Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

�

Click here for the Secret Decoder Ring to this issue!

Click here to keep up with Galen's Speaking Schedule

Looking for a back issue of Mullings? They're in the Archives

Click here to join the Mullings Movement!

Passing the Time

Wednesday August 6, 2003

Click here for an Easy Print Version

I really don't want to write twice this week about the California Recall so I am, in effect, playing for time.

I have decided that August will, more-or-less, be a series of three-day weekends, so on Monday I walked into Barnes & Noble. Actually, I was thinking about going to the nearby movie theater to see "Seabiscuit" but I decided I would take a nap instead, and nothing better prepares one for an afternoon nap than a stroll through a bookstore.

There is a large section of floor space at that store devoted to discounted books. One subsection was a rack labeled: "Discounted History Books."

This struck me as amusing. What, I wondered, is there about a history book which would go out of date such that it would have to be discounted?

While mulling that, I purchased copies - current copies - of Discover and Popular Science magazines so I would have something to occupy me other than searching for Hopalong Cassidy movies on the Westerns Channel.

In the "What's New" section of the August edition of Popular Science there is a short article about a device which combines a snorkel and an FM radio.

If you are weightlessly drifting just below the surface of the air-dependent world, marveling at the diversity of size and form swimming before you, being awed at the interplay of color and light, while contemplating the notion of a God who can create the Aleocerdo cuvier as well as the Pterophyllum scalare it is not clear to me that you would, simultaneously, need to be listening to the latest offering from Linkin Park on KISS 109.5 or whatever.

Here's the actual description of how it works. I swear this is true:

"Just bite down lightly on the snorkel's mouthpiece and vibrations from the radio signal are transmitted through your molars and jawbone to your skull, where they vibrate the bones of the middle ear. From there the vibrations stimulate the fluid and tiny hair cells that connect to the auditory nerve which transmits the signal to your brain."

If this device is at all appealing to you, I have one piece of advice: Switch to decaf.

I go to a barbershop in Old Town, Alexandria which is owned by a wonderful Korean woman named Kim. The woman has a parrot named Eggie who is trained to say, "Lookin' good!" at odd intervals.

Eggie says this in English, but with a Korean accent.

I was the first customer of the morning, so Kim took me immediately. While I was in the chair (and as Eggie was pronouncing me the very image of Cary Grant) two other men walked in and sat down.

They nodded to Kim, mumbled "good morning" to me, and each began reading a magazine, which got me to wondering about how we deal with intervals.

Here's the contemplation: If I had been the third person in, I would have done the calculation that my total commitment of time in the barbershop would be about 30 minutes. The person in the chair, plus about 10 minutes for the next guy, then 10 minutes for me.

That, I might have thought, would be a reasonable investment and I would have sat down, picked up a Popular Science, and been perfectly happy to read about a snorkel-radio or something while I waited.

However, if I were in the checkout line at the Safeway and I thought I was going to have to wait anything over three minutes, I would immediately begin fidgeting. No amount of available reading material from Washingtonian Magazine to Weekly World News would make me any less aggravated about having to spend that much of my valuable time waiting to pay for my groceries.

And, in this age of grocery stores taking ATM and credit cards, if someone actually went back in time and held things up by writing a check � very heavy sighs and very loud eye rollings will surely ensue.

What does this prove? I need to switch to decaf.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: What Aleocerdo cuvier and Pterophyllum scalare are in American; a pretty good Mullfoto, and a pretty funny Catchy Caption of the Day.

Current Issue | Secret Decoder Ring | Past Issues | Email Rich | Rich Who?