Parker County Today April 2017 | Page 114

our opinions: CURMUDGEON MUSINGS The Last Word BY MARK BROWN Aren’t Those Trendy New Tiny Houses Really Just Dogloos For People?  N ew trends fascinate me. My current favorite? Tiny Houses seems to be the latest fad, especially as it pertains to so-called reality TV. I watched several episodes and could not help but comment on the whole Tiny House scene. A family of five moves into a 350-square-foot home. It’s really way too generous to call it a home. It’s more like a doghouse.  It’s all my wife and I can do to stay in a 23-foot camper for two to three days without going berserk. You have to go outside to change your mind. The guy on the show tells the people they can’t have any personal possessions, heck, you can’t have any personal thoughts! Put a family of five in a motel room indefinitely and see what happens. These people that participate in this Tiny House thing are not destitute, they pay thousands of dollars for these deals. Most of the owners seem to want to pull these things 112 around from place to place, and they appear really heavy, because they try to build them like homes, with all the accou- trements, marble showers, full kitchens, lofts. They also have a magician-type guy that can make a sofa turn into a dining room table that can unfold like a Transformer, he can make a stairway disappear into a book- shelf, and a loft with a trapeze. So when they get all that done then they need a giant truck to pull it. It is probably just me, but I can’t see it. Hey man, just go buy a camper, it’s much cheaper and you don’t need a guy to tell you that you can’t have your stuff. P.S. If you haven’t watched the Tiny House show, do your- self a favor, it’s the best come- dy relief there is. So here’s what I want to invent. You pick up your iPhone and send a text to someone and get a text back, then you get another text from some- one entirely different, and in your multitasking mind, driv- ing on autopilot, listening to your music, using your GPS, checking your iWatch, and you respond to who you think is the original texter. But, nooooooo! You have responded to the wrong person. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? So, I would like to invent a stupid monitoring app, just to protect me from my own multi- tasking, auto-piloting, dumb self.   Really, the only way I know to accomplish that is throw away all these stupid devices, and go back to an easier way of life, a life without instant communication, without track- ing devices. In fact I have already started rebelling, I am going back to using maps (yes, a piece of paper you read to figure out which route you want to take), at least for the next few minutes.