July 5, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Forget Paris Hilton; the iPhone story is moo-velous
by JIMMY J. PACK JR.

Mayor John Street may not be able to run again for mayor, but he can still give a political speech to a small but select group of engaged citizens near several dumpsters. (Photos by Jimmy J. Pack Jr.)

Around this time of the year, when the summer is full of beach-goers tending to sun burns, children selling lemonade to sweaty walkers and their panting dogs, and a virtually empty Chestnut Hill is left to fend for itself on weekends when residents head down to the shore, any sane person can officially declare allergy season over.

And I think it’s over for everyone but me. In the middle of the night, last Thursday, I was awakened by an asthma attack, a fever and the urge to vomit.

I had no sleep at all that night, and the next afternoon I left my home to pay a needed visit to an allergist whose office is in center city. I hopped on the R8, half delusional from an over-the-counter allergy medication, and made my way downtown.

There was a strange, affected feel to the day. Was it VE-Day? VJ-Day? Did we really win Bush’s war in Iraq? Did someone discover a cure for cancer? Something was in the air, and it felt like I was missing out on something important.

As I headed down 16th Street I accidentally walked into the most important event of the day; there was Mayor John Street and a long line of geeks and too-cool hipster-doofusses waiting in a line that was perforated by dumpsters for the release of the iPhone.

This cow is ready to fill up his basket with iPhones to distribute to his bovine friends. This way they will be able to communicate with each other and share family photos while grazing in the pasture.

ABC-TV6 had a microphone jammed into the mayor’s face, and while I couldn’t hear what the reporter was asking, I was sure it was something along the lines of, “What are you doing here waiting for a phone? Shouldn’t you be working?”

The accusatory nature of the imagined question pissed me off — as if no one has ever slacked off on their job. Who cares what the mayor does? Maybe with the new iPhone he can plow my street or stop the gun violence. The iPhone is supposed to do just about everything else..

As I walked back to the train, my head was even more cloudy than when I first got into town. I was not believing what was in front of my eyes — a cow standing on its hind legs pushing a Kmart carriage. I had to get home quick to rid my mind of this hallucination. (The “cow” was actually a promotion for the Chick-fil-A fast food chain.)

When I got home, hazy but less feverish, every major television network and cable news network was reporting the most important news story of the day — the 6 p.m. local-time release of the iPhone around the world.

NBC Nightly News showed Apple employees clapping as dorks who waited in line for a hand-held computer/phone overnight marched into the Apple store in Manhattan.

And as I lay on the couch, trying to take one of 50 naps that day, I drifted off with images of Paris Hilton talking on an iPhone in jail as a convoy of news vans from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX rushed to Hilton’s jail cell to see what her first iPhone email would be.

The message that appears across my mind, like a giant red ticker, reads, “Dear Barbara Walters: I’ve read the Bible, and I’m no longer a drunk-driving idiot. I’ve seen the light.”

My nap is quick and short, but I lay there feeling as if I had been spinning in a circle for hours, trying to understand why the release of the iPhone is so damn important.

The president’s approval rating is 31 percent, and civilians and soldiers continue to die daily, not only in Iraq but around the world. The price of gas is at a national average of more than $3 a gallon, and I’m pretty sure we continue to lose coastline worldwide to global warming, but Paris Hilton and the iPhone are the most important stories of the day.

What worries me more is that even I felt something in the air on the day the iPhone was released. Could this possibly be a feeling similar to what my grandparents felt when the war with Germany and Japan was over? Is this what Americans felt when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon?