“If I were to get one, pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to live without one,” said holdout Henry Stimpson, neatly nailing the biggest problem with cell phones: the way they turn previously independent individuals into the great unweaned.

“Typical incident,” Stimpson said: “I went to a ballgame with a bunch of my friends and afterwards all the other guys in the car were whipping out their phones and calling their wives. I don’t need to call my wife! She knows I’m coming home.”

…

“I go to concerts all the time and my network of friends, they just don’t know what to do when they confront somebody without a cell,” said a 27-year-old holdout, Briee (cq) Della Rocca. “They say, ‘Call me when you get to the parking lot and we’ll meet up somewhere.’ I say, ‘I don’t have a cell phone. Let’s plan in advance’ — and the record stops. It’s almost like they don’t even consider that this is a potential option — to plan ahead.”

Cell phones also allow their users to be late (“Almost there!”) and opportunistic.

Tools are useful when the human is in control. For too many, it seems like the phone is in charge and the person just acts like a tool.

The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Except her own plane. So that was the plan.

Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than they could arm war planes, Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.

“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the aircraft,” Penney recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.”

To view her interview on C-SPAN click the link below:

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Bonus: Watch the rabbit run through the background at about :11 seconds.

Apparently the president didn’t get the memo as the next day when he was in Toledo he scarfed down two chili dogs w/fries and a side bowl of chili