Techno Party

One of the WordPress topic suggestions over the weekend was What’s one piece of technology you can’t live without?

To a man with a pacemaker, such as me, the answer is a no-brainer. To a man with no brain, such as me, that answer is no fun.

And the really top ones like the TV, the computer, the car and the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grill will have plenty of espousers (to my amazement Spellcheck says that’s a real word), so I’m here to stand up for the forgotten ones, those little inventions without which life would be a lot less, well, interesting.

The Garmin Sat-nav. Back-seat driving in robot form.

The I-Phone. Gradually bringing the mobile phone back to the size it was in the 1980s, i.e. too big to be mobile.

Now that's entertainment

The underwater TV camera. Without it Synchronised Swimming could not exist, and the girl leaping about with the bit of ribbon would still be the silliest sport in the Olympics.

The canned-laughter machine in sit-coms. How else would we know when the jokes come along?

Run, Forrest, run

The yellow traffic light. The technological equivalent of tapping a racehorse with a whip, it gees us up so that we don’t get stuck at the red.

The treadmill. For people who don’t have footpaths.

The GHD hair-straightener. Shows that women are more vain than men.

The fact that Tinson2 uses Tingirl’s GHD hair-straightener. Shows how little I know.

Screw-top wine bottles. Confirmation that all that stuff wine-snobs used to do about sniffing the cork was a load of bollocks.

The microwave. Heating food by applying radiation to its internal molecules. Sure what could possibly go wrong?

And finally, the nipple-ring and all other forms of body-piercing. Proof that we are not the cleverest race on the planet. Do dolphins do that to themselves? Do tortoises?