Those long-time readers might also recall that Ben had published a book back in 2005, titled Off the Top of My Head, which collected the columns he had written while working for the Katahdin Times in Maine. The book is still available in hardcover and paperback, starting at $20.99. But I recently commented to Ben that he should look into Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program as a way to bring the book to the Kindle platform, and he took my suggestion. The book became available tonight to Kindle users for just $4.99. And it is in the Kindle Lending Library so Amazon Prime customers can borrow it for free – though Ben could use the five bucks, so I hope you buy it if you like it.

Sure, he’s been my best friend since we met back in 1991, so I’m admittedly biased, but he’s a clever & witty writer and the columns are full of humor. And I feature in a few of the columns, when he’s relating tales of our misadventures.

But these are dark times, and not all of us can afford to pursue the latest word in ultracompact personal electronic backup brains or super-high-resolution home theater gear with umpteen-watt wireless Dolby surround speakers. What’s a gizmo lover to do when all the buzzworthy gizmos are out of reach?

Some people find some smaller bit of technology to focus their addiction on. My mother, for instance, has a curious fixation with USB flash drives. She has dozens of them, more than she’ll ever have any actual need for. White ones, black ones, pink ones, ones with store logos on them, ones with clever rotating covers, even one that looks like an old-fashioned Eberhard Faber Pink Pearl eraser. (She doesn’t have one of the ones that look like a severed USB cable yet, but she knows of them and wants one very much.) Whenever we’re out shopping, if we go anywhere that sells flash drives, she’ll leave with at least one. It’s like a compulsion.

But I don’t sneer at that, because I’ve carried on my own minor-tech-widget love affair for years. In my case, it’s not flash drives. It’s flashlights.

I love flashlights. Always have. When I was a kid, one of my happiest moments was the day when my grandfather bought me one of my very own – the classic Rayovac two-C-cell model with the chrome tube and red plastic cap. By modern standards these were deeply sad flashlights, so incredibly primitive that you would probably be better off setting something nearby on fire, but for a five-year-old this was big-time grown-up stuff. Every household I knew of had at least one of that very same model tucked away in a closet someplace, stashed against the inevitable day when the electricity went out and the head of the household would grab the flashlight decisively from its resting place (and discover that the crappy carbon-zinc 1970s batteries had corroded with disuse and the light didn’t work, but hey, it was the best we had).

As I grew up, flashlight technology matured as well. When I was in middle school the one to have was a two-C model (Eveready, I think, or possibly Energizer) with a body and cap covered in thick rubber molded in such a way as to bear an eerie resemblance to the outside of an old-fashioned pineapple hand grenade. This was doubly impressive at the time because it had a push button to turn it on instead of the old-fashioned sliding switch, and the button was in the butt end of the flashlight rather than up on the barrel. This was seriously high-tech personal equipment in 1984. There was also a Duracell model that rather cutely emulated the battery brand’s color scheme, with a black body and copper-colored cap, but it didn’t seem quite as badass as the black rubber one. That thing was like something you’d imagine SWAT cops carried.

In my high school years, the Mag-Lite® revolution arrived in my part of the world, and before long that was the only flashlight any self-respecting individual would have. I have quite a few of them to this day. I’ve had a single-AAA Solitaire on my keyring for at least 20 years (I just replaced it with a new one a few weeks ago) and I’ve owned several of the classic two-AA model, including one specially printed with the logo of a company I once worked for, commissioned as a reward for everybody on the project I was part of to commemorate a man-hours-without-serious-accident safety milestone. I’ve still got one of their whopping fat two-D ones, the kind the cops in this neck of the woods carry in lieu of truncheons, in the trunk of my car for emergencies.

Lately, I’ve found my attention turning to flashlights that do more than just shine a beam of light. The coming of the cheap white LED has made these more common, as the bulk of the light’s body no longer needs to be taken up with big fat alkaline batteries. Such things are a good way to scratch the techno-itch, at least around here; they tend to show up in impulse-purchase displays in hardware stores and general stores, standing on end in cardboard display cases next to the registers.

My current favorite is this little item, shown with a TiVo Glo remote for scale:

One of the local hardware stores had a big cardboard display of these, along with similar displays of all sorts of little home repair gadgets, on a table by the registers last year during the Christmas run-up, with a big sign advising the customer that all the things on the table made great stocking stuffers. For added cheese points, the display for these lights cheerfully cashed in on their resemblance to items seen on a popular television show by announcing, CSI:FLASHLIGHT.

This light’s secondary function is an unnervingly powerful laser pointer that’s built into the center of the circular LED array. By “unnervingly powerful” I don’t mean it’s one of those green lasers you’ve read about idiots trying to blind airline pilots with, but still, from my front porch at night I can quite clearly see the red dot on the steeple of the Congregational church down on the corner, a good 300 yards away.

Not the best picture, but you get the idea.

My most recent acquisition, picked up from a local discount store (they used to have them at the NAPA auto-parts stores in the area as well), rejoices in the brand name “TEC Light”.

One entertaining thing about the TEC Light is that it looks like it ought to have a couple of AA batteries in it, but it doesn’t. It’s got four lithium button batteries way down in the tail end of the barrel. The rest of it’s just hollow space – but it needs to be, because it’s got something I think is pretty nifty tucked away inside it:

It’s a telescopic magnet with a gooseneck segment at the end, suitable for retrieving small ferrous objects from hard-to-reach places. (This is presumably why they sold them at NAPA stores. Magnets-on-a-stick are very popular with auto mechanics, because when you’re working in a car’s engine bay you’re forever dropping bolts and whatnot down into the bowels of the machine, and having a flashlight at the other end of the magnet pole is nice, because it’s usually dark down there.) I used mine to fish a broken bit out of my garbage disposal earlier today. That doesn’t make the disposal work any better, but at least the big metal chunk doesn’t fly around inside it making terrifying noises when it runs.

