The Award For The Paragraph Outside Of Time a'Goes To:

[pardon me while ah rustle some papers]...

Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker!

Blair’s and Pettegree’s work on the relation between minds and machines, and the combination of delight and despair we find in their collisions, leads you to a broader thought: at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1EArWw6Kr

Now, back to reading about the fascinating, nail-biting, suspense-filled tale of the invention of the fireplace grate.  How ingratiating.

Too bad DEJr is little more than a shadow of his father and a little more than his half-brother, Kerry (in other words, I'm envious of their racing pedigree).