Topic 200: Mechanical Pleasures

Carol:

    Building Better Mousetraps

 

Okay, so we have a rodent problem living here in the middle of horse pastures and open land.  Our strategy has gone from torture to tender as we evolved  from metal spring traps baited with cheese to self-contained pest hotels baited with poison to our current no-kill metal trap baited with peanut butter. I wouldn’t exactly call the current trap a “mechanical pleasure,” but it is safe and humane.  Now if Rube Goldberg had designed it….
 

Rube Goldberg wasn’t exactly known for building a better anything. But, his drawings of head-scratching,  complex  inventions for  every imaginable human activity gave everybody great pleasure and live on through science and education groups that continue to hold conventions and award prizes for inventions  that honor Rube’s spirit of whacky ingenuity.  One of the best known is the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, held every March at Purdue University.  The contest was even featured in a documentary called….aha, Mousetrap to Mars.
 

Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) studied engineering at Cal Berkeley. His first post-university job was with the City of San Francisco as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department, but he left after six months to become a sports cartoonist. He achieved fame later through nation-wide syndication starting in 1922.  He was the first president of the National Cartoonists Society and won a 1948 Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons.  It’s easy to imagine how an engineer working with water and sewer designs might end up drawing weird and whimsical inventions (source: “Rube Goldeberg”)

 

Goldberg’s name later became synonymous with any kind of simple activity or process achieved through a complicated chain reaction.  In 1963, Ideal Toy Company started selling Mouse Trap, a three-dimensional board game that begins with the players devising their own Rube Goldberg trap, and goofy contraptions that play off his original ideas show up in all kinds of animated cartoons and feature films, such as Tom and Jerry or Wallace and Gromit.

 

All of the above information came from Wikipedia. I didn’t want to use Wikipedia because my Google search showed an official Rube Goldberg website. I was delighted when I first reached the site because it was full of information and links to all kinds of recent articles, Most exciting was the notice that 16 of his copyright protected cartoons would be available in July for free use in honor of his July birthday.  Here is one of those cartoons, showing a mechanical device that would give me pleasure if it really worked on my husband. The video I handed to him several days ago is still on our dining room table.

 

Just after I started scrolling through the cartoons on the official Goldberg website, my computer got stalled with a “loading” sign, freezing everything. Rebooting and returning to the website created the same problem, so after a Rube Goldberg-like series of pulling out and putting back in wires and plugs-- interrupting my daughter’s train of writing to the point of crankiness--I decided to forego the rich but possibly virus-infested world of R.G. for the shallow but safer Wikipedia.
 

Okay, so this essay itself is taking on the convolutions of a Rube Goldberg invention. I started out with mouse traps and I need to work my way back to mouse traps. At our house, we have found the best rule of thumb in all things mechanical—bread machines, espresso machines, mousetraps—is Keep It Simple.

 

Sources:
Image of Rube Goldberg cartoon. Came from the official website, temporary permission
     to use without copyright. Look it up yourself.
Image of no kill trap. Wikipedia.
 “Rube Goldberg.” 

Megan:

MAC-anical Pleasures

 Those of us who were born in the early 80’s are the first generation to not remember a world before personal computers. Those born in the 90’s will not remember a time before the Internet.  And the 2000’s generation won’t remember a world without smart phones.

In our house we have three laptops and one desktop computer. We have two flat screen TVs with DVRs, several stereos, two iPods, and three cell phones. Those are just the gadgets that work – their predecessors are stashed all over the house, basement and shed. I found a brand new printer/scanner still in its box in the basement, with a receipt taped to it from 2004.  We’ve always had computers in our house – our first was an Apple Macintosh in the mid-80’s. We switched to PCs when the Internet became widely accessible in the mid-90’s , and then back to Mac’s again by the time I started college (except for my mother, who is afraid of change even though that original Mac was hers).

 

I started with a huge grey iMac. I wanted a purple one, but my father ignored my wishes.  En routeback to Oakland for my second year at Mills, I stopped off at Kelly’s house in L.A. for a few nights and lugged the thing inside for safe keeping. Her father, who at the time reminded me a bit of Cher’s dad in Clueless (scary) asked me why I needed to put a space helmet on his dining room table.  For grad school, I switched to a Notebook, and then finally graduated to a MacBook Pro two years ago. I wanted a black Notebook, but my requests were once again ignored. I shouldn’t complain because each time my father ignored my color preference, I wound up with a more powerful computer.

As I’ve grown up with these machines, they’ve shifted from novelty to commonplace, from convenient to essential.  I know people who literally have anxiety attacks if they are unable to access the Internet. I welcome breaks from the computer, but it’s rare for me to go more than a couple of hours without using it (or my phone) to look something up.  That being said, I don’t get a lot of pleasure or satisfaction out of using it. It’s a necessary tool, but it doesn’t excite my enthusiasm.

I do, however, get immense pleasure from my iPod. I have always loved portable music players, but the iPod changed everything. I didn’t have to worry anymore about bringing enough mix tapes (and then CD’s) on a trip. I’m not a runner, but until I got my iPod, my excuse not to run was always that it caused my CD walkman to skip. I take my iPod everywhere, and as soon as the contract on my Droid expires, I want to get an iPhone – not because I think they are superior, I’m just tired of having to carry around two things when I could be carrying one thing.

Listening to music while I drive or walk around is favorite activity. Although it’s somewhat isolating, and can even be dangerous -- the other day I almost got hit by a car I didn’t hear coming – it alters my mood like nothing else. I rarely listen to whole albums at once – and my iTunes playlists tend to be named for the place I was visiting when I made it (“A NOLA List”), people I want to share particular music with (“For Colyn”), or a specific mood (“Conflicted” and “Upbeatish”).  Exciting music makes me walk faster, classical music can enhance a view, and a happy song improves my attitude and boosts my confidence. My iPod allows me to create a soundtrack for my life.