"Man Ur So Obsolete"

Remember the Walkman portable cassette player?

I do. You clicked it on your belt and put on these foam earphones and blasted "Brass Monkey" with a faint sizzle in the background.

I remember in 7th grade riding the school bus and Leroy Teague (who I thought was my friend because he served on the safety patrol as one of my deputies) asking me if he could borrow it.

Right when his stop came up, he handed me back an identical one -- except it was all beat up. Probably from tripping over his Barbie playhouse when he got out of bed every night he wet his sheets. I just like to think that.

So today Sony announced that it will no longer sell the Walkman in Japan (where everything is always all the rage).

Surprising to me they still make them -- and apparently they're going to still sell them to some countries in Asia and the Middle East (not surprising).

I can't say I'm feeling a nostalgic melancholy. It's just not coming naturally.

But it does make me think of what I think I'm seeing is the midst of a potentially embarrassing moment in technoligical pop culture history -- one perhaps that will be similar to looking back at that awkwardly bulky Walkman with the ear phones framing the mullet.

It's about texting and what we all thought would become the new language upheaval that would shape the future and give the old grammar nazis fits until they finally came around.

I'm talking about the shorthand -- like "ur" for "your" etc.

(By the way, at this time there is no more obvious way to date a movie than by looking at the cell phone being used in it. It was so high-tech in the "The Matrix" yet so monstrous, then they steadily got smaller, losing the attennae. But even as recently as in 2006 in "The Departed" the novel idea of gangster texting was done on the key pad phone, making the absence of a smart phone so less-impressive. In fact, even the idea of a smart phone being considered a phone will seem ridiculous soon enough. Or I could be wrong ...).

I resisted the shorthand at first. It felt childish.

But after wasting so much time finishing off the "you're" -- even spelling it with the apostrophe when it applied to "you are" and not possession of something -- I finally relented.

I figured that I was joining the mainstream, reluctantly staying current while shaking my head at the whole development.

But then something happened last spring.

I got a Droid.

With the touch-screen keyboard I soon realized that there was no reason not to type "you're" -- because I could type "yorue" and hit the space key and it would still spell it right.

Thanks to word completion, I don't have to be a college-educated person whose liberal arts education is moot. It's now more difficult to type "b/c" than it is to write "because."

I could be wrong, but it seems like that little period of texting will seem so obsolete.

It'll look like some big, awkward portable cassette player.

And Japan will begin typing full words again in 2030.

"Yes ...?"

I'm getting at this age where I don't know when I'm supposed to call someone "sir."

I go with the obvious -- you know, the old guy with the cane (and definitely not the police officer just because he's wearing a badge).

I'm not sure about the 45-year-old guy whose hair (whatever's left of it) is gray. He seems old to me, at least old enough to call him "sir." But then again, I'm only nine years younger than him.

And there's these times when I see a picture taken of me that I didn't know was taken. And I think to myself, "Wow, that looks like a guy who's getting old."

But it's me.

I've never been good about "Yes, sir." I've always done better with "Yes, ma'am."

The other day an old fellow -- he was definitely old -- held the door open for me. It was almost out of my mouth ... "Thanks, man."

But I thought about it and realized that it was never natural for me to respect the authority of an older man. Then I thought about I've always been a bit of a punk.

And then I thought about how it's not too late and that saying "Thank you, sir" would be a gesture that made me feel right with the world.

The thing is ... there's just not as many people as there once were in the world left for me to call "sir."

Love It

So in the alternate reality of Facebook tonight I actually -- for the first time -- acknowledged with someone else that I agreed with their sentiment that, indeed, "TGIF!!"

In fact, I "liked" it.

I liked it a lot.

For the first time in I can't remember, I actually spent my entire week trying to get to Friday.

So, yeah ... thank God.

I like it.

Play

One of the few things I can control in my life is the playlist.

I can listen to what I want, when I want and in the order that I want to hear it.

I've never been one to press the "shuffle" button.

I've always wondered what the point was.

Well all I can say is that I've put my music on shuffle.

And while I can't articulate exactly why, I like my life on that setting.

Eclipsed

As we were driving to the beach I thought about the past six years. The boys were little - more or less they still are.

Each trip we - mostly my oldest and I - go to the Broadway 16 and see the mega-huge, blowout action summer hit of the summer.

The ones with the Burger King toys.

I was thinking back on them - "Revenge Of The Sith," "Superman Returns," "Transformers," "Dark Knight," "Transformers 2."

Then I thought to this week. This part of the summer - not the beginning, not quite the end - is when whatever the summer movie was has been.

I thought back to "Iron Man 2" and how cool of a superhero movie that was. But so early too, mid-May.

"Karate Kid?" I liked it. Maybe the closest but still more a kid movie. No Burger King tie-in or 7-Eleven Slurpee cup.

So what do the boys get with their kids meals at the beach?

There it is, there the whole time in everything and everywhere.

"Eclipse!"

"Eclipse" hacky-sack." "Eclipse" miniature tote bag.

The female supermovie. Imagine that.

Eclipsing Summer Twenty Ten.