Jesus (my husband) has been at the Kennedy Space Center this week awaiting the shuttle launch. It keeps getting delayed, so he’s taken on another mission: photographing Nasa’s pay phones for Obsolete.
This one is an ersatz Mercury capsule. Jesus says tells me that the real capsules are actually not a lot bigger than a telephone booth —the space inside was about the same.
3 
“Does an area code even matter when most of us make calls by selecting names from a contact list, and not dialing digits? “I find that I’m using the phone less and less. Physical talking on the phone is something old people do.” — Doug Jaeger
This is from an article by Caroline Wexler in The Wall Street Journal about how numbers in the 212 Manhattan area code are the new “old” thing in the exciting world of phone number selection. According to the article, you can buy them on eBay.
My dad’s number might actually get us some good money. It’s 925-1965, a number which has the same digits as Malcolm X’s birth and death dates (minus the first 1). We only know this because one day, back before you had to dial area codes in Manhattan, someone called my dad asking for Malcolm X. My dad reported to the caller that Mr. X was a) not a member of our household and, b) dead. The caller had, in fact, dialed the numbers printed next to his name in the newspaper.
You know, come to think of it, my parents have at least five 212 numbers wired into their rent-stabilized apartments in Manhattan. Let me check out this eBay thing. Ah yes, you can sell them! Some are up to $1000. No wait, one person is asking $1,000,000 for a number that ends in three zeroes.
This could be a model for quite the business idea. All you have to do is cross-reference the NY Times’ obits and the white pages. Duh.
5 
In honor of the new iPhone and its FaceTime video chat feature, I present Technologizer’s history of video calls. (Via PC World)
15 
