In the Parlance of Our Times

The New York Times has an article today, Real-Time Traffic Reports? Get Real, about services that attempt to deliver real-time traffic reports to your car navigation system, cell phone, or satellite radio. It would be cool if it worked, but according to the article there are lots of obstacles in the way of a system that can really keep you out of traffic.

I'll be watching this technology with detached interest, as I have no need for it. My commute takes five minutes and is not dependent on traffic. Or a car, even.

Michael likes to accuse me of wanting to buy any new technology that comes down the road. I'll have to keep this one in mind next time he challenges me to name a technology item I don't want.

Shopping. 'Nuff said.

What I remember most about being a new parent - and what I was totally unprepared for - was the unsolicited advice that came at us from every direction. Every problem we had was our fault and if we only did what THEY did in a similiar situation we wouldn't be in this mess.

Parents today have all the same problems we had, but now they're also being subjected to advice about high-tech toys. A recent Boston Globe article (featuring advice from Matt Damon's mom, no less) warns of the dangers of raising your children with high-tech toys. High-tech is an all-encompassing term in this article and seems to apply to nearly any toy with a battery. (Can you say "EZ Bake Oven"?) Teachers are getting in on the act, too, with an 8-page Toy Action Guide including two pages of examples of toys to avoid.

To make matters way, way worse there's even a new term to describe a condition your child might end up with if he/she plays with high-tech toys too much: compassion deficit disorder. Scary sounding, isn't it? And remember, it will be ALL YOUR FAULT.

Now don't get me wrong. I think a lot of the toys listed in the Toys to Avoid list are junk, too. My own kids wouldn't have had much use for many of them. Sure, they may have played with them for a week or a month even, but then they'd end up at the bottom of the toy pile. It was the toys that they could mold to the play at hand - the Legos and the Playmobil, the dolls and stuffed animals, the trucks, the art supplies, the dress-up clothes - that got used for years and years. Some are still in our basement, and I've been warned they are not to thrown or given away. Ever.

But let's get real, shall we? Nobody's kid is going to turn out to be an axe murderer because they were given a Baby Einstein video for a Christmas present. If the toys we give our kids to play with could so easily determine the type of adult they grew up to be, don't you think we'd have already figured out which toys to give them to make them all happy, productive members of society?

So let's all take a deep breath and relax. Get your kids the gifts you know they will enjoy. And take notes, so that in twenty years you'll be able to tell the next generation of parents what they're doing wrong.

As I write, my Christmas puddings are at the beginning of their 6 hour steam on the stovetop. I've been thinking there must be a way to use modern technology to speed up the cooking of the puddings. Surely the microwave could help us out here.

Truth be told, I could - and often have - quite happily spent Christmas without any pudding at all. But once in a while I like to make one. Doing so gets me thinking and remembering about the years I spent in Ireland and the friends and family I still have there. In particular, it makes me feel connected to my mother-in-law, whose Christmas pudding recipe I'm using and who taught me what little I know about Irish cooking. As I rub the butter into the breadcrumbs I think of all the times I sat at her kitchen table watching her rubbing shortening into dry ingredients. As I pour in the brandy I wonder just how much a "half glass of brandy" meant to her. With distance and her Alzheimer's between us now, it's nice to feel this connnection to the past.

So I think I'll put thoughts of the microwave aside. Steaming the pudding gives me 6 more hours with her on my mind...how much of a boil would she keep going, how much water would she keep in the pot?

Sometimes it's just nice to do things the old way. Of course, I did use the food processor to make the breadcrumbs, grind the almonds, chop the dates and peel, grate the apple and carrot. No need to go overboard here.

For the past several weeks, Michael and I have been watching a TV show over the internet. It isn't something we'd normally do, but a fall show we'd been watching, Kidnapped, was dropped from NBC's schedule, and they decided to show the last 8 episodes on the internet only. We had to keep watching to see if poor Leo would be rescued.

Michael and I gathering around the laptop to watch an hour long TV show was not an appealing prospect, so we've been connecting the computer to the TV set in order to watch on a bigger screen. It's gone fairly well, all in all, but has not been quite the quality of a broadcast show. There have been occasional streaming hiccups. And then there's the set up time - changing energy and screen saver options, hiding the dock, hiding toolbars on the browser, making the connections.

In the end, it's been worth it to see out the show, but unlike the author of the Wired article, Goodbye TV, Hello Broadband, we won't be giving up the cable any time soon.