Strokes of Genius

The wheel's pretty great. Gets your car where it needs to go. Allowed you to go through that skateboarding phase in middle school. Cooks your Hot Pocket relatively evenly in the microwave.

The telephone, that's pretty clutch. Allowed business to be conducted before email. Employs millions of call-center peons. Paved the way for sexting.

The computer? Well, it's awesome. Without it, we'd still be painting Wite Out over our typos and may never have discovered Tetris.

But these inventions are so ubiquitous, it's like we don't even notice them anymore. They're old hat, taken for granted. What about the stuff we're still marveling at? Or at least, the stuff I'm still marveling at. Liiiiike:

Shazam. It's not the app I use the most often, but it might be the one that impresses me the most with its existence. Three seconds of holding my phone high up in the air in a moderately quiet bar and suddenly I know what song I need to download when I get home? Are you kidding me? Anything that facilitates fewer moments of "Ugh who the hell sings that song??" works for me. It's some kind of high-tech Harry Potter magic.

The DVR. As someone who was programming VCRs to record TV shows when she was probably four, I have embraced the DVR with wide-open arms. I don't even know what time things come on anymore, because what does it matter? I can spend my prime-times doing anything I want, knowing that I can come home to a DVR full of the night's most excellent programs or guiltiest pleasures.

Cups that get smaller at the bottom so they fit in standard cup-holders. I'm a fan of Diet Coke, if you weren't aware, and 12 oz., 20 oz., it's just not always enough. Sometimes I have to dip into the QuikTrip for a 32+ oz. cup of ice-cold fountain Diet Coke, and we all know what happens when you're forced to hold your Big Gulp between your legs. Bad news. These tapered plastic drink receptacles are crucial to my continued happiness.

Smartphones in general. The iPhone is my KoolAid of choice, but it's really the ability to prove someone wrong when they insist that Steve Guttenberg was, in fact, the star of Top Gun, and I cannot simply let this kind of egregious error stand, even at 2 a.m. when we're kind of drunk in a bar. The iMDB app is key for this very purpose.

Flip flops. We probably do take this blessed style of footwear for granted, but you've seen those old illustrations of Bible times and stuff. They're all wearing Birkenstocks. I mean, I went through a Birk phase just like everyone else in my suburban high school, but I'm thankful that somewhere along the line someone thought to stick some fabric between the big and second toe and invent the other kind of thong.

There's some pretty cool stuff out there. Now if only someone would figure out how to cook Hot Pockets all the way evenly. Relatively isn't going to cut it in 2011. Let's get the greatest minds of our generation on this.