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Show There's no doubt about it. Mankind has passed through a passel of periods or "ages" since his advent upon the earth. There have been changes chan-ges galore, since the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Machine Age and so on, up to the modern age of automation. Also, as each change has come, men have had less and less to do with their hands. Which of course means more leisure time and more opportunity oppor-tunity to get into mischief. It just so happens these days, that if a job can't be done with either a semi-automatic machine, it often doesn't does-n't get done. I observed an example of this here in Battle Creek the other day. A young man was mowing weeds along the sides of the city streets. His mowing machine ma-chine was semi-automatic. A gasoline motor propelled it down the street and operated the cutting knives. Of course the operator had to steer the mower and punch a button when he wanted to start, stop or raise Or lower the sickle bar. As he came down the street, mowing the two-foot high weeds, an empty garbage can was setting out in the path of the sickle bar. He could have stopped the machine, got down, moved the can to the sidewalk and then continued on with the mowing. But that didn't happen hap-pen here. He touched a button, raised the sickle bar over the can, lowered it and proceeded on down the street without even looking back. Of course, this saved time and he may have been working work-ing at so much for the job. However, it left a patch of high weeds about six feet square. And so, what could have been a nice clean job, turned out to be a patchy, ragged one. That, perhaps, is an example exam-ple of the faults of automation. Many a man and woman, too, frequently finds himself or herself practically helpless these days, when the automatic automat-ic gadgets conk out. Automobiles now must have power brakes, power steering, power windows, and automatic automat-ic gear shifts. In fact, the drivers dri-vers have so little to do, that they often fall asleep and kill themselves as well as somebody some-body else. No one went to sleep operating oper-ating a Model-T Ford. Just to hold the thing on the road was a full time muscular effort. ef-fort. Operating the brakes, clutch, spark and throttle required re-quired manual strength, skill and perpetual alertness. Anyway, during the yesteryear, yester-year, when everything was done by manpower, or horsepower, horse-power, folks didn't need to "jog" daily to keep themselves them-selves physically fit. Now, for those who do not wish to exercise in public, automatic au-tomatic jogging machines are available for use in the privacy priv-acy of the home. They are geared for the fast, slow, or in-between needs of the fat or flatulent. So long 'til Thursday. |