Cellphones have become the talk of the town in Washington, D.C. with suspicion of talking to and listening to whom.
Twitter tattling took over the 2016 election campaign becoming a political pipe wrench in the perversely shaped cyber P-trap universe.
The issues before the citizens of this country concerning cellphones, wiretapping, grainy reruns of “Truth or Consequences” as White House press conferences is very wrinkled-brow weighty and grammatically insecure.
However, following an extended moment of lightness I have potentially solved one vexing problem — opposable thumbs and sending cellphone messages.
We in the media are quick to condemn the president (and others like me) for sending weird Twitter-tattle messages. Not our fault.
This morning sitting at my desk I spilled hot coffee on my fancy new $7 shirt. The pain of my potential financial loss caused a epiphany in the form of a Bugs Bunny lightbulb. A series of apparently disconnected moments in Elmer Fudd (E=MBB2) time suddenly linked together. Daffy and Bugs were dancing in the moonlight.
The epiphany began a while earlier at my Kent office. There are three young women, true goddesses of reporting, at the office (they shall remain anonymous along with their manly cohort from Enumclaw — we will refer to them as Sarah Brenden, Ana Karen Perez Guzman, Leah Abraham and Raymond Scott Still). The goddesses were watching me type a message on my phone to my daughter, Katy (who isn’t going to answer because I don’t know the stupid code of made-up words from an alternate universe). I noticed the sidebar pointing and giggling from the goddesses, likely with instant message cheering from their cohort, at the knuckle dragger across the room. Taking five minutes to compose, a word, seemed appropriate behavior to me — apparently not.
I have watched the goddesses and my daughter do this thumb thing that no biped should be able to do. At least the biped boys I know, and I know at least two. Believe me I have tried their thumb-crobatics. My hand cramped to my shoulder then traveled to my neck. I limped around the office for a week and a half (got no sympathy — zero).
This is where the spilled hot coffee on my fancy new shirt comes into the stick-figure story. The economic pain brought back a repressed memory from junior high days. Remember when the teachers would divide us up into clumps of girls and boys and made us go to those clandestine classes? No biped boy I know remembers anything from those classes and we were always very attentive and well behaved. I do have one foggy memory of something being mumbled about some nefarious magazine and our eyelashes falling out.
I suddenly realized the girls were given an encyclical that has been kept from the biped boys for all these centuries. In one of those hugger-mugger school symposiums it was revealed the girls got the cool, new and improved opposable thumbs and the biped boys got an aftermarket model. (Maybe God was trying out the market economy.)
I admit the younger biped males, which is everyone in my world, have passable opposable thumbs, but it is still a cut-rate model.
This moment of clarity leads us back to beginning. The Gordian knot of goofy Twitter tattles, cellphone messages that appear nuts and all the other apparent distortions of veracity can simply be blamed on the biped-boys’ aftermarket model of opposable thumbs.
The real message is: (Are you listening?) It’s not our fault.
Reach Dennis Box, Covington Reporter regional editor, at dbox@maplevalleyreporter.com or 425-432-1209, ext. 5050.
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