If you didn’t see Last Week Tonight with John Oliver last night, his Main Story was on the power grid. It’s a well-done piece – a bit convoluted at times, but then that’s some of the point of the story. But it’s interesting, and has good humor. One odd quibble of sorts. At one point, Oliver shows an old video from the 1950s and shows a housewife really pleased by how electricity helps making her ironing so much easier and better. As you might imagine, Oliver has a lot of fun with this. Except… Years ago, when I was in high school, I remember asking my Grandma Rose a question. She was a wonderful person, one of the truly sweetest I’ve ever known, traveled a bit, enjoyed reading and opera, worked at the family department story in Gary, Indiana, when she had the time, loved singing and playing the piano, and had a good perspective on the world. She had been born in 1895, and I asked her – with all the inventions she’d seen in her life, like cars, airplanes, radio, television, space travel and more – what did she think the greatest innovation was. And to my surprise (and I suspect it would be John Oliver’s, as well), she said…”The electric iron.” Really. Honest. Needless-to-say, that was not remotely what I expected, so I asked her why. She explained that when she was young and you had to do ironing, you had basically a slab of metal which was put into the middle of the fireplace to heat it up. Then you reached in to grab it – risking being burned – and did some ironing until it cooled off…when you put it back into the fire, heated it up, reached into the fire again to grab it and go through the whole process again and again, until your ironing was done. And do this every time you did the laundry and needed to iron. When the electric iron came along, that changed everything, and you didn’t risk being burned repeatedly whenever you had to iron. By the way, her story taught me an important lesson: people tend to judge what’s important to them by how things impact their life, not necessarily how it changes society. So, Oliver’s quips about the electric iron aside, which Grandma Rose would sweetly inform him of his mistake, here’s the segment.
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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