Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) by Dave Barry Page B

wirelessly to the Internet through wifi or a Bluetooth phone. So basically, when you put on Google Glass, you are wearing a tiny “hands-free” computer with direct access to the unimaginably vast information resources of the Internet. Think, for a moment, about what this means.
    It means you look like a douchebag.
    Seriously, you do. There is no getting around it. My daughter, who has been my daughter for her entire life and therefore has developed a very high tolerance for being embarrassed by me, refused to walk into a restaurant with me until I removed my Google Glass.
    If you go to the official Google website for Google Glass, you will see photos of attractive young people wearing Google Glass as they engage in a variety of modern youthful activities—biking, running, golfing, chopping organic vegetables, etc. Google has enough money to buy whatever it wants—Asia, for example—so you know they paid for the absolute best-looking photos of the absolute best-looking Glass-wearing individuals money could buy.
    They still look like douchebags.
    Am I saying you should not get Google Glass? No I am not. What I am saying is that in weighing your decision, you need to balance the advantages of wearing a vast information resource with numerous “hands-free” capabilities on your head against the fact that you
will
look like a douchebag. Also many people will automatically hate you and/or assume you are sneakily taking pictures of them. Even your friends and loved ones will, at bare minimum, mock you relentlessly. (My own wife, when I put on my Glass, said: “Fifteen hundred
dollars
? Why not just buy joke glasses at Party City?” * )
    But let’s look at the positives. You can control your Google Glass using voice commands, thereby leaving your hands free for other tasks in your active modern lifestyle, such as chopping organic vegetables. These voice commands begin with “OK, Glass.” For example, you might say, “OK, Glass, take a picture.” The Glass will then take a picture of whatever you’re looking at, most likely a person looking back at you with a facial expression that is expressing the concept “What a douchebag.”
    You can also use your Glass to (among other things) take video, send and receive emails, check your calendar, get map directions, search Google and view Internet websites—all on a tiny screen! Which unfortunately you can’t really see. At least I can’t, unless I hold my head very still at a certain angle, looking not unlike the way my dog, Lucy, does when she believes she has caught the scent of a distant turd.
    But I am not one to criticize a product merely because it costs a lot of money and makes me look ridiculous and is hard to use. I wanted to know how Google Glass would function under “real life” conditions. So I field-tested it over the course of a weekend in Natchez, Mississippi, where I was attending a wedding. I used Glass to get directions to the pre-wedding brunch, and I am pleased to report that it worked: I was able to successfully navigate my rental car from the hotel to the restaurant by holding my head very still so I could see the tiny map on the tiny screen. Unfortunately, this meant that much of the time I was not watching where the car was physically going. Fortunately—and I mean this as a compliment—Natchez has a total population of twenty-three, so the streets were empty, and I failed to hit anybody, as far as I know. In Miami I would have killed dozens.
    I also used Google Glass during the brunch. One of the other brunchers mentioned that he had heard that the famous bird painter John James Audubon had spent some time in Natchez. This was a perfect opportunity to tap into the vast information resources of the Internet. So I hastened out of the dining room to get my Glass, which I had chosen not to wear into the dining room because the other guests were mocking me for looking like a