I’m always on the lookout for new flashlights with interesting quirks – second functions, interesting forms, anything that sets them apart. Okay, it’s not “hey, I got the new Ultraphone with direct neural spam filter,” but for the gadgeteer on a budget, flashlight lust is comparatively easy to manage.

When I was younger, I had a T-top Camaro. This was a whole different animal. The tops were heavy, taking them off and putting them on was a pain in the ass, they took up the whole damn trunk (not that a Camaro has much of one, admittedly) when stowed, they started leaking about half an hour after we took delivery, it was drafty and cold, and there was the ever-present terror that you’d manage to very expensively break one while putting them on or taking them off (though, fortunately, I never did). To add insult to injury, it didn’t really feel much different with them off. Oh, sure, you had the open space where the bit you’d normally hit your head on getting into the car should’ve been, and that was nice, but on the road it was just noisier. With the same view through the rearview mirror either way, there just wasn’t any particular feeling of… liberation.

Put simply, the convertible is worth it; the T-top wasn’t.

Through all that time, though, I never had a car with a moonroof. I didn’t even know anyone whose car had a moonroof for most of that time. (I should, perhaps, explain that by “moonroof” I mean a panel in the roof that opens, so that you could, if pressed, use it as an emergency exit. This is as opposed to a sunroof, which is just a fixed transparent panel in the roof that maybe pops up a little for ventilation, maybe does nothing at all.) I’d seen them, of course, but I never really saw the point. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a replay of the T-top experience, except you traded the convenience of not having to lug the thing to the trunk for the downside that you still had the bit of the car you’d hit your head on. Just something to be drafty, and leak when it rained.

I thought that right up until a couple of weeks ago, when my mother bought a MINI Cooper, and, while driving it around, I suddenly realized that it’s not the T-top experience, and it’s nothing to compare to a convertible either. The moonroof thing is… somewhere in the middle. It’s a little like the convertible in that all you have to do is push a button, and a little like the T-top in that you don’t get that full-on open-top experience. Of the two, it’s much closer to the T-top experience, but the downsides are so much less with a moonroof, it’s hard to believe.

As a ragtop snob, I was completely prepared to find the MINI’s moonroof pointless, but I just can’t. Sure, you’re sacrificing an inch or two of headroom, and the MINI’s popup air dams make an irritating rattling noise if you don’t find the friction points and damp them, but it doesn’t leak, it doesn’t let in a draft, and here’s something else it shares with my convertible: it’s got nice features even when it’s closed. It’s glass, so you can see through it, but it’s nicely tinted, so you don’t roast in the sun. It’s surprising what a difference that makes to the atmosphere inside the car. (The old Camaro’s T-tops were glass too, but they were laid out such that you couldn’t see anything through them from a normal driving position.)

There’s even one thing the MINI’s moonroof can do that – if I’m being honest – I have to admit my beloved convertible can’t.

I live in a town with two traffic lights, both of them on the main drag through town. This is a route that big trucks with full loads of logs often take, and over the years, as yahoo truckers with bigger and bigger overloads have made the run and bashed the lights, the town has jacked them up higher and higher – to the point where, if you’re driving a normal-size car and you stop where the painted line on the street tells you to, you can’t see the lights without doing some very interesting contortions.

Unless it’s a nice sunny day and you have the top down… or you’re in my mom’s MINI. Then, even if it’s raining, you just look up through the moonroof, and there you are. It’s difficult to encapsulate the delight you feel when you first notice that little trick.

At this point, I’m prepared to say that the only real downside to the moonroof on a MINI is that, if you’ve got one, you can’t get the Union Jack roof graphic.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that piston engines have reached the limit of what can be wrung out of them. That what’s really needed now is a whole new concept in automotive powerplant technology, something that will make cars with piston engines seem as antiquated and quaint as fighter planes with propellers.

Well, funnily enough, I think that something already exists. In fact, I think it’s the same something that left propeller-driven fighter planes behind at the end of World War II… and it’s a something that engineers first seriously took a crack at putting in automobiles in the early 1960s.

Meet the 1963 Chrysler Turbine. Styled by Ghia, the famed Italian design firm (of VW Karmann Ghia fame), it wasn’t called the Turbine just because it looked futuristic and sleek by the standards of its day. It was called that because it really was powered by a turbine. Understand, though, the Turbine was not a “jet car”. Its turbine didn’t power it by direct thrust, as in those giant dragsters with the jet fighter engines, or various Batmobiles over the years. It used a gas turbine where a conventional car has a piston engine – to drive a pair of its wheels via a mechanical gearing system. It wasn’t intended for stunts or silly afterburner showing off; it was intended to prove that a gas turbine engine was a serious candidate to replace the piston engine under the hood of the average American car.

Chrysler Corporation had been fooling around with small gas turbine engines since before the Second World War, and they’d made attempts at putting them into cars before, but their earlier attempts were, quite frankly, rubbish. The biggest problem they had was the same problem that plagued the early jet aircraft: poor throttle response. A lot of modern turbocharged cars experience a phenomenon called “turbo lag”, wherein you stamp on the throttle, but the big boost of horsepower provided by the turbo doesn’t kick in for several seconds while it sorts out what it’s doing. Chrysler’s early experimental turbine-powered cars had a very similar problem, except that in their case, the wait wasn’t just for the added horsepower provided by a turbo, it was for any power at all.

