Small Change
I begin today with a request. Can people please stop finding ways to slip the phrase ‘game-changer’ into every second conversation? I know it’s new and fun to say, but already it’s starting to wear out what little welcome it had. The only silver lining is that it seems to have supplanted the until-recently ubiquitous ‘deal-breaker’, and, to a lesser extent, the perhaps Wire-inspired ‘change up’.
These days, it seems, pretty much everything new is a dead-set game-changer. The special effects in Avatar, Lord Monckton’s nutbag rhetoric, the return of Hey Hey It’s Saturday, game-changers all of them, I hear. When applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, I can almost go with it, but last weekend I actually heard someone refer to the Double Dipped Cherry Ripe as a game-changer. I’m sure that, if they haven’t already done it, somewhere there’s a radio breakfast show working on a segment called ‘Relationship Game-Changers’. When the brekky crews start bandying a phrase about, that’s when you know it’s done.
My favourite Overheard Tram Conversation of late was between three young men on the number 67. Men who would have, in my day, been called ‘homeboys’. Their chosen topic was, and I’m not making this up, ‘whether bum sex gives you a gay walk’. That’s what they called it, bum sex. What made the discourse so amusing, rather than offensive, was the group’s genuine spirit of inquiry; this wasn’t a series of cheap poof jokes, but a carefully reasoned thesis.
‘I mean, maybe if you do it all the time, it throws your pelvis out of whack,’ suggested one, and, to the amazement of all, nobody laughed. Although, muffled snorts were narrowly averted when the three began to speculate as to how far someone would have to go, in order to be considered ‘fully gay’.
‘Blowing a guy…’ said one, and I could feel his next words coming a mile off. ‘That’d be a game-changer.’
But mostly, the phrase ‘game-changer’ was used during the surprisingly short-lived excitement that surrounded the launch of the iTablet. ‘Are you going to be getting an iTablet?’ I was asked by one young person, more taking the piss than genuinely inquiring. ‘They’re saying it’s a game-changer.’
‘I know they are,’ I replied, peevishly. ‘It doesn’t mean you have to.’
Whenever I hear the word ‘iTablet’, I involuntarily recall how, as a child, I would be called upon to hide a large blue pill in our cat Dougal’s dinner, in an attempt to clear up his recurrent conjunctivitis. ‘Don’t forget his eye tablet,’ Mum would say, but Dougal was always one step ahead. At meal’s end, his half of the orange plastic double bowl would be licked spotless, save for a single slimy eye tablet.
But then, sometime in the last month, people started referring to the iTablet as the ‘iPad’, the result, no doubt, of some kind of last-minute game-change. I think ‘iPad’ is even worse. It sounds like some kind of microchip-enhanced ‘smart’ sanitary napkin.
These days, every even half-arsed public figure is required to register an opinion about the latest devices (‘Chopper Read test-drives the Kindle’, ‘What’s on the Dalai Lama’s iPod?’, ‘Lady Gaga models the iMerkin’, etc), and so I dutifully Googled up an article headed ‘Apple iTablet: Will You Buy One?’. As the piece states right upfront, ‘a ten inch tablet that’s something between an iPhone and a Macbook leaves a lot of questions’. Like ‘How many fucking devices do you need?’, for one. I can understand why you might want a computer sitting on your desk, and why you might want some smaller pocket version in your handbag, but a box of chocolates that plays movies, that you have to stare down into to watch a cat playing the piano? Or is there a stand? Have I not thought this through?
Helpfully, the article lists the pros and cons. Sure enough, first among the cons is that ‘since a tablet is designed for lying flat, you have to be looking straight down to view the computer.’ Like someone staring down deep into their own soul, and thinking, ‘I wonder what apps it comes with?’
On the pro side, the iWhatever features ‘book-reading abilities’. Like many people, so do I. And I have books, which are superior in so many ways, not the least of which being you can fling them across the room in disgust at any point. Try doing that with an iTablet version of Eat Pray Love and see what happens. The virtues of printed books over those of the ‘electronic reader’ have been catalogued passionately elsewhere (John Updike’s ‘A Case for Books’ is one of the finest things he ever wrote; well worth downloading), but the usual response from the Kindle-wielding hipster is ‘Yeah, but I can store 1200 books on here.’ Then ask them when they last read even one book, and the standard answer is ‘I read a Michel Houllebecq a year and a half ago. Mostly just the dirty bits. Who has time for reading? Look at this clip I made of Hitler’s reaction to the new series of Lost.’
Of course I’m probably just being wilfully geezerish. I should ‘get with the program’ as they used to say, before the Morning Zoo did that segment ‘Get With The Program’. And I do remember the excitement, back in the seventies, when they released the first pocket calculator. Mine would sit proudly on my desk during maths, until the teacher spotted it and said, ‘If you just use the calculator, you won’t learn how to do maths yourself.’
‘But in the future, we won’t need to,’ I’d reply, smugly. ‘These are only gonna get more sophisticated. And we’ll be able to use our brains for other things.’
‘Yeah, like what?’ he’d say.
‘You’ll see,’ I’d say. ‘You’ll see.’
I trust everyone has seen that clip of the fat kid falling through the ice?
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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