCD screens that go black when the food is deposited, so no signs of human involvement are visible. With two taps of my finger, my cubby opened and my food was waiting."

2. The search for robots that can pick tomatoes and cut lettuce and spinach and shake almond trees: "Machines don't yet exist for these crops because there have been ample people to do the work, and because it's hard to design machines that can cut or pick the fruit or vegetables without squishing or damaging them too much.... 'There's an urgent need to develop engineering solutions for a lot of fresh-market fruit and vegetable crops,' Matthew Whiting, an associate professor and extension specialist at Washington State University who works with the sweet cherry industry, tells The Salt. 'The shortage of skilled harvest labor is on every grower's mind.'"

A sleep researcher "told us that if you want to sleep well, you should avoid all screens for half an hour before going to bed. And yet she doesn’t."

"But she promised... [f]or one week, she would not look at a single screen – no TV, no computer, no smartphone – between nine at night and seven in the morning."

HALE: The real challenge is try it for a week and see if you feel better, if you’re sleeping more, if you’re going to bed earlier, and see how you feel.

DUBNER: So how did it go?

HALE: It went great. I was shocked at how many times I wanted to check my phone, turn on the TV, go to the computer, any number of screens as they were all yelling out to me, but I held back and I slept so much better I can hardly believe it.

From the earlier episode:

"The Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get e-mail or use Google to settle arguments."

"The iPads we took had something like seventy billion times the capacity of those Apollo-era dial-ups and were mucho handy, especially during all the downtime on our long haul. MDash used his to watch Season Four of 'Breaking Bad.' We took hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window and, plinking a Ping-Pong ball off the center seat, played a tableless table-tennis tournament, which was won by Anna.... Steve Wong had cued up a certain musical track for what would be Earthrise but had to reboot the Bluetooth on Anna’s Jambox and was nearly late for his cue. MDash yelled, 'Hit Play, hit Play!' just as a blue-and-white patch of life — a slice of all that we have made of ourselves, all that we have ever been — pierced the black cosmos above the sawtooth horizon. I was expecting something classical, Franz Joseph Haydn or George Harrison, but 'The Circle of Life,' from 'The Lion King,' scored our home planet’s rise over the plaster-of-Paris moon. Really? A Disney show tune? But, you know, that rhythm and that chorus and the double meaning of the lyrics caught me right in the throat, and I choked up. Tears popped off my face and joined the others’ tears, which were floating around the Alan Bean. Anna gave me a hug like I was still her boyfriend. We cried. We all cried. You’d have done the same."

From a New Yorker story by Tom Hanks (which you can read or listen to Tom Hanks read at the link).

The New Republic finally put its racial smear of Scott Walker up on its website.

Here's the scurrilous hit piece, "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker," which I first saw in my iPad on Saturday. The article went up Sunday evening, after I'd posted about it 3 times Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, and Sunday morning. My posts:

Saturday afternoon: "Look at the new New Republic cover, smearing Scott Walker for his 'toxic strain of racial politics.'" This post displays the cover, with what I read as a strangely sexualized headline "Scott Walker Is So Hot Right Now"* and the puzzling sub-head "Too bad he owes his success to a toxic strain of racial politics." I noted that headline inside at the article itself (which is also the headline on the TNR website now) was "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." Sub-head: "A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star." I read the article and opined that TNR had nothing racial to say about Walker himself. Walker built his political career in the Milwaukee area, and the article is mostly about the racial demographics of the place and 2 talk radio hosts who are popular there.

Saturday evening: "... I almost feel as though I am bullying The New Republic at this point." The article was still not up, and I took that as a digital-age failure for TNR's editor and publisher, Chris Hughes (who, as the co-founder of Facebook, had seemed as though he was going to make TNR very digitally sharp, which was why I subscribed, and why I got early access via iPad).

Sunday morning: "When is it considered acceptable, in polite company, to refer to the excessive 'whiteness' of a public figure?"

Why did the editors of The New Republic — that venerable journal — think it was acceptable to title an article "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker"? 

I did not give the typical conservative answer, which would be: Because it's liberal, and liberals can and will do to conservatives what conservatives can't get away with doing to liberals. That old rule of thumb is reasonably apt, but I don't think it is generally acceptable among liberals to use "whiteness" as the key word in an attack. I have a different answer, which you can read at the link.

Also, the Sunday morning post ends with a clipped out passage that I believe is intended to float the rumor that Scott Walker is a closeted homosexual:

Walker had an easy smile and impressive 1980s mullet, and he played on the football team, but his friends would apologize if they swore in his presence, and he wasn’t much for chasing girls. “He was a very nice-looking young man, always very neat in appearance,” says Neill Flood, the town’s fire chief, whose daughter was a year ahead of Walker in school. “He was the kind of guy who liked everyone, and everyone liked him. There was never any physical attraction for Scott, girls being all over him.” On Scott’s prom night, his mother recalls, he, his date, and some friends stayed up very late talking politics.

The girls hung "all over him," but "There was never any physical attraction for Scott"? He was "very neat in appearance" and not "much for chasing girls"? He spent prom night — a classic time for sexual adventures — talking about politics? I'm going to write a separate post on this topic, because I remember when the NYT tried a move like this when John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court.
______________________

* I'm told "so hot right now" may be an allusion to the movie "Zoolander."

