The announcer piped up. Dwayne said. What on earth was he gonna do with a grill? Dwayne was still staring at the Rocket Chef Grill. Why couldn't it have been a car? Dwayne heard someone yell, "Go, Dwayne!" He was sure it was Jo. Bob grinned from ear to ear. Once again the crowd began to shout. Dwayne didn't really want the grill, so he randomly guessed. He tried to imagine the grill as a silvery Trans-Am. Dwayne guessed again. "Nine." "You're right again." "Six?" "Right again. Only one more, Dwayne, and you win that grill!" Dwayne rolled his eyes. Dwayne said with forced enthusiasim. The crowd erupted into applause and cheers. Jo and Garth, Dwayne noticed, were laughing hysterically. Dwayne wondered what he would do with a Grill King grill on an aircraft carrier. Several weeks later, after several attempts to offload the grill on his relatives, Dwayne decided that the grill wasn't so bad.

It was, in fact, Rocket Chef Grill pretty nice. Dwayne sat, with his feet propped up on a lawn chair on the flight deck of the Dark Horse. With him were Jo, Garth, Mack, Slate, and Rusty. They were all clustered around the space age-looking grill. Jo was busy happily eating some grilled chicken, while Rusty was munching on a hot dog. Dwayne said. "Do you like hot dogs?" "I dunno, no taste receptors." Rusty shrugged and ravenously devoured the remainder of his hot dog. Garth said, "you'd think the kid never eats." Slate gave him a wry smile. Jo said, "At least we know who the real Grill King is." She pointed her fork towards Dwayne. Rusty laughed. "Flaming Death, that's funny!" Jo gave Rusty her best serious face. Rusty said. "Cow?" "Never mind, Rusty," Dwayne said. Jo smirked. "The Grill King hath spoken." Dwayne smiled as he took a bite of hamburger. Okay, so this story makes no sense, not even to me. But, hey, I'm tired. Also, forgive the spelling errors. I know there are lots.

A parasitic blight has woven itself into the fabric of our tools. With godlike precision, it tracks our behavior, learns our preferences, and anticipates our weaknesses. It knows everything, and it follows us everywhere. If we stray too far from its influence, our Happy Boxes dispatch reminders to Consume. Potent videodrugs lull us into mental anesthesia, then milk us for all we're worth. Our eyes kinda hurt. A familiar bitter flavor is faintly detected; this Content has been laced with something. The Algorithm looks on as additive advertisements steep in our subconsciouses. Maybe I should buy another mechanical keyboard? Our thoughts have been planted, and our carts floweth over. Were we moving too fast? Did we break too many things? Was putting profits before people really the wrong move? And, uh.. can this thing be undone? Twenty-six years ago, two technologists envisioned a different kind of future: one where humans and quiet, unobtrusive computers comfortably co-existed. In their prophetic 1996 essay The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown spoke of a time when tiny, Internet-enabled computers would be embedded in everything from clocks, to toys, to microwave ovens.

In Weiser and Brown's ideal future, our information systems would be deeply integrated into our physical environment. Subtle peripheral cues would clue us in when our attention was needed, but fade into the background when it wasn't. Contrasting the attention-leeching tools of today, Calm Technology promised to inform without overburdening. But where is this "Calm Tech", anyway? Weiser and Brown said its time was coming, but an ETA might have been nice. Maybe we should wait for our corporate overlords to build it for us? Or, perhaps, Calm Technology is something we must build for ourselves. In a previous experiment, I dumbed down my smartphone by permanently removing all but four essential applications. The result was certainly calmer, and even freeing, but vestigial user-interface elements, designed with the It Only Does Everything paradigm in mind, routinely got in my way. If I wanted to do this thing right (and I did), I knew that eventually, I'd have to rebuild my phone's operating system from the ground up.