In the 1963 Turbine Car they had that issue pretty well licked, as well as the other major bugaboos of their early turbine experiments – mechanical reliability and fuel efficiency. Chrysler built 55 ’63 Turbine Cars and sent them all over the country in an ambitious test program, placing them with ordinary people in all walks of life for testing in the real world – where they promptly performed brilliantly, racking up a reliability record that would have been the envy of any normal car of their day. They ran everywhere, rain or shine, winter and summer, day and night – and, most intriguingly from our modern oh-no-is-this-peak-oil perspective, they ran on pretty much anything that was a) a liquid and b) flammable. Gasoline, diesel oil, kerosene, jet fuel, Wesson, they didn’t care. The president of Mexico, presented with one for his consideration, famously tried running it on tequila, which it happily did (though presumably it didn’t eat the worm). And all that with an emission signature that amounted to little more than some heat.

The Turbine test program ran for three years. More than 200 people spent three months each driving their Turbines in normal, everyday life, just like their next-door neighbors were using their Chevy Impalas and Ford Galaxie 500s. From Maine to California, in the hands of postmen, housewives, salesmen, engineers, doctors, ministers, the Turbines whirred steadily on. And all during that time, shopping mall displays and other marketing events announced that here, my friends, was the car of the future. Never mind the concept stuff on display at Autorama. We built these and then proved that they actually work in the real world.

And then…

… well, and then nothing, sadly. Chrysler did go on to make one further turbine-powered ground vehicle – the M1 Abrams tank, you may have heard of it – but nothing more was said, in public anyway, about a turbine-powered automobile for the general public.

Why not? Well… here it all gets a little hazy. Chrysler collected the ’63 Turbines at the end of the test and destroyed all but a handful of them, ostensibly because if they didn’t they would have to pay an import duty on the bits made in Italy, and what little the company’s management said about the turbine idea when people asked about it afterward was couched in vague terms about economic feasibility. There were mutterings about the problem of training mechanics to work on the things and were Mr. and Mrs. John Q. and Jane Public really ready for such a thing (ironic, given Chrysler had just spent three years proving that they were). Even more interestingly, when Chrysler was bailed out by the federal government during the Iacocca years, one of the provisions of that bailout was that Chrysler would scrap any and all research into turbine-powered consumer automobiles.

As you might imagine, these… intriguing… circumstances give rise to a good many conspiracy theories among those who remember the ’63 Turbine and wonder what might have been.

Mind you, as cars they did have shortcomings. Their exhaust temperature at the pipe, for instance, was a rather brisk 500° F, and they made an uninspiring vacuum-cleaner whine in an era when people expected a car that size to make a meaty V-8 rumble. They didn’t have inspiring power by the standards of the day – around 130 horsepower, at a time when a standard family car with a V-8 engine developing less than 300 HP was considered a bit poky. While they didn’t produce carbon monoxide or unburned hydrocarbons in their exhaust, they did produce oxides of nitrogen – though the engineers had fixed that by 1966. And yes, they required a bit of special handling – if you didn’t follow the startup procedure correctly, for instance, you’d destroy the engine.

Still, that was nothing normal, workaday people couldn’t handle. Nowadays you expend more brainpower working out how the radio in your new car is operated vs. the one in your old car. Everything else could’ve been cracked with further engineering (and, as I’ve already mentioned, the emissions issue already had been). The trickiest shortcoming of the bunch would’ve been making it make a better noise, and conventional car companies nowadays have entire teams of engineers working on that kind of thing.

What the 1963 Chrysler Turbine represents, then, is a car built with technology that arguably wasn’t quite there… but the mass of evidence from the three-year test program shows that at worst, it was within one generation of commercial readiness. Had research continued, had the program been given anything like the attention it deserved, all the ’63 Turbine’s remaining problems could have been addressed. Look at how much conventional cars have advanced since 1963. Consider a modern turbine car as far ahead of the ’63 Turbine, engineering-wise, as a modern Chrysler 300C is ahead of a ’63 300J.

Consider it, versus the alternatives we have today instead – versus pointless publicity stunts like the Prius and naff plastic boxes like the Smart Fortwo – and weep.

The only problem with this, as anyone else who was there at the time can attest to, is that in the early 1970s American small cars were rubbish. That said, Dad was also not a Ford man, so at least we escaped having the worst small car ever made. Instead we had a Chevy Vega. An orange one, no less, which was fortuitous in that the rust it would inevitably develop wouldn’t show as obviously. I have only the dimmest memories of the Vega – it only lasted until I was about three – but I recall thinking it was cramped inside even then.

Fast-forward to 1976; the ’73 fuel crisis had mostly abated and happy days were here again. The Vega had pretty much rusted out anyway, and it was okay to have a big car again – so my father, overcome with glee, threw caution to the wind and ordered a brand new, fully customized Monte Carlo from our local Chevrolet dealer. It took months to come, and when it did, well. The 1977 Monte Carlo wasn’t just big, it was colossal – and at the time it was considered a mid-sized car! It had a hood you could land military jets on and four-foot-long doors that weighed about 100 pounds apiece. The front seats swiveled so you could get in and out without all of that pesky sliding-across-the-seat stuff you have to do in normal cars. It was the swankiest car Chevrolet made that year.

It got about 10 miles per gallon.

