Sunday, March 8, 2009

Arthritic Thumbs

Tomorrow, we are expecting that somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,400+ text messages between Kwame and Beatty will be unsealed for our simultaneous reading pleasure and dismay. It's hard to imagine what new pieces of information may be revealed within these text messages, and I'm sure Jon Stewart is looking forward to another field day. I await these text messages like a child on Christmas Eve because they are guaranteed to be absolutely hilarious and further evidence of just how sexy Kwame can be.

About 10 years ago when I got my first cell phone telephone (watch the Futurama movie Into the Wild Green Yonder) I would sit for hours and work on my mastery of the classic Nokia cell phone game Snake. I would steer my stupid snake around in a square using the 2, 4, 6, and 8 buttons eating dots and growing to the size of several thousand, if not million, pixels. It's hard to measure the length of things in pixels, so get off my case. There was a time when I would have the TV on in the background and I would be playing Snake for hours and hours. By the time that phone died, I was a top 10 Snake player in North America (by my own measure), but this excellence came at a serious price - to this day when I use only my thumbs for an extended period of time, I start to get the old Snake pain in my thumb joints. I don't know if I will ever truly experience a complete Snake recovery, and I'm trying to figure out how I can get insurance to pay for thumb braces.

With this in mind, does anyone else find it truly amazing that in either the second or third batch of released text messages from Detroit's Romeo and Juliet, there are still 1,400 text messages out there? That is a gigantic number of text messages, and this was before texting really even hit full steam. If memory serves me, earlier batches of text messages also contained around this number of texts - and this only includes the messages that are being officially released. How on earth did these two manage to generate so many text messages in such a short period of time? As a fan of efficiency, how much time did it take them to produce so much drivel, and what could they have been doing with their time instead of texting?

We must study their thumbs in a laboratory and learn how to cure those of us who suffer from less evil thumb-related injuries. I played Snake to bring my thumb reaction time into perfect harmony with my brain, not to find love at the local Motel 6. If we harvest Kwame's and Beatty's thumbs we can learn so many things about avoiding or treating repetitive stress disorders. Let's take this embarassment and learn something from it through a blessed combination of justice and science.

1 comment:

Dan Anderson said...

I think I hit 1,000 texts one month last year. I have no mayoral(?) duties of course.