Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Who Ya' Gonna Call?

Wednesday February 19, 2003

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Three Score and ten years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933:

"[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Having been more-or-less housebound for the past 36 hours because of the Global Warming-induced 16 inch snowfall, I have decided that it's a good thing FDR isn't around today. Here's an alphabetical listing of a few things about which we DO have concerns 70 years later:

Afghanistan, Airline Bankruptcies, Airport Security, Amber Alerts, Anthrax, Augusta National Golf Club, Both Koreas, Botulism, Campaign Finance Reform, Cancer, Cell Phone Radiation, China, Cholesterol, Democrats, Diabetes, Duct Tape, Earthquakes, Economy, Enron, France, French Figure Skating Judges, Gasoline Prices, Gerhardt Schroeder, Germany, Heart Disease, Hypothermia, Income Tax, Iran, Iraq, Jacques Chirac, Killer Bees, Lyme Disease, Mad Cow Disease, NATO, Nerve Gas, Obesity, Orange Alerts, Ozone Layer, Pakistan, Quran, Reality TV, Retirement Accounts, Sky Marshals, Smallpox, Snipers, Snow Storms, Space Shuttles, Stock Markets, Terrorists, Unemployment, UNMOVIC, Volcanoes, Weapons of Mass Destruction, West Nile Virus, and Zora Andrich

I, for one, am ready to throw in the towel and admit we need outside help: Anyone have a number for Ghostbusters?

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about a guy who collects slide rules. For those of you who are under 40, a slide rule was a sort-of hand-held calculator in wide use prior to the introduction of the electronic version in 1972 by Hewlett-Packard.

Somewhere, there is a person who pulled the last slide rule ever manufactured off the assembly line.

That got me thinking about some of the other items which people the age of The Lad have never seen.

There was a time when telephones had dials, and phone numbers had names. I can still remember the phone number we had to dial to call home when we were growing up: Floral Park 2-8959.

A majority of Americans, I suspect, do not know why the term "dial the phone" even exists.

Television sets, too, had dials. And the dial only went up to 13. The reason so many Public Broadcasting Stations are channel 13 is because, in the 1950's no one else was using it in many markets when the FCC doled out channels for their use.

When I was dialing Floral Park 2-8959 we had only these channels to choose from: 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. And that was in New York - the largest television market on the planet.

Every house had an antenna. Not a satellite dish, but an antenna which meant almost everyone knew someone with a relative who had fallen off their roof while attempting to adjust the thing so as to "pull in" a better picture which was, by the way, only available in black and white.

There was a time when the water that came out of the tap was plenty good enough, and the dangers of instantaneous dehydration (requiring every adult woman in America to have a large plastic bottle filled with pure spring water with her at all times) were not yet known.

In fact, the notion of going to the Safeway to buy water (at about $6.08 a gallon - three times more than premium gasoline - even at current consumer-gouging prices) was, to use the famous Vizzini construct: Inconceivable.

Finally there used to be a device called a "girdle" which women wore to ... to ... I don't know why they wore them. It is defined by Merriam-Webster as:

A woman's close-fitting undergarment often boned and usually partly or wholly elasticized and extending from the waist or just above to below the hips for figure control.

I only bring this up because, while sitting in Mullings Central watching the snow accumulate, I saw an ad (on my color-912-channel-digital-cable-ready-electronic-tuning-with-remote-control-42-inch television) for a device called "The Invisible Tummy Trimmer." $19.99.

This may be the third best marketing idea for selling something with a better name than the original behind "action figures" for boys who would never have asked for something called a "doll," and "mahi-mahi" for people who would never order a fish named a "dolphin."

I saw the ad while I was watching a black and white movie drinking a glass of water which came out of my - refrigerator door.

Maybe the best Secret Decoder Ring EVER! Some lyrics from the Ghostbusters song, photos of a dial telephone and dial television, of Zora, of a slide rule, a Mullfoto, a Catchy Caption AND a citation from the Constitution of the United States. Whew!

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