This became something of an issue in 1979, when the Iranian Revolution sparked the second major U.S. fuel crisis.

Probably not coincidentally, it was around this time that cars powered by things other than gasoline started to become vaguely worthy of the average consumer’s attention. “By the year 2000, $BIGPERCENTAGE of cars on America’s roads will be electrically powered” became the same kind of car-magazine mantra that “by the year 2000, cars will fly” had been in the middle of the century. There were a lot of pie-in-the-sky announcements of forthcoming new products and promises of wonderful things in the future.

Then the price of crude started to come down again and everybody more or less forgot about it, except for a few hippies and other ahead-of-their-time enviro-nuts. Electric cars went back to being inconvenient curiosities that weren’t really good for anything. The most the mainstream did at the time was to start looking more closely at diesel-powered cars, because – weird as this is to consider now – at the time, diesel fuel was considerably cheaper than gasoline, even when oil prices spiked. That was clearly an evolutionary dead end, especially when considered environmentally rather than economically.

Over the last 20 years or so there has still been the occasional spasm of searching for alternatives (oddly, they seem to coincide eerily with Middle East wars), but they always peter out again. The Alewife station on the Boston T’s Red Line had a rank of spaces with chargers for electric cars in the parking garage, right up by the entrance to the station, for years. I think I saw an actual electric car parked in one of them once. Last time I was in the station, the chargers appeared to have been removed. And yes, you do see the odd city bus or UPS delivery vehicle with a decal on the side proudly announcing that this vehicle runs on used fryolator oil or grass clippings or something, and that’s fine. It’s not as if a city bus could do anything with the power to go faster than a reasonably healthy man can walk anyway. Apart from that, though, it’s pretty much been business as usual.

Well, here we are in the first decade of the 21st century, and everything’s gone wrong again. Not only is gasoline ridiculously expensive by U.S. standards (which, since I live there, are the only standards I consider personally relevant), but now the green lobby has acquired such social, if not political, power that people who drive real cars get the same kinds of evil looks on the street that you’d once have had to do something really outrageous to get. Walking around in a full-length coat made of veal, say.

Admittedly, that kind of crackpottery isn’t new – I once, in about 1992, had a patchouli enthusiast come up to me at a gas station while I was filling up my 1968 Pontiac Tempest and inform me that I was “no better than a murderer” and that he hoped I was proud of myself. The temptation to pull the nozzle out of the car, douse him with premium unleaded, and strike a match was very, very strong. It seems to be more prevalent now, though. You get the same kind of feedback for driving small, reasonably economical cars like the one I have now, a Saab 900S convertible, and from people who you would swear are habitual bathers.

It is, distressingly, starting to look more and more like proper motor vehicles will eventually be forced out, turning the world into some hideous motoring dystopia, like in that old Rush song about the guy with the Ferrari 166. I’m not going to do the usual gearhead thing here and try to trot out obviously forced rationalizations about why piston-engined cars are practically necessary or the like. Yes, electric cars are still ridiculous. Yes, they don’t have a long enough range, high enough reliability, or low enough cost to be worth bothering with. Yes, most of those on the market right now are either insanely unsafe, utterly impractical, or both. Even the best of the current crop of electric cars that I know about, the Tesla Roadster, is hugely expensive, has only a 200-mile range, and takes three and a half hours to recharge. I live in the far reaches of Maine. They’re never going to sell me an electric car, unless I have no choice in the matter at all, before they can make one that will get me to Boston and doesn’t take a full viewing of Seven Samurai to “fill up”.

But that’s just it: Eventually, I’m sure they will. Everything I’ve said about electric cars above was also true of early motorcars, and all those problems were eventually surpassed. If engineers keep working on electric cars, they’ll one day achieve the same sort of evolution, and the electric vehicle will have arrived. Maybe the answer is fuel cells, I don’t know. I’m not sanguine about driving around with a charge of somehing so enormously more explosive than gasoline as hydrogen on board, but don’t go by me.

I’ll be sad when that day comes, anyway, for no better reason than that I like internal combustion cars. I like changing gears and keeping track of revs, even though in practical terms that’s just a contrivance for overcoming the piston engine’s main limitation, its inability to provide smooth or consistent power across a street car’s wide range of speed requirements. I like torque and horsepower ratings. I like the noise they make and the idea that, even if I’m never going to have any reason to ask it to, my car could go really fast. (Well, okay, the car I actually drive couldn’t go really fast, but it could still go quite a lot faster than I ever drive it.)

Yes, in strictly practical terms, I agree that there is nothing I require of a motor vehicle that some future electric model will be unable to do… but I can’t accept that we’ve climbed our way to the 21st century just to start accepting things that can only do what we need them to do. And I decline to just sit back and be demonized because I like cars that rev and make a bit of smoke. Technological progress is supposed to be about a steadily increasing standard of living, not more effective austerity measures.

That got me to thinking about how much more fiddly and sophisticated cars have gotten in the last 20 years or so, and how little they really changed in the 20 or so years before that, comparatively speaking.

Take even the basic secondary controls in your average passenger car. If you were to compare, say, a Chevrolet Impala from the mid-1960s and one from the mid-1980s, the controls not directly relating to the control of the car would be pretty much the same. You’d have the two-position pull-out knob for the headlights in the lower left corner of the dash, and right next to it the three-position toggle switch for the windshield wipers. Over on the right-hand side, you’d have vents with a clock in between them, then the two slide levers to control the heater below them, then the radio below that. The radio would have a knob at one side to turn it on and adjust the volume, and one on the other side to control the tuning, and a row of buttons for preset stations underneath the bit that shows you what frequency you’re tuned to. On the left side of the steering column, the lever that controls the directional signals. On the right side, the thing you pull out to turn on the hazard flashers. The button that turns the high beams on and off would be down on the floor.

