things the laptop-owning world has to think about:

While the free wifi access at the coffee shop is great, watch out when the coffee shop is down the street from the movie theater. As you sit and try to update your resume in your precious, sacred free time, patron after patron will sit down in your immediate vicinity and loudly ruin the movie you would rather be seeing instead of updating your resume. No matter how patiently you have been waiting for the film to be released, avoiding every trailer and newspaper blurb, there is no plot point so crucial that it cannot be brainlessly brayed at a volume only rivaled by the amplified conversations the mouth-breathers were probably having in the theater as the movie was going on. Actual, non-caricature, living human beings will sit in a public place and utter sentences that begin, “That part at the end, where…” with a complete lack of irony or self-awareness.

things the non-laptop-owning world has to think about:

While one of the primary hallmarks of 21st-century technology is that electronics are growing smaller and more lightweight, even the most state-of-the-art internet-enabled laptops can be surprisingly heavy. With passion and judicious aim, a closed Dell Inspiron 5100 could easily be driven deep into the base of the human skull. Given one of the other hallmarks of this new technology, its durability, that same laptop could likely be used to dash your quote-unquote brains out altogether and still be perfectly functional with the application of a little Windex.

things the entire American public have to think about in 2004:

Headphones. Everywhere headphones.