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Today’s foray into verbal brilliance comes to you as a result of the efforts of the first actress (reportedly) to ever appear nekid on film.
I’m talking about Hedy Lamarr.
Of course that’s not to be confused with Hedley Lamarr, the character Harvey Korman portrayed in 1974’s feel-good romp, Blazing Saddles. As far as I know, Korman never got nekid on film, however he did get caught wearing a pair of tighty-whities on the Carol Burnett show.
Hedy Lamarr starred in the film Ecstasy in 1933 where she portrayed a neglected wife to an apathetic husband. She caused quite a ruckus by taking it all off for the camera, and even showed the movie going public her “O-face”. Nearly ten years later, she and a composer patented a process known as frequency hopping which was initially created to control multiple player pianos. The process was eventually used to rotate the frequencies used to control radio guided torpedoes in order to make them harder for the enemy to detect. Fifty years later, the process became one of the guiding principles behind the magic of Bluetooth and WiFi.
Cool, right?
Right.
Now it goes without saying that both my laptop and my iPhone use WiFi. For that reason alone, I’m invoking the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” rule here to send a shout-out to the film industry’s first nude scene. Had it not been for Hedy and her “O face”, this blog wouldn’t have been published.
Now let’s get down to bidness.
A few weeks ago, I downloaded an app for my phone which essentially tracks my every movement. It’s kind of like Lo-Jack for humans, but they didn’t have to hide a transmitter in an uncomfortable place like the back of a Volkswagen. The magic of the app is that it tracks various exercise habits like walking, running, biking, etcetera. I use it when I walk the dogs.
The app uses the GPS capabilities found in a smart phone in order to figure out how fast I’m going, the change in elevation, how long I’ve been at it and where I’ve been. Where I’ve been is the cool part because it features geo-tracking which overlays your route onto a map. Given the routes I typically take whenever walking my four-legged minions, the map overlays of my routes tend to come out looking like a phallic symbol similar to those that high school bullies draw on the faces of their victims with permanent markers.
For the record, those cruel drawings have nothing on the freeway system which surrounds the Dallas-Ft.Worth area.
Just sayin’.
Today, in an effort to take advantage of the bane of my existence (aka daylight savings time), I got the wild hair to mow the lawn after spending my time in Cubeville. What a perfect opportunity to take advantage of the cool app. I could find out how long it would take to mow the entire yard, how far of a walk it would be, and whether it could be considered a decent amount of exercise.
Ideally, I would see a bunch of straight lines on the map overlay of my yard. Heck, if the app was good enough, I would be able to see spots in the yard where I missed.
And so, I mowed.
And I mowed some more.
In the end, I only walked .63 miles over a 38 minute period. Hope the TharpSter Pit Bull scoots faster than that when she has an itch.
Even still, I was able to use the geo-tracking feature to review my route.
I think I missed some.