And that would pretty much be it. Oh, sure, you might have a slightly fancier model, especially in the ’80s, that might have air conditioning (three sliders on the heater control panel instead of two), a cassette player (same radio, except with a slot for a cassette and a couple of controls related to its use), maybe even cruise control (some more fiddly bits attached to the directional signal control). If you really splashed out on it you might even have a digital clock in the newer one, and possibly even a little twisty bit on the directional control to set the delay on your fancy new intermittent windshield wipers. But even if you had all the options, everything would be in pretty much the same place it’d always been in. In high school I had a 1989 Camaro; all its controls were in the same places, with the same markings, controlling the same things as the ones in our 1977 Caprice.

Contrast that with my father’s current Impala, a 2004 model, and it’s like the newer car was designed on a different planet than the older ones. The radio and heater controls are in about the same place as before, but they’re laid out entirely differently, and everything else is utterly in the wrong place. The headlight controls are on the turn signal lever, for God’s sake.

Mind you, from a foreign car I’d expect that kind of thing – foreign cars have always had their own interesting ways of doing things, it’s part of the game. I’ve driven a Saab for many years now and have gotten accustomed to its quirks, though my father is still baffled that a car with the ignition switch on the floor even works. (“What keeps it from just getting all full of dirt?” I don’t know. Swedish engineering.) He recently bought a Honda Pilot and has been semi-cheerfully confused by its controls ever since. Last weekend he remarked that one of them – the headlight control, I think – works exactly backward from the way it works in his other car.

These vehicles all pale in comparison, though, to one my mother briefly had a couple years ago. And talk about your jumps in complexity! See, until recently, Mom had a ’94 Land Rover Discovery. This was a deeply basic vehicle. The only control it had that was at all complicated was the lever for activating and deactivating differential lock. We never did figure out how to work that (and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it didn’t actually work). At one point, it had to go into the shop for some repairs, and the dealership provided her with a loaner. It was the same model – a Discovery – but about ten years newer.

The thing was like some kind of spacecraft. Everything on the dash was different, and in most cases not immediately recognizable. The whole interior was black plastic, carbon fiber, and chrome, a far cry from the homey beige and brown tones of Mom’s old Rover, and the controls were all marked with puzzling little icons. These were probably intended to be some kind of pan-lingual code, as obvious to, say, Malaysians as they were to English people. If that’s the case, I can only assume that they don’t make any sense to Malaysians either, because we found them entirely baffling. I recall guessing that one button jammed television reception in the vehicle’s immediate vicinity, while another appeared to involve bacon.

The best of the lot, though, was a chrome knob on the center console, about where the mysterious diff lock lever was in the older Rover. If that lever was mysterious, the knob in the Space Rover (as I mentally dubbed the newer one) was like some unfathomable artifact of an ancient and clever civilization. It had four icons spaced evenly around it, none of them immediately decipherable (I eventually did figure out that one of them depicted a tiny cartoon Rover with one of its wheels up on a large rock), and also four buttons arranged in a little rectangle around it.

We were sitting in the drive-thru lane at the local McDonald’s, waiting our turn, when I started playing with the Mystery Knob. To my delight and Mom’s dismay, it turned out to be connected to what I can only describe as the first factory-standard vato suspension system I’d ever seen. It became clear that the Mystery Knob adjusted the Rover’s suspension for various pre-programmed conditions. That made the one whose icon I’d figured out suddenly make sense; apparently it set the Rover up for the task of climbing over large rocks.

I had fun with this for a bit, making the Rover lift and settle and generally do a little dance as I switched from one preset to another. As I did, the onboard computer would put up a brief note explaining what each mode was for on the marquee-like display panel the Rover sported where you would expect to find the odometer on a dash designed on Earth. Once she noticed it was doing so, Mom switched from demanding to know what the hell I was doing to calling out the different modes in a tone of rising alarm.

“Snow! Rock crawl! Mud ruts! Rock crawl! Mud ruts! Mud ruts!”

Even better, a little more experimentation showed that the four chrome buttons each controlled the position of an individual wheel. This made it possible to, for instance, jack the back wheels up as high as they would go and drop the front wheels to their lowest extreme, giving the Rover a rakish Speed Buggy stance. Or position the left front and right rear wheels in the middle, the left rear at full height, and the right front at minimum, which would make the vehicle adopt a sort of R. Crumb posture. I’m sure the other people in line at the drive-thru were entirely baffled by the evolutions the Rover was going through. I know the woman working the drive-thru window was, since by the time we got to the window I had all four corners jacked up as high as possible, so that Mom’s window was entirely above the drive-thru. No problem – just let the left side down a bit!

The onboard computer didn’t like this much either. Whenever there was a left-right imbalance, for instance, it would huffily inform us that VEHICLE WILL BE UNSTABLE ON DRY PAVEMENT. Still, I was impressed that it would let me set such utterly unsound configurations in the first place. I guess the designer of the suspension control system followed the old UNIX principle – “It doesn’t stop you from doing stupid things because that would stop you from doing clever things.” (A refreshing change from the usual idiot-proofing car designers are so into these days.)

