R U L E S

Send your submissions via e-mail only to href="mailto:salon21st@salonmagazine.com">salon21st@salonmagazine.com.
Please include your full name and an accurate e-mail address so we can
contact you if you’re a winner. By submitting your entry you give Salon Technology
permission to publish it. Deadline for entries is May 3, 1999.

P R I Z E S

The winning response will receive a copy of Salon Technology senior
correspondent Andrew Leonard’s book, “Bots: The Origin of New Species.”

In two weeks we’ll publish a winner and some selected entries — then
start over a couple weeks after that with a whole new challenge.

Sorry, no winner this time.

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Honorable Mentions

Earliest Times

“Don’t get me started on fire. When I was a boy, we ran away from fire; we didn’t sit around it burning our food. It’s not natural, I tell you.”
– Ug, Tribal Elder

[submitted by Tom Davidson]

” “
– Old-guard Cro-Magnon decrying the invention of written communication

[submitted by Owen Mathews]

Things were fine the way they were. Foraging with the warthogs. Occasionally falling victim to the predatory impulses of the less-civilized beasts. The use of the Bone for hunting has changed this and our innocence has thus been lost forever. What good could possibly derive from the mad desire to kill? I will never know the answer to this question. I am starving.
[submitted by Anthony Notaro]

The Middle Years

“Gutenberg, Schmutenberg. I wish that I had lived before technology was even
invented.“
– Moishe, Torah Scribe, 16th century
[submitted by Eli Neiburger]

“Thanks for the invite, but your project won’t work. 120 cubits is bigger than anything that’s ever been built, except maybe the Babel vaporware fiasco, but it’s probably too small to do the job. Your gopherwood construction is hardly state of the art. Have you considered getting a deadline extension from the Maker? We’ll be more comfortable on the outside, spearing fish. Please send our best to Japheth, Ham and Shem, and of course Mrs. Noah.”
–The last communication from Mr. and Ms. Unicorn
[submitted by Arthur Stock]

Our Modern Era

I entered this contest by screaming the individual zeros and ones down a phone line.
[submitted by Michael Stern]

In counterpoint with our high-tech jobs, we have been turning back the clock a bit at home, expanding our gardens and orchards, keeping bees and ducks, spending more time on our feet (or our bicycles) than we do in our cars. I make all our bread, and am having a spare fireplace converted into a wood-burning brick oven. We grow shiitake mushrooms in our garage. We do not own a television, and have taken to spending the evenings when we are at home curled up on the couch with our cats, taking turns reading aloud to each other … But you can have the Internet connection when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
[submitted by Catherine Kehl]

I’m not anti-
I love technology — just don’t have time for it.
[submitted by Brady Mattson]

“Send your submissions via e-mail only …”
Blatant discrimination!!! Just because I use cuneiform on stone slabs, I almost missed your deadline. I chiseled all night in order to deliver my tablets to an Egyptologist for translation onto papyrus, find a monk to transcribe the scrolls on vellum, persuade the Gutenberg Society to typeset a single page, and beg Kinko’s for a “rush” copy. I barely had time for my daughter to scan it into her computer and e-mail this protest.
[submitted by John Herpel]

“Course, ah’m disappointed. But no red-blooded, Southern gentleman should be usurped in the marital bedroom by one of them — them ‘thingies.’ And no genteel Southern woman needs one.”

– Alabama Legislator Beau Britches on his defeat today (along with a majority of his colleagues) two years after passage of the 1998 law making it illegal to sell vibrators in the state of Alabama. Mrs. Britches filed for divorce late last year.

[submitted by Mary Waggoner]

I am not as much anti-technology as against the uses to which technology is often put, particularly digital technology. Articles that work perfectly fine in many cases no longer do so after a technological “fix.” I could sum the whole thing up, I guess, with an axiom. PEOPLE DO NOT NEED SMART TOASTERS.
[submitted by Bruce Hume]

I wake up to the sound of my wind-up alarm clock. I watch the morning news on a television but you have to turn it on with a pull knob. I don’t own a microwave and I make my own bread from scratch, without a bread machine. I’m learning to spin wool in my spare time and, for my birthday, my friend Wendy gave a blown-glass fountain pen that I use with a dip ink well when I write letters to her. What do I do for a living? I’m an online editor at a bleeding-edge technology Web site.
[submitted by J. Amanda Nielsen]

What Herman Melville knew:
Lo, man has become the tool of his tools.
Computers make the
unnecessary possible.
[submitted by Tom Cook]

Thanks for your submissions — and check back in two weeks for the next Salon 21st Challenge.

It was my father’s practice to read the Times at the breakfast table. Mine is to un-rubberband it as I walk my son to the school bus, glance at the headlines, re-rubberband it, and only begin my study of the paper in earnest after returning home. This way my son and I can speculate about why the bus is late, or I can try to explain to him why the school where we are waiting for the bus has recently been handed over to a private corporation to run. But Monday, stunned by what I had seen on Page 1 of the Times, I said little.

Buddy’s penis appears there in a large color photo captioned “Vacation Farewell.” The top right corner of the picture shows Hillary, one foot inside Air Force One, wearing dark glasses and a hat and waving. Chelsea follows, walking up a stairway to the plane, eyes down, and then comes Buddy, his head obscured by Chelsea’s right leg. At the bottom left, finally, trails Our President, right hand on the rail of the ladder, left hand holding a baseball cap and Buddy’s leash.

“Reuters,” says the photo credit in 6-point type.

Was it accident? Could the photographer have been unaware that Buddy’s procreative organ would appear silhouetted against the Massachusetts summer sky? That if you draw a line on the photo from the president’s nose to Buddy’s penis, and another from Buddy’s penis to Hillary’s hand, it forms a perfect check mark, as if to say, “Vacation successfully completed! The first family is doing fine!”

Draw another line from the president’s baseball cap, through Buddy’s penis, and you arrive at a paragraph in a neighboring article that reads: “It is hard to conduct government by consensus if there is no consensus. And seldom, it seems, have two political bedmates been more incompatible than these two.” (This paragraph is not about Bill and Hillary; it is about Yeltsin and the Communists.)

Am I reading too much into this?

This I know: The editors of the New York Times are curators of an august journalistic tradition. They do not print dog penises lightly. In running the photo, at the size they ran it, and above the fold, they are making a statement. But what statement? “We are not the stuffy New York Times of old”? “We should keep the president on a short leash”? “We accept that the Leader of the Free World, like his dog, has no control over his libido; still, we recognize his strides toward the formulation of a sensible foreign policy”?

I checked the editorial page. Sometimes the editors comment or expand there on front-page matter. Nothing.

I do expect there will be an op-ed piece soon from an animal-rights activist protesting that Buddy never consented to the photograph, and opining that it is indecent and wrong for a newspaper to print a photograph showing a dog’s genitals and not his face. One way or another, I’ll have a reason to un-rubberband my Times on Tuesday.