No Prē For Mē

My ancient Nokia will be sleeping with the fishes soon. It works about half the time. When it works, everything’s just fine. The rest of the time, it’s silent — no ringer, no sound through the earpiece or the speaker, and that makes it kind of tough to make a call, or to notice that someone’s calling me.

Not that a mobile phone is vital for me, of course. I work at home, and I have no life, so my VoIP land line is all I need most of the time, but I do leave the house on occasion. In fact, I discovered that the cell was dying when I tried to phone for a taxi a few weeks ago. That’s when I discovered that public phones (remember those?) have become astonishingly rare these days.

So the time has come to get a new phone. This will only be my third cell phone, as I was pretty late in joining the mobile communications revolution (being stuck on a stopped train for an hour or two some time around 2002, unable to call the person I had left work early to meet to tell them I was stuck on a stopped train convinced me to get one) and I use my phones until they croak, oblivious as I am to fashion, technology, and fashion technology. The Nokia doesn’t even have a camera. Don’t ask me how I’ve survived. I guess I’ve just been lucky.

So, what to get… Friends of mine with iPhones and Androids just love them, but I’m on Sprint, so those are out. I suppose I could get a Palm Prē (which I like to pronounce as “pompry,” for some reason), but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Aside from the fact that I just don’t need something that fancy, the advertising campaign for the phone has kind of put me off a bit.

There’s just something about that woman. I can’t quite put my finger on it… Oh, that’s it. She reminds me of this guy:

I saw The Man Who Fell to Earth when it first came out in the US, so I think I was about 13. I’ve got a thing about eyes, so I had nightmares about that face, along with the scene in which Bowie’s character first removes his human disguise, including the contact lenses.

I absolutely love the film. I even wrote a paper I’m fairly proud of about it in grad school: “Alienation and the Subsequent Development of Sexual Identity in The Man Who Fell to Earth.” But that doesn’t mean I want to buy a phone from Thomas Newton’s long-lost sister here. Hell, their species have sexual organs in their palms — remember how that moist touch made Candy Clark lose it? The phone probably has alien reproductive goo all over it.

I don’t know… CNET gave the LG LX370 a pretty positive review, and there was nothing in there about alien DNA. Maybe I’ll get one of those.

By the way, I think Tilda Swinton might be one of them too.