Example number two: Toaster ovens are the freaking WORST! Especially the Black & Decker Toast-R-Oven Classic™, which I recently purchased and am VERY disappointed with. Remember how the old toaster ovens had one button and a dial that offered you a choice of how toasty you wanted your toast to be? They don’t make those anymore! Now, there’s not a single button, and instead you have to adjust three different incredibly confusing dials, and my toast either comes out cold and floppy (that’s what she said) or burnt to a crisp! Thanks a pantload for making a technologically inferior toaster oven, Black & Decker! And thanks for dying before solving this vitally important problem, Steve Jobs!!
Example number three: Ummmmmm… where exactly is my flying car, jetpack, and/or transporter beam? Steve Jobs (and by “Steve Jobs” I mean lazy scientists) has been promising me this stuff for decades—and yet? I don’t have my freaking flyingcarjetpacktransporterbeam! But I do have a phone that can play Angry Birds. Screw you, Steve Jobs. Posthumously.
Anyway, technology always has and always will be a big deal—and to prove it, this week AMC debuts their newest show Hell on Wheels (debuting Sunday, Nov 6, 10 pm), which depicts how technology completely changed America back in the olden days before people were too stupid to even imagine flyingcarjetpacktransporterbeams.
The year? 1865! The place? America, just following the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln! Gunslinger Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) is a former Confederate soldier who gets a job with Union Pacific—the builders of the first transcontinental railroad—but! It turns out Bohannon has ulterior motives, which primarily involve murderizing the Union soldiers who murdered his wife! However, Hell on Wheels is also a document of the time, portraying the uneasy tension between North and South, the treatment of supposedly freed black slaves, and how the one percent of the richy-riches screw over the 99% of people constructing this burgeoning, game-changing technology. (Sound familiar?)
By all accounts, Hell on Wheels is a gorgeously shot, smart, and gritty Western that will easily fill the hole left in your heart when HBO’s Deadwood got poop-canned. But I also hope it will be inspiring. After all, if a bunch of 1860 yahoos could build a railroad that spanned the country, certainly somebody can build a freaking easy-to-use toaster oven that won’t incinerate my freaking breakfast!! (I’m looking at YOU, ghost of Steve Jobs!)
Follow me (technologically) on Twitter! @WmSteveHumphrey
