CONFESSION time: I’m not big on rappers. I get my Eminems confused with my Maltesers, and for years I thought Snoop Dogg belonged to Charlie Brown. It is not surprising, therefore, that the name of Wiz Khalifa had not impinged on my consciousness before I heard about the spot of bother he had at Los Angeles airport at the weekend.
The bold Khalifa became a star of the Twittersphere when he tweeted a video of a run-in he had with the local constabulary at LA International. He had provoked their ire by riding on a hoverboard, and grumbled: “All because I wouldn’t ditch the technology everyone will be using in the next six months.”
I’m afraid the man is a chump on two counts. One, hoverboards very rarely fit securely into overhead luggage compartments, not in these days of fridge-sized carry-on bags; and two, one should never, ever make predictions about the future success of technological developments. The lofts of the world’s inventors are stuffed full of the corpses of The Next Big Thing. (Incidentally, hoverboards are not all that novel; they appeared in Back to the Future Part II and III.)
I speak from bitter experience. I’m a sucker for gadgets, but I have all the technical knowhow of an Amish spinster’s tabby cat. I am a salesman’s dream.
Take video. When the concept of being able to record telly programmes first became reality in the early 1980s, there were three contenders – the Philips Video Compact Cassette, Betamax and VHS. Most people opted for one of the latter two. I bought the Philips, swayed by the fact that you could record on both sides (like an audio cassette), thus giving you eight hours’ playing time. The format quickly died a death, partly due to the cost of the tapes, so I traded up to the Betamax. That also went belly up, and I finally backed the winner, VHS, at the third time of asking.
I somehow managed to avoid purchasing a Sinclair C5, but I have down the years owned such indispensable life-affirming items as a sticky-tape label maker, an eight-track cartridge music player, an Amstrad Emailer telephone and a video camera that Cecil B de Mille would have been proud of. Nothing so guarantees imminent obsolescence as my name on a sales invoice.
I’m still doing it. I bought a Blu-Ray DVD player in 2012, but I haven’t felt the urge to buy a disc since early 2013, thanks to catch-up TV and Netflix.
That’s probably no bad thing. For one thing, I’m running out of storage space in the loft.
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