Progress on the path of passivity.

"The iPad And Other Tablets Are Turning Out To Be Far More Important Than PCs Ever Were."

[T]ablets have already, by one measure, surpassed the sales numbers of both PCs and laptop-style notebook computers....

And so we see ourselves sliding into passivity. I love my iPad for reading, but it's almost useless for writing. When I'm lounging about with my iPad, I'm a reader. I can write, but it's completely awkward to do so and I rarely do. In the old days, before desktops and laptops, I read paper books, probably with a pen in hand to write notes in the margin. With my desktop and laptop — connected to the internet and loaded with texts — the process understanding through reading merged fluidly with the process of writing. I read to write, and write for readers who write back to me, and I write again, endlessly. At some point in the evening, I settle down with my iPad, and I am deactivated. I'm choosing this deactivation, on a daily basis. One must wind down and go to sleep. But I worry about people shifting to iPads and other tablets and away from the keyboard. I know reading, just reading, can be active, and I know there's the modest activity of "sharing" what is read on Facebook and Twitter, and maybe the young folks can do some serious typing on the virtual keyboard, but I fear we are sinking into passivity, that we're taking sleeping tablets.

"My once beloved magazines sit in a forlorn pile... Television now meets many of the needs that pile previously satisfied."

Writes David Carr in the NYT:

I have yet to read the big heave on Amazon in The New Yorker...

Which I blogged here last month.

... or the feature on the pathology of contemporary fraternities in the March issue of The Atlantic...

Yeah, I already blogged that too, here.

Magazines in general had a tough year...

Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is surging in the rankings on Amazon and iTunes.

Why?

"iPad baby seat inspires campaign to stop the parenting apocalypse."

Check out the Fisher-Price the Apptivity Seat. Link goes to an article in the L.A. Times, not to Amazon, as you might suspect, but if you want to buy one, here's the Amazon link. The L.A. Times article includes some snark from comments at Amazon, stuff like:

"This product is great. Exactly what I was looking for. Everyone should own one of these. Fisher-Price does it again. Hail Satan."

But let's be fair-minded. Let's compare this product (with the iPad inserted) to the usual distract-a-baby devices. There's television and there are those horrible mobiles people hang over cribs. Here, for example, is the Fisher-Price Discover 'n Grow Twinkling Lights Projector Mobile. Why would we think that is better than an iPad? First, you need to ask, what are the iPad apps for babies?

The nightmare of flying just got a little more complicated.

"The Federal Aviation Administration will allow airlines to expand passengers' use of portable electronic devices during all phases of flight, the agency announced today, but cell phone calls will still be prohibited," says a "Breaking News" email from CNN.

I'm guessing the cell phones are still prohibited because we really cannot tolerate a plane full of people yakking on their cell phones. And yet... flying on a plane is an ordeal in the toleration of other people. Those of us who are too sensitive to endure it are not on that plane, which means that if you are, you're there with a plane full of insensitive people.

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks..."

"... because that’s what you needed on the farm."

That's an analogy from Steve Jobs, quoted in a NYT article about the newest iteration of the iPad. Is it really true that the earliest cars were truck-like? I didn't believe that. I Google. I get to Wikipedia. I'm amazed and call out this question to Meade (who is editing dog video in the next room): "When do you think the earliest thing that could be called a car — an automobile — was?" He says 1910, then re-guesses 1890. I say: "1672."

"The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon, and the Big Six Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight."

Publishers Weekly has put out a $1.99 ebook.

Little did Apple know when it introduced the iPad in 2010 that it would be setting itself up to land in federal court on price-fixing charges. This blow-by-blow account charts how five of America’s six largest publishers, afraid that bookselling powerhouse Amazon's $9.99 price for Kindle e-books would undermine the industry, spent a few frantic weeks in early 2010 deep in negotiations with Apple to introduce a new business model for e-books, just in time for the launch of the iPad and the iBookstore.

ADDED: I was dreaming when I wrote this/Forgive me if it goes astray/But when I woke up this morning/Coulda sworn it was judgment day/The sky was all purple/There were people running everywhere/Trying 2 run from the destruction/You know I didn't even care/They say two thousand one zero party over/Oops out of time/So tonight I'm gonna read like it's nine point ninety-nine...

"Do you want to be near people or away from people?"

The restauranteur asked Governor Deval Patrick, the day after the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. 

"I said, ‘As far away as I can.’ So she put in the corner, me and my book on my iPad, and she starts bringing me things. Some of them edible. In fact all the food was edible. She starts bringing me things to drink as a celebration. And by the end of the meal, I was actually quite drunk, by myself.”

"When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them."

"When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined. They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates."

A super-short fiction by RLC, written a few years ago, but long after the time when I was married to him. These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

"Rules for Radicals"? Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." There's marriage for you!

Why was I reading that old post? Because when I read that wonderful garden club politics article out loud, I said it was like a compressed novel and Meade said it was like one of RLC's super-short fictions which you can read the best of in book form or read at his blog. The one about married couples reading marriage therapy books simultaneously is just what's at the top when you click the "fiction" tag.

I was also considering blogging "If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock" — a propos of the fuzzy pink socks that played a central role in the news story of the week, how North Korea is about to drop a nuclear bomb somewhere Mitch McConnell's people considered quoting things Ashley Judd wrote about herself.