Notes from Norman

A CHECKERS BRAIN IN A PLAY STATION WORLD

Sometimes I think I just don’t fit into the contemporary world. This was the week that the long awaited Play Station 3 went on sale. From what I hear, it’s the biggest thing that’s happened since Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. It probably rivals the invention of the wheel in technological achievement. Our local newspaper reported that people stood in line for 48 hours in chilly weather to be among the first people to buy Play Station 3 when it went on sale at Target. It takes about $600 to own one of these things. That’s no small outlay of capital. Most of the people who got there first, say they’re going to sell them on e-bay, presumably for more money. Besides that you’ve got to have HDTV to make the thing work. You’ve got to spend a couple of thousand dollars for a television set, another $600 for the Play Station Platform, and no telling how much money for the games themselves. That’s a lot of pocket change to put out just because you’re looking for something to do in your spare time. In some parts of the country, people have actually been robbed and killed while waiting in line.

What does that have to do with my age? Just this. I don’t understand it. Furthermore, there’s no way I’m going to understand it. I don’t have the slightest notion about how to use a Play Station. I keep remembering a world in which my cousins and I owned one checkerboard. When we lost some of the checkers, we asked my aunt for some buttons to use in their place. In a world without television receivers, computers, DVD’s, Play Station, MP3’s and ipods, our entertainment options were limited. My grandmother had a windup Victrola, but we had to go to her house to play it, and we could only play it when she was able to save up a few pennies from her butter and egg money, so she could afford phonograph needles. We amused ourselves by playing checkers with buttons. Sometimes we might visit a kid who had the real state of the art game – Chinese checkers. I quit playing checkers because I never could see the jumps ahead of time, and my cousin, Noma could beat the socks off me.

Today you can probably pick up a good checkerboard at Goodwill for two or three dollars, and I might do that except for the fact that I still can’t see the jumps ahead of time. Either the mechanism that enables one’s brain to do that is defective, or I’ve worn it out by concentrating on weightier matters like determining the square root of 12. I can’t do that either. I definitely won’t take on Noma in checkers, but if she would challenge me to a game of Trivial Pursuit, I’d be a formidable opponent. Yeah, I’m too old to live in a Play Station world, but I’ll make a prediction. I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, nevertheless I feel confident in asserting the premise that twenty years from now you’ll be able to pick up Play Station 3 at Goodwill for nearly nothing.

posted by Norman @ 6:22 PM