Friday 5 + 5: Technology Moves Ahead (and Leaves Us Behind)

Five Sounds My Son May Never Hear, Outside of a Museum*:

1) A manual typewriter.

2) The dial of a rotary phone.

3) A phonograph needle on an LP. (Note: as long as club DJs exist, this may never be an extinct sound. But I don't own a turntable, and I own four times as many CDs as records.)

4) Change falling into a pay phone.

5) A manual cash register. (Okay, there's always some tchotchke store with an old-fashioned cash register. But, as with the phonographs, they're just not as ubiquitous as they used to be. To my great dismay.)

*Note: my undying gratitude goes out to Tom Ferrick Jr. and the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer for their small, but heartwarming online Museum of Lost Sounds. I've taken several of the sounds heard here from their website.

Five Technology Questions My Son Will Ask Me That I'm Dreading Having to Answer:

1) How does the internet work?

2) How does a cell phone work?

3) How come you can put more stuff on a DVD disc than on a regular old CD?

4) If you rip a library CD onto your computer, how is that not stealing?

5) What did baseball players look like when you were a kid? (Yes, the whole Barry Bonds thing is still getting me down.**)

**If you don't understand why the size of baseball players is a technology question, you haven't been reading the sports section lately.