Phones and photos.

I still reel at the sentence, "I took a picture with my phone." For someone old enough to remember the seventies, that sentence makes as much sense as "I was on the phone with the Philadelphia office" would have made to George Washington. Perhaps less so; while the idea of long-distance communications was not unknown to our forefathers, the idea of one thing doing something completely alien to it was not. "I roasted the turkey with the butter churner" might be a more apt Colonial equivalent.

The invention and development of the camera has been very revealing to us over the centuries. First we learned that people all over were just as funny looking as the people we saw every day. With the compact camera we learned what our fingertips looked like as they blocked the lens. Now we know that our rear ends can take butt pictures. We can even find out what the world looks like to a small pet gerbil tucked into a shirt pocket.

Answer: Not much.

So now the technology that brought us the butt dial has given us the pocket photo. Who knows where future phone technology will lead? The telephoto beard? The autofocus shorts? The pan tilt zoom tighty whities? The mind boggles.

O brave new world, That has such people in't!