A familiar dork talks...

Consistently zeitgeisty Douglas Coupland deputising quite magnificently for Stephen Fry in The Guardian Weekend's Dork Talk column:

"I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we're all assholes. We're assholes at the supermarket's meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we're assholes driving in traffic; and we're assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy."

Snaps...

The keeper of this hand encroached on my space on the train last night. Look at it - do I pay £16.90 for this? Anyway, the keeper of this hand did redeem himself by making me laugh. We were just coming up to Selby when he caught the attention of a very elderly man sat across the aisle from him by repeatedly saying the word "Snaps!" "Snaps! Snaps! Snaps!" it went. The elderly man understandably looked puzzled and feared for his life. Then came an attempt at clarification: "Take the snaps!" It eventualy transpired that the keeper of the hand wanted his photograph taken with a high falutin' and very fancy mobile telephone but had, unfortunately, selected a man for the job who had not crossed paths with technology since the introduction of cylindrical music boxes. "This is the snaps button, you press it, it takes a snaps. Take a snaps of me!" The elderly chap complied with the demand and, after a lot of fumbling about, showed the keeper of the hand his photographic effort. "No good! This snaps is no good! You have taken too much snaps of the table. Do it again! Another snaps!" Thankfully, the subsequent snaps ("Another snaps! Another!) finally did the job. Phew. I thought at one point it would all end in tears. If you believe in karma then this thrilling entertainment was possibly all due to the elderly man snatching a Manchester Evening News that I had my eye on when I boarded the train but, rather than reading it, tucking it into his bag, which he then clutched tightly to his chest until the snaps incident.