Is winter over?

I took a chance yesterday, 1 May, and took the snow-blower off the tractor.

Five hundred miles to the west, in a band that stretches from Arkansas up through the Dakotas and Minnesota and into Canada, there's a snow-storm heading in this general direction.

Nevertheless, it was a beautiful summer day here. We took the opportunity to spend a couple of hours on a restaurant patio in town. Beer and wings on a patio in the bright afternoon sunshine, a patio that was under snow and windswept by blizzard conditions barely two weeks ago.

And we were far from being the only folks in the mood to celebrate the end of winter. The patio was packed.

But here's the thing that struck me. Most of the people on the patio were more engrossed by their smart-phones than by the company at their table. Couples are celebrating the first rays of spring sun by sitting on a patio, each with phone in hand, constantly checking whatever important stuff it is that totally unimportant people have to check on their phones. Constantly.

I know they are unimportant people because they are sitting on the same patio as me. I don't hang with important people.

Entire families were on that patio, every family member deeply into their 2X2 inch screen, with an occasional acknowledgement of their table-mates, but for the most part far more interested in what those screens were showing them.

There was even a guy with one of those magical phones strapped to his ear. You have to have a lot of faith in the purveyors of technology to walk around all day with a cell-phone strapped to the side of your brain. Yes, I know that most of the phone-company research conclusively concludes that there is no conclusive link between radio waves and brain cancer, but still....

If they can't be counted on to get your monthly bill straight, how can you count on their scientific research?

But no matter.

Spring has sprung.

At least for today.

mma d mal

Oh, sorry, didn't notice you there. I was just updating my facebook status.

I am moved to wonderment at how a periferally useful but far from essential piece of technology has in less than a generation made itself an indespensible accessory. The cellphone marketeers have pulled off one of the greatest flim flam jobs of all time.

You see parents with their wee ones waiting at the end of the lane for the schoolbus, checking their text messages on their phones. What would they have been doing in the pre-cell era? Interacting with their spawn maybe?

By the time the spawn are in the second or third grade they will in most cases be checking their own text messages on their own phones as they await the bus.

People text while pushing their baby strollers through the park. The parental gathering spots around the playground are filled with adults glued to their tiny screens. Today I saw a guy texting while skateboarding.

And you can't beat the mall for text traffic. Everybody in the mall is rushing from store to store, thumbs a-flying while they relay the good news of their latest purchase to their twitter followers or their bff's or their mom.

The cell/text addiction is particularly ubiquitous among the teen crowd. This is the market that is in that tenuous transition from having a parentally subsidized phone to making their own way in the texting world. You see them throughout the mall, in bus shelters all over town on their way to their minimum wage jobs at the mall, and often enough busy texting while you are waiting for them to serve you at the shops they work at in the mall.

The cell phone manufacturers and marketers have by and large convinced society that this addiction is a good thing. This is the most socially engaged generation in the history of humanity they tell us.

Bullshit!

This is the most socially retarded generation in the history of humanity. They are totally consumed by the exercise of swapping innanities back and forth on electronic devices while life passes them by.

But it's not entirely their fault. Even though working people have become more productive every year at least since the dawn of the industrial revolution, our relative standard of living has been in decline for the last half century.

These teens simply can't afford lives anymore.

But they can afford a cell phone with an unlimited texting plan.