Mom didn’t trust the Space Rover much after that – though I eventually worked out how to put it back into a normal, neutral stance, she spent the rest of the loan period in fear that she would accidentally bump the Mystery Knob into Mud Ruts mode and be unable to get it switched back. God only knows what she’d make of one of those fancy-pants new Mercedes models with the larger version of the Mystery Knob that controls every computerized function imaginable.

For his part, my father is deeply suspicious of all the gadgets packed into his new Pilot. Understand, this is a man who, when I was a kid, wouldn’t buy a car that had power windows or air conditioning because “that’s just another thing to frig up.” To this day, though he’s become too accustomed to AC to do without it, he insists that he would buy cars with hand-cranked windows if they were still available, just to avoid the inconvenience when the electric ones inevitably break down. (Note: This has never happened on any car so equipped that he has owned, which is pretty much all of them in the last 15 years or so.) He’s starting to come around, though. He eschewed the version of the Pilot equipped with a satellite navigation system because “we’ll never use that,” then became so enamored of the portable one I brought along to help us on a trip to Massachusetts General Hospital a few months ago that he’s since bought his own.

I’m so proud. At this rate, I’ll have him just about ready to get an ATM card by the time he goes to the nursing home.

I don’t know as I’ll ever convince my mother of the usefulness of Mud Ruts mode, though.

(It should also be noted that when I wrote this, Compaq was not merely a brand of Hewlett-Packard, but was in fact a vast manufacturing concern in its own right which had recently finished dismembering and devouring Digital Equipment Corporation.)

Long ago I worked as a hardware tech support rep for Leading Edge Products, a company which made bad PC clones, then supported them shoddily. (“Oh, like Compaq!” you’re thinking. Well, yes, except without the success.) We had two warranty plans available with our machines:

• A three-year “carry-in” plan, where you schlepped your defective PC to the nearest Leading Edge Authorized Service Center (most often someplace called ‘DataCom ElectroEnterprises’ that turned out to be some college kid’s garage) and they fixed it for you (this generally involved replacing failed defective parts with new defective parts that had not yet failed). Then they would call you up and you would go back and get it, usually without bothering to check at the store to see if it actually worked, and then when you got home and it didn’t you would call us, as though we had personally screwed you, rather than taking it back to the people who’d actually worked on it; and
• A one-year “on-site” plan, where you called up our support number, answered the various obvious questions that the front-line support techs would put to you, and, if by some miracle you -had- plugged the machine in and it -wasn’t- just the World’s Cheapest Mouse going trackball-up on you, you’d be handed off to one of our harried and overworked Service Advisors. There, depending on which of the two Advisors you got, you would be badgered mercilessly like a murder trial witness of questionable reliability or spoken to in a soft and soothing manner while the exact nature of your system’s defect was divined. Then the Service Advisor would hand off the call to our wonderfully alert and competent on-site service vendor, General Electric, who would eventually dispatch a surly and uncaring dolt in a truck to come out and cram mismatched new parts into your machine, then call our support line and hassle the front-liners about why their bin pickers had given them the wrong parts.

OK? Enough background information? Still with me?

Well. One lovely Wednesday, because the manager had a special and enduring love for me, I was assigned the task of returning calls left on the manager’s voice mail box. As you might guess, people leaving voice mail for the manager are not generally calling to give compliments. As a matter of routine, I looked through the service database for the callbacks where the caller had left a case number to see what information I could glean. One call looked especially unpromising – it was an on-site service call which had been dispatched something like a week before and was still showing “unresolved” by our friends at GE. I figured I’d get the hard part out of the way first and called that one back.

The phone was answered by a woman, though the name on the ticket was a man’s. OK, no problem – it’s a machine owned by a company, probably this is the receptionist or something.

Here’s the way our conversation started:

ME: Hi, my name is Ben Hutchins, I’m calling from Leading Edge Products in regard to the outstanding service call your office has out on one of your computer systems. Can I speak to Mr. Whatever please?

HER (sounding shaken and sad): Oh… uh… I’m sorry, but Mr. Whatever… passed away suddenly last week.

ME: … Oh. Well, uh… I’m sorry to hear that. Is there, uh, somebody else there in the office who will be handling this issue now, that I could speak to?

She explained to me that no, she didn’t think there was, because it was probable that the machine was simply going to be discarded, and the company’s management was probably trying to decide whether it would be worth suing us.

You see, Mr. Whatever was a VP of this company, the girl I was talking to had been his secretary, and the machine in question was Mr. Whatever’s desktop workstation. It had been malfunctioning for some time, and GE had failed to dispatch on it because of some more-than-usual confusion about what parts were needed, or something like that – so the computer’s problems got worse and worse over time, and calls to LE accomplished little, since the problem had already been dispatched to GE and they would just blow the Service Advisors off whenever they called to ask why this hadn’t been handled.

The real highlight of the call, though, came when Mr. Whatever’s secretary related the circumstances of her boss’s death. The last time anyone saw him alive was the previous Friday afternoon when, on her way out, she had looked in to see how Mr. Whatever was getting on with his reluctant computer.

He had been sitting at his desk glaring at the machine with hatred, muttering, “It’s this thing or me. It’s this thing or me.”

He was found at his desk, slumped over the keyboard, on Monday morning. Dead of an apparent heart attack.

“He really hated that thing,” she told me tearfully. “I don’t think he’d want us to have it fixed now.”

What else could I do? I thanked her very kindly, closed the ticket, and told the manager I was going the hell home for the day.

And that’s how Leading Edge’s tech support killed a man.

