A LAMENT TO CELL PHONES

According to the Divine Comedy (The Inferno) the eighth circle of hell is full of lawyers.   But, in keeping up with the new technology I feel that at least the fifth circle of hell should have a place for the people who can’t unplug from their cell phones. 

Back in December we finally traded in our old truck for a new fuel efficient car.  The payments stroke us but it needed doing so that my wife will have dependable transportation when I am gone - and this is the last one.   Then two months ago some woman ran into the back of our new car while I was stopped at a stop light.   She was in her late forties and texting to her daughter.  

I am super conscious now of people riding around with a cell phone held up to their ear.   If you drive around your town and watch, at least twenty-percent of the people are talking on cell phones while they are driving in traffic.  If you go into the grocery store, or walk around Wal*Mart you will see people on their cell phones.   Kids walking down the street are talking on their cell phones.   

Phones ring and people talk on their cells at restaurants.   Recently, at a local restaurant six middle aged people at the same table were laughing because they were texting each other, while from a nearby booth we had to listen to a woman talking to friend on her cell. 

 Yesterday my wife and I went to a playhouse.  Before the play started the MC asked everyone to turn off their cell phones - but an hour into the play we had to listen to some elderly woman’s favorite tune digitally explode on her cell phone.   I won’t even mention the school age kids that seem to have a cell phone implanted onto the side of their head. 

What the fuck is this that we cant unplug from our telephones for a couple of hours to sit in a play or a movie or a restaurant.

In the fifth circle of hell I would have cell phones implanted on both ears of the abusers; and every three minutes, twenty-four hours a day, the phone would ring playing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkuries, followed by a recording warning you that your credit card might be overdrawn. 

the Ol’Buzzard hates cell phones.

The Inferno

My wife just bought me Dan Brown’s new book Inferno. Dan Brown is the man who wrote (among others) The Di Vinci Code and Angles & Demons: both page turners about a professor named Robert Langdon and the unbelievable secrecy, power and reach of the Catholic church, and the extreme the Vatican will go to protect its doctrines and dogma. Both books made in to movies starring Tom Hanks.

The Inferno finds Robert Langdon in Florence, Italy being hunted down by a hit woman with spiked hair, a powerful criminal organization, the Italian military police and possibly even the American government. A powerful plague is about to be released on the world and the secret to the disruption of the plot lies in the text of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Inferno: a trip through the multiple layers of hell.

“We are on the brink of the end of humanity, and our world leaders are sitting in boardrooms commissioning studies on solar power, recycling, the hybrid automobiles? How is it that you – a highly educated woman of science - don’t see? Ozone depletion, lack of water, and pollution are not the disease – they are the symptoms. The disease is over population.”

Perhaps a good argument for the culling of our run-away population growth?

Half way through the book I felt like I was revisiting some of my earlier blogs on world population as pollution. Since 1900 we have been doubling our population approximately every forty years. We now have over seven billion people in the world and by midcentury we could be looking at fourteen billion. This is past the point of sustainability. Population scientist set four billion as the optimum population that he planet can sustain.

Dwindling water supplies, ozone depletion, global temperature increases, depletion of ocean resources, deforestation, species extinction, and sea level increases have all risen at the same rate as population growth.

This book is a must read. It is not only a gripping adventure novel, but also dissertation on the biggest environmental danger to the human race.

I just got back from Augusta where I had an appointment to service my car…and I had to stop by Barnes and Noble and buy Dante’s DEVINE COMEDY, which begins with the Inferno… (like we need another book in our small cabin – fortunately my wife has the same obsession with books.)

Read it – or wait for the movie…but read it.

the Ol’Buzzard