Waaaaah!  Waaaaah!  Waaaaah!  Another posting on Camera Anguish! Only five and half weeks after the previous one!

It’s about iPods:

I have one of the 2nd generation iPods (the one with menu buttons but with a solid-state wheel) and while it’s great (apart from the battery monitor which is never right) I am so sick to death of having to untangle the headphones wiring every single time I try to use it. Surely there must be some form of ‘cable tidy’ system for the iPod headphones, rather than wrapping the cabling around the iPod and thus placing the earphones under stress?

That’s all of it, aside from the vent/unvent signs at the beginning and the end.

The way to get rid of the wires of iPods is for iPods to be made lighter, and for them to hang from our ear lobes.

It is a little known fact that when, in or around 7,000 BC, Gods From Space arrived at this planet (having foolishly destroyed their own planetary civilisation) they brought the notion of ear-rings with them.  These were combination iPod/mobile phones.  They were often spherical, hence the expression “the music of the spheres”.  Only posh people, specially selected by the Gods From Space for their grovelling willingness to do what the Gods From Space commanded were equipped with ear-rings.  With them, these posh people communicated with the Gods From Space, or they did on those rare occasions when they could get through to them.  There was always one hell of a queue.  Mostly they had to be satisfied with recording a message and hoping for the best.  And they communicated more frequently with one another.

Humans selected by the Gods From Space for even more important responsibilities were equipped with more elaborate communications devices, which were installed on their heads in what are now called “coronation” ceremonies.  Through these head-sets – “crowns” – they received their instructions, and were able to call up air support, satellite intelligence reports, and so forth.  No wonder these super-trusties, or “kings” as they were known, were taken extremely seriously by the downtrodden masses.

Eventually the Gods From Space, who were a quarrelsome lot, destroyed themselves.  Or else they just died out, through shortages of the necessary chemicals etc., or because they simply weren’t able to sustain what remained of their way of life with their insufficient numbers.  But the memory of their magical technology and tempestuous cavortings still lives on.  Humans still trying to impress one another with spurious claims of continuing Godly favour, and with the reality of the Godly knowledge they still had, make it almost impossible to work out when the Gods From Space perished.

“Religion” is the more or less debased memory of those times, together with the various doomed attempts – cargo-cult style – that Godless humans have made to revive these powers and relive these ancient and dangerous excitements.  As a general rule the less ancient a purely human “religion” is, the more deranged is its memory of what really happened, but the more that religion accords with purely human needs and yearnings.  In the East – especially in India, I sense – they remember things vaguely accurately.  Here in the West, and in the nearer East, our own civilisations having only developed later, we have no bloody idea, and just made it up as we went along.

Meanwhile iPods as we now know them are causing many other problems besides the tangled wire problem that Julian of Camera Anguish complains of.  Because they are so wonderful, so light, and so expensive, iPods have caused the property crime rate to increase, bucking the generally downward trend in property crime, caused by electronic stuff mostly becoming so cheap that it’s not worth nicking.  And those wires that Julian rants of are all part of the problem.  They are apparently rather distinctive.  They say “I am an iPod – steal me” to any passing hoodlum. Hoodla everywhere are responding enthusiastically.

If you nicked someone’s iPod in 6,500 BC they could tell you’d nicked it at once and if you tried using it you would be immediately executed with a single 180 decibel phone message.  Say what you like about those Gods From Space, and I do, but they knew what to do with muggers.