As it happens, the shaver itself is cordless – the adapter is just plugged in to charge it, not used when actually shaving – so it spends most of its time not connected. Its usual spot is up on one of the shelves in the bathroom, where one tends to see it whenever one uses the facilities. So over the next few days, I kept noticing the warning tag, and eventually it penetrated my conscious mind that there was something odd about it.

Finally I took a closer look today and realized that it’s not one of the usual warnings. It’s a little pictogram showing the transformer on the plug end, a pair of scissors positioned just below it on the wire itself, and a red X over the junction of scissors and wire. The warning here seems to be at once very specific and, to my mind, more than a little bizarre: Do not take a pair of scissors and cut the transformer off this power cord.

I find this simultaneously amusing and appalling. Amusing because we’ve finally reached the stage that my friend Andrew predicted years ago, appalled because, well, we’ve finally reached the stage that my friend Andrew predicted years ago.

A long time ago, I worked for a PC manufacturer, Leading Edge Products, as did my friends Andrew and Derek (and a good many others besides, but that’s not important right now). One day we were looking over the documentation for one of Leading Edge’s laptop computers and came across the page explaining the relative severity levels of the several different types of interjectory bullets one was likely to find in the course of reading the manual. I’m paraphrasing from memory, because it’s been a long time and I don’t have any of those docs any more, but they ranged from something like Note!, which indicated something the user might find helpful but that wasn’t of particular importance, through Caution! and Warning! to STOP!, which, the book gravely explained, was a warning that, if unheeded, could lead to injury or death!

There being a relatively limited number of ways in which even a careless user could kill himself with a laptop computer, Andrew speculated jokingly that somewhere in the book was the warning, “STOP! Do not eat your laptop!”

Well, we’re there. Manufacturers now feel it necessary to include little iconic warnings advising us not to do things that:

A) Any idiot can plainly see are dangerous (cutting an electric wire with a pair of scissors); and

B) Would wreck the device if performed, even if no danger to the user was present (severing the transformer, even on a power cord not presently plugged into the wall).

So I thought for a while: Why would Philips Norelco have felt the very specific need to warn us not to do this particular thing? And the only conclusion I could come to was that someone has done it, then brought the fact that it tends to cause problems to the company’s attention, probably by way of a lawsuit.

I find this both depressing and more than a little baffling. I mean, what person rational enough to go out and buy an electric shaver, and old enough to have any use for same, would even think of cutting the transformer off the charging cord with a pair of scissors? Who looks at any electrically powered device and thinks, You know, if I had a pair of Fiskars, I could just lop that sucker right off of there? I suppose you could argue that a child might do it, but there again – any child capable of operating scissors should already know both A and B, and any child incapable of grasping those two points should certainly not be roaming around the bathroom with scissors.

I’m all for basic safety precautions with our household electric devices, but come on, people.

For years now, we’ve been told – oddly, almost always by computer people, not TV people – that the personal computer and the television set will become one any day now. The supposedly imminent coalescence of TV and computers, we’re told, will mean new heights in convenience, instant access to… well, pretty much everything, all without ever getting up from our Barcaloungers. Mind you, they’ve been saying that and then not doing it for so long now that it’s become something of a joke, this era’s equivalent of the old Popular Science “by the year 2000, cars will fly” thing. (Remember how we were all going to have WebTVs within five years?) Still, I have to admit that, with things like the ability to push content to a TiVo by doing something on the Internet, downloading stuff to your Xbox 360, and whatnot working now, we are getting closer… and that concerns me on a couple of levels.

The first is simple, bordering on prosaic, and I don’t really have the time or the inclination to embark on a deep probing of the “is there such a thing as too much convenience?” question right now. The other is… more complex, and has its roots in a speech delivered by a journalist to a gathering of his peers 50 years ago.

In 1958, the great news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow gave a speech at a gathering of the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago. (You may have seen Edward Strathairn deliver part of this address in the movie Good Night, and Good Luck. If you haven’t, you probably ought to someday, but I digress.) In that speech he sounded an alarm of sorts, outlining for his listeners the fears he felt for the future of television as a medium.

Murrow was such a colossal influence on broadcast journalism that I am by long custom obliged to refer to him as A Towering Figure. He made his name reporting from England during the Battle of Britain, bringing the terror of the London Blitz home to American listeners – many of whom, in those isolationist days before Pearl Harbor, still agitating for the US to stay out of World War II and leave the British to whatever fate awaited them. After the war he was one of CBS’s television pioneers. In 1953, on his program See It Now, he took on Senator Joseph McCarthy – a bold move even for a man as influential as Murrow, and one that, if it didn’t burn many of his bridges, at least left them ready for the flame.

By 1958 his disenchantment with the corporate pressures and market forces acting on television had reached the point where he felt it necessary to deliver a public warning, and he did so before the RTNDA. His remarks were a scathing indictment of those who made television, those who paid for it, and those who watched it, all of whom he viewed as conspirators in an effort to take what could have been a powerful tool for public enlightenment and reduce it to a meaningless toy.

“I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time,” he said. “Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live.”

Murrow’s concerns, coming as they do from an era when there were only three television networks in the United States and only a mere handful worldwide, may seem quaint – but look at what he’s saying. Forget for a moment that he’s speaking from the other end of a tunnel that leads back 50 years in time and observe the message itself. “Television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live.” Does anything about that seem at all familiar?

“Surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive,” Murrow said. “I mean the word survive literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show.”

