Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • February 24, 2010 ibly, pushed the right couple of buttons and got one of the adjuncts of Channel 4, which showed a slushy urban street and told people in Brooklyn when to take out their recyclables. Cleverly concluding that this was the wrong Channel 4, I boldly seized the remote and got the one with the Olympic logo and constant commercials, I sensed that I had come to the right place. My wife arrived, looking suspiciously at the TV screen. I think she could not believe that I had actually tuned it in. Then the telephone rang. She picked it up. “Johnny says figure skating is on tonight,” she reported. I enjoy figure skating, but more to the point, this meant that the telephone worked again. Good news twice. Over-engineering contributes not only to problems with night-time entertainment, but to the overall problem of earning a living. I now have a digital camera, but I have a digital camera where the controls have far more sophistication than I need. I once got some photos that I wanted to illustrate an article for the newspaper, and found out that they were somehow a movie. I never asked the camera to make a movie, and when I found out that the video inside the camera could not be transposed into one usable still photograph, I was less than amused. Probably the camera control had slipped over into the video mode by itself. I deny that I was in any way responsible. However, I was stuck with a home movie of a perfectly nice couple of people I barely know that I couldn’t use to illustrate a story commending them for having done something useful. I did not need a still camera with a movie function any more than I needed a cellular phone that takes bad photographs. Who invents this stuff, and who approves it for production? Most of this stuff is harmless, if annoying, but there are cases where over-engineering can cause danger or death. One example, made in the U.S.A., was the early production model of the M-16 used in Vietnam. The United States entered the stage of serious involvement with the M-14 – an upgrade of the M-1 Garand used in World War II and Korea, but with a fully automatic capability. The trouble is that when you shoulder-fire a rifle fitted with 30.06 rifle cartridges on full-automatic, the recoil is so drastic that you tend to send a large part of the magazine into the clouds or the third story of buildings when you are aiming at the ground floor. The M-16, engineered around a whole new concept, was known as the “Mattie Mattel Space Gun” when it first appeared. The M-16 had a hollow plastic stock, most of the metal parts were alloys, and it weighed about half as much as a conventional military rifle like a Garand or a Springfield. The M-16 was ideally suited to full automatic, and combat being a nervous situation, it was most often used on full automatic. The Field First Sergeant, a John Wayne clone, showed us that he could fire one by holding it against the tip of his nose. The weapon was so short and so light that it was ill-suited to take a bayonet, and the plastic stock meant it was not even a very good club in a pinch. Unfortunately, while the early model M-16 was an ideal weapon for outer space, it was so fine-tuned in its mechanical tolerances that it reportedly jammed in jungle and swamp combat situations with terrifying regularity. Tales filtered back to us of guys who had been found knifed or strangled when their M-16s stopped working. I never saw this happen, and I cannot vouch for how true the tales were, but they had a chilling effect on people who may not have been happy with the Army in general or the war in particular. The sergeants hammered into our heads that this would not happen if we remembered to lubricate with colloidal graphite instead of the kind of oil you use on a sewing machine, and later phases of the M-16 did not have the same problem. But it was a scary thought that soldiers would be sent into battle with guns that jammed a lot. The Soviet AK-47, on the other hand, had an excellent reputation for reliability. Some friends found one still loaded, tied a rope around it, dragged it through a rifle paddy, then threw it in a mud hole and drove a Jeep over it. The mud turned to clay, but a few days later, the guys pulled it up by the rope, threw it back in the rice paddy to clear off the mud, and shook off the water. It still fired. This was also bad for morale. History has shown who had the best system, and few people were happier than I was to see the break-up of the Soviet Union. But the Russians often had the right idea about equipment to be used by rough guys in tough situations. (We used to be issued comic books with a goodlooking female cartoon character called “Connie Rodd” telling us to remember to clean our weapons.) Stuff should be strong, sturdy, and simple if it is going to be relegated to non-experts on limited budgets. We could probably save a large chunk of the U.S. economy if we built TVs with simple dials that do not need a fussy remote, computers that process words and relay e-mail and do not do a whole lot else, telephones