I am not that hip to what the cool kids are doing these days. The main criterion I used when I picked out my latest cell phone two years ago was simple—when I get out of my truck and it hits the ground because I left it on my lap, will it shatter into hundreds of tiny little pieces? No? Sold. Therefore, as you might have guessed, I don’t have one of those fancy smart phones. And therefore, I’m a little perplexed by this whole “app” thing.
I don’t have an iPhone, but I do have an iPod touch (a gift), and so I was able to test out this new iPhone app, Show Me Now, which promises to empower you to “fix the world’s problems” and “win friends and influence people.”
Now, you may or may not know that there’s a book for that, and it’s been around for 75 years. But you’re unlikely to win any friends reading books, and anyway, who needs a 200-page book when there’s an app for that? Undoubtedly, apps are the favored way of acquiring such information.
Among the many sets of how-to instructions contained within this app—“how to make a tin can luminary” and “how to tie a cherry stem in your mouth”— is “how to create a hollowed-out book.” I tried this once as a teenager, way back before they had apps, and it didn’t go so well. (My first mistake was choosing a soft-cover book.) In fact, it went terribly. Not only did I not create a safe, secure, and secret place to hide my … um … favorite baseball cards, years later I actually developed an interest in Robert Frosts’ poetry, and was repeatedly reminded of my miserable failure (at a certain point while hollowing out the book, taking note of how poorly my DIY project was proceeding, I gave up—like teenage baseball card enthusiasts are well known to do—thus sparing all but the introduction, table of contents, and a handful of Frosts’ earliest poems.)
Oh, if I had only had the great fortune to have benefited from the wisdom contained in apps.
Amazingly, I’m told that the Show Me Now app has a companion book (Show Me Now), which, I guess, could be hollowed out to create safe place to hide your baseball cards. Teenagers are still into baseball cards, aren’t they?
—Photo Alec McNayr/Flickr