Word: earlied
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Cooper has been out of practice for three weeks, nursing an ear injury. Cooper claimed he had clearance to wrestle, but Harvard trainer Kate Smith advised against it, and feared liability for any damage to his ear that might result from the bout...
...telephone is a commonplace item on a much-wired planet. The idea of being able to throw your voice around the world and in a few seconds hit precisely the ear you wanted among all the globe's 10 billion ears has lost its capacity to surprise. But the telephone has strange powers. The sudden little Ice Age that descended upon AT&T last week may have given some Americans, in an almost subliminal way, a dose of the metaphysical spooks...
...think of the telephone purely as a secular voice thrower, it arrives in the mind at its most irritating. For example, no one has yet devised a pleasant way for a telephone to come to life. The ring is a sudden intrusion, a drill in the ear. Pavlov's dog hears and picks the damned thing up. The Satanic bleats from some new phones are the equivalent of sound lasers. Don't hurt me again, says the dog. I'll talk. Perhaps the phone that looks like a duck decoy and quacks instead of ring will breed new species -- phones...
Something about telephones is obscurely comic, related to some manic vaudeville. In your fist you clutch to the ear an object that looks ignominiously like the shining plastic cousin of a shoe. Designers have produced more streamlined models, but an essential ungainliness is inescapable. It results partly from the pressing of technology against anatomy. The technosmooth circuitry is pushed bizarrely against the old Darwinian skull. The talker's being comes unfocused from the visual immediate room and refocuses -- through the ear! -- elsewhere. The Here communes with There through sudden activations of breath, vocal cords, jawbone, tongue, lips, eyes, emotions. Through...
...long no one really fears it). The telephone, like democracy, is infinitely tolerant of stupidity; it is a virtual medium of stupidity, a four-lane highway of the greedy and false and brainless. But it is (unless tampered with) a faithful channel of words from mouth to distant ear, mind to mind, and that is, absolutely and exactly, the meaning of freedom...