Blathr Wayne Lorentz

Today I drank coffee in the shower. Iʼm either a genius or a madman.

In other news, there is a Hot Pockets heiress. And a Hot Pockets fortune.

I wonder if thereʼs a Hot Pockets mansion. Please be called “Ham and Cheese Manor.”

Some days I pack Darcieʼs lunch for her. Today I put a whole can of Spam in her lunch bag.

Sheʼll thank me for it later.

If Apple canʼt make its programs work, what chance do I… oh, wait. Itʼs iTunes. This is probably an improvement.

My local library sometimes has little museum exhibits in it. Today I noticed some new artifacts on display, including an Atari 2600 of the sort I played just last week.

The iOS spell checker doesnʼt know the name of the eighth president of the United States.

I watch a lot of old cowboy movies. What Iʼve learned is that the most important part of being a cowboy is to put your hands over your head when you fall off of your horse so that nobody can see that youʼre a stunt man.

I will not vote for a candidate who sends me spam text messages.

That means youʼre off the list, Bernie Sanders.

Not everyone is a millionaire like you. Some of us pay for our texts.

Thanks for showing me how little you understand the finances of ordinary people and how little you respect the voters.

You know what was kinda awesome about being a kid? School supplies.

The smell of the cheap vinyl of a Trapper Keeper. The crunch of a brand new pencil being twirled in a little plastic sharpener. The anticipation of the endless possibilities inside a clean marble composition book.

Somehow, office supplies are not so magical.

When I was in J school, we were issued little pamphlets from the New York Times titled How To Read The New York Times. It was very useful, and one of those things that would be useful for people to read today since so many are burdened by information overload.

The instructions went something like this:

1. Throw away all of the sections you donʼt like.
2. Put the remaining sections in order of priority.
3. Look at the headlines on each page. If a headline doesnʼt interest you, move on.
4. If a headline interests you, read the subhead or the photo caption. If youʼre not interested or arenʼt learning anything new, move on.
5. Read the first three paragraphs of the article. Move on when you stop learning something new.

This method is still remarkably effective, especially for plowing through a fat pile of Sunday papers.

The only Times sections I toss are the Book Review and the Magazine. I like books, but I want to form my own opinion about them. And the Magazine is just hard to read. The paper is too glossy and the print too small for the stylish lighting in my abode.

Counterintuitively, I find the Sports section quite compelling. Even though I have near zero interest in sportsball, thereʼs always an article in there that is intellectually intriguing. A couple of weeks ago there was a good piece about how “home field advantage” is a thing of the past because teams are so pampered in their palatial practice facilities that even when they play in their home stadium, theyʼre playing on unfamiliar territory. Fun stuff.

If you listen to the chattering masses on the internet, you can be made to believe that the internet is everywhere, data is virtually free, and if youʼre not connected to everyone everywhere all day every day, you must be at room temperature.

As is often the case, reality and the internet are very different from one another.

The reality is that there are millions of people in America with no internet service. Not because of choice, or poverty, or lack of education; but because they are simply beyond the reach of the infrastructure.

People I know in the Silicon Valley bubble cannot fathom that there are places in America without broadband, let alone cell phone service. Yet right now, there are hundreds of thousands in Las Vegas who have no internet service. Even in New York City, there are over a million people who do not have internet access, and have no cellular service in their homes.

Itʼs especially hard for people from Europe to understand. They live in small countries where people are packed close together, so itʼs easy to provide cell phone service. They donʼt grasp how vast places like the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere are and that cell service is not universal around the entire globe.

I ran into a British couple in Monument Valley once who were complaining that their cell phone didnʼt work. They kept saying, “But we bought it in San Francisco!” as if repeating the phrase often enough would cause a cell tower and power lines to sprout from the cracked earth. They couldnʼt be made to understand that they shouldnʼt expect a phone to work in the desert a thousand miles from the Bay Area.

The photograph above is a great example of how many places in America lack basic communications infrastructure (let alone running water and electricity). Itʼs a special pay phone in the town of Shoshone, California. The same California that gave us so much of the high-tech world in which we live also cannot connect all of its towns and cities.

There is no cell service in Shoshone. There is only dialup internet service in Shoshone. There are only a couple of radio signals that reach Shoshone. So the way many people communicate with the outside world is via this payphone.

Itʼs an ordinary payphone that also has special numbers people can dial to connect to essential, and some seemingly sponsored, services for free.

• *10: Chase Bank
• *12: Prayer line
• *13: Payday loans
• *14: Job search help
• *15: Credit cards
• *16: Weather
• *17: Wells Fargo Bank
• *19: Social Security

Local calls are currently 50¢, and anywhere else on the planet is $1.00 for two minutes. Which seems pretty reasonable to me, since I remember when calling my high school friends could cost an inflation-adjusted $3.50 for two minutes, and they were only a few miles away.