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Wirelessness leaves
Slobs tied down

Thanks to new catch phrases that were until recently completely alien to Digital Slobs, like "Bluetooth enabled," "home networking" and "neatness," this century should be a lot less cluttered with cables and cords than the last.

Even so, other infuriating entanglements are stepping in, promising to keep our fists going through walls at, or above, historic levels.

The wireless revolution, it seems, has strings attached.

This is not to say that the woefully knotted-up Digital Age isn't in desperate need of pruning.

Dare to look behind my TV/CD/VCR/DVR/DVD player, and you'll find a labyrinth of coax cables, all idiot-proofed by duct-tape labels on both ends, with identifiers like "CABLE BOX/OUT" and "TIVO/RF IN" handwritten on them in Magic Marker.

Usually, I'm a typical haphazard Slob. Right now, there's a box of Mac & Cheese in my linen closet. Still, I saw the need to break character long enough to meticulously keep track of my entertainment center's vital circulatory system.

Otherwise, I'd have to get a degree from MIT before attempting another move in-between episodes of "24."

But as many Slobs, and every lead in every local production of "Peter Pan" ever, will tell you, wires can also be comforting.

Sure, in an ideal world, it would be cool to have your cell phone, laptop, PDA, MP3 player and kidney dialysis machine all psychically connected. But if something goes wrong, what's the first thing you're going to jiggle?

Tech support will be the first to tell you that one of the most effective instructions they recite to us over the telephone is "make sure all your connections are securely plugged in" -- second only to "if you don't stop crying, then you'll get me started and we'll be here all night."

In an increasingly complex world, this power to have some direct ability to solve our own problems is going the way of the Do-Do Bird (to further torture this metaphor, I tried to Google "Do-Do Bird," but my Internet was down -- so you're on your own).

Some of us can draw upon remote memories of a remoteless era -- a time when our dad, uncle, or some other adult male relative suffering from undiagnosed hypertension made their palms beet red, slapping their 20-inch Sylvanias silly in a vain effort to get a vertical hold on the Baltimore Colts.

Maybe they never got Johnny Unitas in focus, but they seemed to nevertheless get some satisfaction from battling it out -- at least until they keeled over from rage and/or the neighbors called the police.

Remnants of this old-school desire to "do something" in the face of high-tech hopelessness remains. According to a recent University of Maryland study, about 10 percent of those polled admitted they had committed violence against computers -- though we should probably say that in almost all cases, the computers had it coming.

Of course in the end, wireless will be better, but the tradeoff should at least give us pause. After all, the final death throe for what's left of our self-reliance in the Digital Age could be the faint memory of our last cord jiggle.