Landrew’s Take on Technology

When people came over to my house when I was a kid, they would see our big satellite dish and be like, “Whoa!  Does you dad work as a spy for the government and get super secret updates beamed through that thing?”  And I would be like, “Yeah.”  They would think I was really cool, and then for dinner we would have frozen pizza and my friends would be like, “if your dad is a sweet spy, why do you guys eat frozen pizza?  Shouldn’t you have a pizza chef, like from Italy, that works for you full time?”  And that’s when I would have to admit that my dad wasn’t a spy for the government and that our satellite dish was just for TV.

Satellite is the opposite of cable.  The difference between satellite and cable is that satellite television comes from outer space and cable comes from wires that run underground in the sewer (I think).  There’s good stuff and bad stuff about both of them. Like if you have satellite, you feel cool because you’re talking to things in space every time you change the channel, but then if there was an intergalactic war, what would happen to TV as we know it?  By having cable your supporting earth by saying no to space, but then if the sewers flood or alligators start gnawing on the wires, your picture might get fuzzy (I am pretty sure cable is in the sewers.

The big satellite dish I had when I was kid was from the time before they started making the really tiny ones that everyone has now.  While the new small ones work better and don’t take up your whole back yard, I like the old big ones more.  It’s kind of like having a rhino instead of a poodle for a pet.  The poodle would be better behaved in the house and win more dog shows than the rhino, and with a poodle you don’t need to worry about it getting moody and trampling your car.  But at the end of the day if you have a poodle, you can’t be like, “I have a pet rhino” and make people think you’re cool.

The sweetest thing about big satellite dishes was that they actually moved.  One summer, me and my older brother, Lester, got walk walkie-talkies and I sat out next to the satellite dish with a piece of paper and Lester changed channels.  He would tell me over the walkie-talkie what channel he was turning to and I would see where the dish pointed and make a channel map on my piece of paper.  I got really into it, like I could see where the satellite was pointing and know what channel someone was watching without even looking at my map.  Even these days, I still think stuff like, “There’s a storm coming in around channel five” or “There’s a cloud that looks like a laptop over channel nine.”

So what can we use those big dishes for now?  Well if you live off a highway and you had a barn, you could hang a sign on the barn that says “Spot” like it’s a dog house and you could put the dish in front of it half full of dog food.  Then you could make money on a roadside attraction for the biggest in the world. (And you don’t even need to have the biggest dog in the world to do it!  You just need to point to the barn and say, “He’s sleeping”!)