A few of my favorite things from 2007? Where to begin.
So many wonderful, terrific, funny and fascinating things to recall and I didn’t write any of them down. Well, some of them I did, so here’s a look back at a few of my favorite things a virtual compendium of vital information to help you remember the year that was for you and me.
In case you forgot, your life improved exponentially in 2007 because of one little device that changed everything (except maybe your underwear.) This was the year of the iPhone, and just because you didn’t get one didn’t mean you weren’t impacted somehow. In fact, the beauty of the iPhone is that it made all of our lives better. Really annoying people, we found, weren’t out on the road, crowding stores or making us wish hogtying complete strangers with duct tape was legal. Instead, they were home on the sofa muttering to no one in particular, “Whoa, check this out!”
I wondered in a column why technology was more fun than practical these days, and pointed to at least one example of valuable innovations, like a car that can parallel park itself. Who needs to solve world hunger, cure cancer or head off global warming when we have that!
The most ridiculous things are probably my favorites. For instance, in 2007 we learned these priceless little gems:
• You can spend $600 a pound on coffee made from the undigested beans found in, get this, the droppings of an Indonesian weasel-looking creature. Normally rat poop is free.
• That if you take salmonella up in space, it comes back to Earth even deadlier, mainly because it didn’t get any sleep and is cranky.
• That you can put garbanzo beans in chocolate cookies and it won’t kill you or make hair grow out of your toes.
• That Leona Helmsly’s dog a Maltese was left $12 million in her will.
• That if you’re drinking a beer with a toddler in front of you, she will inevitably jerk her head back at just the right moment to knock your teeth out.The last one, of course, did happen to me in 2007, and the force chipped off the tip of one of my teeth, making me look like, well, a stupid man who was drinking a bottle of beer with a toddler sitting in front of him.
Everyday life is priceless.
Take the story my wife told me: She went to lunch with my daughter and sister-in-law one day at a Jacksonville restaurant, and on the wall was a picture of Elvis. My daughter saw the picture, pointed excitedly and blurted out, “Dada!”
I’m still not sure whether to take that as a compliment or an insult, but I knew it was definitely time to trim the sideburns back a little bit. (I also want to know if it was young, hip Elvis or the old, burned-out one.)
That one never made it into a column in 2007, although I guess it has now.
I ran a marathon in 2007 I still have a toenail that is pitch black from it and I got my first microwave, which I still don’t entirely know how to use. (Are you supposed to plug it in or is it solar powered?)
But my personal favorite from 2007 is my mother getting a computer. I have only myself to blame. Now for the rest of my life I will get endless phone calls asking me to explain how to turn it on, what the difference between an e-mail and a Web address is, whether you have to say “Yahoo!” to make the page come up, and why they named the mouse “mouse” and not, say, “gerbil.”
“Brian, I don’t want to Google,” she yells into the phone. “A person shouldn’t have to Google if they don’t want to. This is America, after all, and I refuse to do it. Now what do all these white keys do?”
What a wild, whacky and wonderful year. What will 2008 hold for us all?