I've become kind of addicted to the Netflix play-movie-in-the-browser function. It's made me watch too many movies (usually while I'm doing other stuff on the computer) that I would probably NEVER watch, even if they came on television. Is it because the movies are in the background in the same way that kids of today watch stuff constantly on their computers while they do homework, twitter, chat, download porn & music & pirate movies? I always thought I was too old for this. & I do do one thing they probably don't - when I am absorbed in an email or something else that's taking my time, I tend to "rewind" the movie to see the stuff I've missed. In any event, I feel dumb because I just watched two movies that I thought were all right but didn't really want to watch & I'm late writing in this blog.
I've probably started this because my new computer has a gorgeous screen & I like to use it. I'm going to start watching my favorite pretty movies on it before too long.
I have mentioned this before (& I mention it on my show when I read something from a column) but I am a big fan of the Word Detective. I just remembered a column he wrote a while back which, unfortunately, doesn't have anything to with Netflix Instant Play (or whatever it's called) addiction. In this column, about the origins of the word "crank," he talks about words like "dial" which we still use even though we don't really use phones with dials any more. He remarks that words like "crank" & "dial" are both in "a range of terms still in common usage even though the technologies that spawned them have profoundly changed, turning words whose logic once would have been obvious into linguistic fossils." But surely there's a better name for them than "linguistic fossils"! Let's come up with one.
I thought of that because I mentioned that I "rewind" the online movies, even though there's no tape involved. Funny, yes?
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