Posted 4:55 PM by Gene

Also on my South Street soujourn today I picked up a copy of RadioShack's (DilbertSpell) latest circular. I can't imagine what that outfit's good for besides batteries and media blanks and what used to be called patch cords. Years ago, when people bought alligator-clip cables to attach to their TV speakers to record off the air (remember ALLIED/Radio Shack?), the catalog was a two-color wonder of shortwave radios and marine radios and police radios and CBs (!) and ham kits and electronics kits -- and my perennial favorites, reel-to-reel tape recorders. Today the outfit should be renamed Electronics for Dummies. All I see are things with cute colored plastic. There are fifty different varieties of cellphones, each capable of its own brand of privacy invasions. There are ugly phone-answerers and ugly accessories and ugly everything. And there's also an unnerving juxtaposition, especially so from a company based in Tex-AYSS: two karaoke cubes display lyrics on their screens side-by-side, the first being,

Oh, beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,

And the second being,

Of all the things I've believed in
I just wanna get it over with.

Just those two lyrics side-by-side demonstrate once again Thoreau's great line (which I've quoted before) that men are the tools of their tools, and furthermore that a life of enslavement to goods electronic may be a life not worth living.

P. S. Anyone recall when Radio Shack was HQed in Boston?