My mother knows that I have an iPad. It came up this way. My parents were driving home from visiting a friend and the topic of Kindle book readers came up. My father mentioned that Kindles could be compared to the iPad, certainly for things like print size and readability and responsiveness, so why doesn't she try out mine and see how she likes that? She, apparently, told him that he was confused; it's my brother who has the iPad, and it's their granddaughter's favorite toy. (It is, by far.)
So then my father insisted again that I had iPad, and she insisted I didn't, and the result was that when I got home in the midst of WiiFit exercising my father said it was my responsibility to ``save him'' from the charge of confusion when I was done sweating. Thus I took it out when I was finished with that round of Step Aerobics, and showed the existence of it, as well as how iBooks looks, and admitted that I hadn't compared it to the Kindle so I couldn't say how things like reading in the sun compared.
My mother pointed out, in a statement surely not made just to save her pride, that most of the time when she gets in I'm in my room, and on my computer, so don't tend to have the iPad out. And that it was quite out of character for me to go buying a new gizmo when it had been out for less than a year, or maybe less than two years. She might add it's a bit out of character for me to ever buy a gizmo, given the sluggishness with which I swing into action on these things.
I wonder if I should mention the new computer.
Trivia: The audience at the Opening Day, 1894, baseball game between the New York and the Baltimore National League teams, more than fifteen thousand people at Union Park, was reportedly the largest crowd ever in Baltimore to that point. Source: The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball, Frank Deford. (I note my mild doubts about the soundness of trivia points like this, as it seems like it could easily have been the largest sports-based crowd; I'd have imagined, for example, Lincoln's funeral train to draw a bigger turnout than that. I note Deford insists on calling the teams the Giants and the Orioles, which is problematic if not outright anachronistic.)
Currently Reading: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Leonard Mlodinow.