My plan with this week’s column was to write about something brainy, like free speech. You know, that First Amendment thing politicians and community cranberries throw around like a dayglow Frisbee?
Once I started writing, my brain began to hurt and images of buttermilk popsicles began dancing in my head. Here is the rub. No one really likes free speech, unless it’s their unfiltered gossip. That is why we have a First Amendment (that apparently no one reads if they can possibly resist).
Free speech means someone has the right to annoy, irritate and infuriate someone else with political speech … whatever that is … I think … kinda.
My daughter, Katy, exercises her free speech on me all the time. I never knew I was such a dumbwad until she learned to free speech me when she was 2. Now I get free speeched all the time. My best attempts at suppression just seem to get me in deeper trouble. That may be the problem with daughters going to college and getting all smarty.
A week ago or so, Katy made me buy a new smarty-pants phone, which she picked out.
Yesterday, while I was writing this column, I had to take a picture with my new smarty-pants phone and send it to someone. I hit every button thing I could find and could not figure out where the dippy device hid the photo.
I finally caved out of desperation and called Katy to find out where my phone from the evil region put the photo.
It was cleverly hidden under photos. What sort of logic is that?
I got a lot of free speech from Katy for that one.
After being thoroughly annoyed by my phone, I decided to do something I was good at – cooking. I made some popcorn.
While it was popping on the stove, I became distracted with my hellish device looking at some recipe apps, and burned my popcorn. Fortunately, I have discovered a cure for burnt popcorn. Mix it with buttermilk and hot sauce, and I didn’t find an app for that one.
Once I cleared the smoke from the kitchen, I went back to searching for apps. Every app I found either tried to tell me where I was, which I thought I knew, or where I was going, which I don’t want to know.
I just started downloading everything I could find.
I don’t know what all these stupid apps I downloaded are really supposed to do, beside force me to call Katy and get yelled at when I can’t figure out whatever I am supposed to be doing … I think.
A couple of years ago I wrote a column about goofy app talk and a young woman on a bus sent me a message from her fancy-smanchy phone with every app on Earth yelling at me, exercising her darn free speech, telling me what a dolt I am.
What I need is an app to tell me what apps are really for, and how to suppress free speech of daughters, and young women on buses yelling at me when they are right.
That darn free speech.
Dennis Box is editor of the Covington/Maple Valley/Black Diamond Reporter and Enumclaw/Boney Lake Courier-Herald. Reach him at dbox@maplevalleyreporter.com or 425-432-1209, ext. 5050.
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