Further on he noted, “I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation. … The sponsor of an hour’s television program is not buying merely the six minutes devoted to commercial message. He is determining, within broad limits, the sum total of the impact of the entire hour. If he always, invariably, reaches for the largest possible audience, then this process of insulation, of escape from reality, will continue to be massively financed, and its apologist will continue to make winsome speeches about giving the public what it wants, or ‘letting the public decide.’”

Far from being merely an alarmist diatribe against what he saw even then as the corporate control of television (and one wonders what he would make of today’s violently immersive TV adscape), Murrow’s speech contained an optimistic message as well. He deplored the strange and unsavory dance between sponsor, network, and news department, yes, but he also saw a way out, one which depended on two beliefs that the post-modern, pre-cyberpunk Internet cynic will probably find hopelessly naïve:

1. A belief in the basic decency of men, even men of business. Murrow believed that, if given the chance and properly persuaded that it would do them no harm, sponsors and network executives could reach some sort of understanding, that the businessmen controlling the money and power that really made the mass media work would choose to act for the public good.

   “I refuse to believe that the presidents and chairmen of the boards of these big corporations want their corporate image to consist exclusively of a solemn voice in an echo chamber, or a pretty girl opening the door of a refrigerator, or a horse that talks. They want something better, and on occasion some of them have demonstrated it,” he said.

2. A belief in the essential righteousness of the General Public. Murrow espoused the view, even in his darkest speeches, that the man on the street would get things right, if only he had enough information to make an informed decision.

   “I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry’s program planners believe,” he said. “I have reason to know… that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is – an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.”

But, he argued, none of that was taking place. Because of the corporate structures of networks and sponsors – because of the layers of bureaucracy between the people in charge of sponsoring companies and the people in charge of the actual content appearing on networks, and the fact that most of those layers were inhabited only by salespeople, ad agents, and PR flacks – the open and honest dialogue that was needed wasn’t taking place. Murrow saw it as a question of indolence and timidity rather than malfeasance; today we would probably say that the whole structure was and is rotten and that there is a deliberate effort being made on many levels of the power structure to blunt the edge of what could be a powerful communications tool. Or, well, I would, anyway.

“To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention,” said Murrow. “But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.”

In the modern day, a case could be made – and a strong one too, I think – that the struggle has been lost, at least in television’s case. The line between news and entertainment, already blurry in Murrow’s day, has become almost completely indistinguishable. TV’s power to entertain, amuse, and insulate has reached heights that would have been unimaginable in Murrow’s day, but the only efforts to do anything like what he suggested – “a sustained study of the state of the nation” – are grim, bobbing-head parodies of the whole idea, moronic one-sided puppet-fistings from one side of the political spectrum or the other. There is no fairness. There is no balance. Viewers may be, as Murrow believed they were in 1958, “prepared to listen to both sides with reason and restraint,” but we have no way of knowing, because no one is presenting both sides with reason and restraint (though, one must admit, we’re certainly getting more than “fleeting… reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger”).

Is that it, then? Game over? Do we pack up our tents and resign ourselves to an eternity in the wilderness, surrounded by looming ads and leering political puppets who don’t even try to disguise themselves any more?

Well, maybe it is too late for TV. But there’s a new medium in town, one that has the potential to be as revolutionary as television was in its day – and although it might not seem that way at first glance, I don’t think the Internet’s version of that same battle is yet lost. To be sure, there’s a lot of extremism and stupidity out here, and pockets of brainless commercialism so crass and repellent that they make TV infomercials seem like cerebral, publicly responsible programming… but the potential band is a hell of a lot wider than even modern cable TV’s, and – most promising of all – it goes both ways. Television, for all its power, is a one-way medium. It has weight to throw around, but the consequences of throwing that weight around are all indirect, measured by methods that insulate the makers from the results. If something on TV has a negative effect, by the time the consequences of that effect are felt, they’re so far removed from the source that no one can reasonably point to a direct connection. The Internet can create dialogue – instantly, everywhere, with easily visible links of cause and effect.

Moreover, it’s hard to get on TV; getting on the Internet is easy. Becoming well-known in either place takes work, it’s true, but the playing field is much more level for the Internet writer or filmmaker or musician with something to say than it is for someone who wants to break into one of the “conventional” media. Sure, that means there’s a lot of crap is out there – Sturgeon’s Law applies on the Internet as anywhere else, maybe even more so – but if you believe, as Murrow did, that the public can find the right racing line if it’s only given access to the whole racetrack, well, here we are on the biggest track in human history.

The frightening part, and the part about which I have the greatest reservations, is that, as predicted, television and the Internet are slowly growing together. It isn’t happening as fast as the people who first tried to sell the concept predicted, but it is happening – and there’s every chance that, as the process goes on, the same forces that rendered television such a wasteland may follow exactly the same vectors, leaving us eventually with a medium that neither TV’s pioneers nor the Internet’s would recognize, except for the astronomical signal-to-noise ratio and the unmistakable stench of wasted potential.

Some observers, even more cynical than I, might say that’s already happened, but I disagree. I don’t think all is lost just yet. The race may be a mess to look at now, but I think it’s still too early to say that it can only end in chaos. There are more of us out here to resist the worst of the forces that poisoned television. By the time it’s all said and done, we might just win this one – but only if we stay in the race.

If not? If we just give up, shrug our shoulders and say “Well, the public is a stupid animal, human nature tends toward the lowest common denominator – welcome to the Third World”?

Then Murrow’s most famous and oft-quoted prediction comes true, not just for TV, not just for the Internet but for what the combination of the two will eventually become – arguably humanity’s greatest technological achievement:

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”