that never break down and don’t necessarily take photographs, and cars that stop when we put our foot down instead of reportedly using the pressure of our feet to generate electricity. That is what I think, and cavemen have spending money, too! Just when you thought nothing could save what’s left of the American automobile industry, the word is out that a roster of Toyotas are being recalled -- some due to faulty brakes. In a sense, this is good news. I drive a Ford Explorer because it is the cheapest reliable car I can fit into, so for once it looks like I know something about cars. True enough, the Ford blew its engine, despite good routine maintenance, when I was about 1,000 miles over the warranty, and I once had three flats in 10 days when the valves on the newly-installed tires degraded, probably after a couple of decades in the warehouse, but neither of these circumstances was as jarring or as outright dangerous as a brake failure at a critical moment. Brake failure by sabotage is a favorite assassination technique. Having the people who sold you the car build this sort of thing into the vehicle is not encouraging. Rumor has it that the problem with brakes that don’t stop the car has to do with some form of over-engineering: either the failure occurs because the anti-locking device was too sophisticated, or some of the faulty cars tried to recover the energy exerted in pushing the brake to revitalize the car’s storage battery. If that is true, it is a classic case of over-engineering: techno-guys try to make something that is theoretically excellent but so complicated that it either fails mechanically or cannot be operated by anybody who is not a genius or an obsessive tinkerer. Many of us have had this problem. When the new TV reception came in, my son, who has a patent pending on an invention of classic simplicity, arrived and set up an indoor aerial and a converter box so my wife and I can at least watch PBS on Saturday night, which is about the only TV we watch, except for classical music concerts and the nature and science shows. For some months, all was well. Then the Olympics started! We put in a call to find out how to see Channel 4 so we could watch what was going on in Vancouver and so I could marvel at the wisdom of all these philosophers who explain that a gold medal is better than a silver medal which is better than a bronze medal. When I tried to switch back from Channel 4 to Channel 13, it didn’t work. “Call Johnny,” my wife advised. She knows the limits of my electronic sophistication. I picked up the telephone. The line was dead. This has happened before. Shortly after our telephone supplier acknowledged that we did not owe them $2,400 because they had made a mistake on the bill and the Board of Public Utilities and Better Business Bureau knew all about it, the telephone started to fail about once a month, sometimes for several hours, sometimes for several days. My wife claims that, because Custer was killed by Indians, the government is responding to my book, “Custer Survivor,” by tapping our telephone to see if I was in any way responsible. Devoted as I am to seeing that my wife gets to watch the Olympics, I dared to tangle with the controls and, incred- Over-engineering: Just give me a brake! Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: On behalf of the Mahwah Regional Chamber of Commerce, I want to say thank you to everyone who supported and participated in Mahwah’s first WinterFest. Led by a group of committed business and civic leaders, WinterFest was a year in the making, and judging by the hundreds who participated in the eight-week calendar of events, it was a year well spent! Knowing how unpredictable winter in this region can be, the committee put outdoor winter sports and ice sculptures on hold, replacing them with more community-minded projects: thanking our veterans, lighting up the town, helping those in need, celebrating the community’s unique heritage and cultural diversity, and creating enjoyable contests – all of which were possible without any snow at all! The names of all the WinterFest contest winners are posted on the Chamber’s website, www.mahwah.com. Chamber appreciates support Click on our photo gallery to see photos of the winning light contest displays. Visit the children’s section of the Mahwah Public Library to see the 18 winners of the WinterFest coloring contest for grades K through five. Special thanks go the local businesses, organizations, and families who sponsored the lighting of the spectacular Veteran’s Tree on Franklin Turnpike in Veteran’s Memorial Park. Did you ever drive past that tree without saying “Wow”? The Chamber is proud to have dedicated this tree to our veterans. One of the goals of WinterFest was to bring the business and civic communities together. Based upon the positive response from participants and the new relationships we have formed with veterans, seniors, schools, museum society, library, charitable organizations, and religious and civic leaders, I’d say mission accomplished. Dr. Annette S. Freund, President Mahwah Regional Chamber of Commerce