I think I just stumbled across the ultimate Orwellian nightmare: a “mirror” that keeps track of your movements and executes your voice commands.

It’s the New York Times’ “Magic Mirror” prototype. According to its Internet hype, “With this omniscient slab affixed to your wall, you can surf the web, flip through your wardrobe and send reassuring e-mails to your teenage daughter, whom you should have driven to school a good 30 minutes ago.”

I don’t need a magic mirror to flip through my wardrobe and chose the proper styles and colors. My wife does a great job of that, and I’d rather look into her face than into a mirror.

If I had a teenage daughter, I wouldn’t communicate with her through bloodless emails or text messages. My voice still carries across the house. And we still have school buses.

The Internet item urges me to “forget crosswords and Krugman, because The New York Times has created a new bathroom companion that looks infinitely more entertaining than either of them.”

I beg to differ. When I sit down in my bathroom to work a crossword, I don’t want any all-seeing eye intruding into my thoughts or movements. All I need is my spectacles and a working ballpoint pen. After I’m finished, I can retire to my office to absorb at my leisure the economic wisdom of Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning Princeton scholar and Times columnist. For that, I need a cup of good, strong Maxwell House to sharpen my mental faculties, and I don’t normally take my coffee mug into the john.

It’s bad enough to compare Krugman and crosswords unfavorably to a high-tech gadget. It’s even worse to surrender the bathroom mirror to the tender mercies of Microsoft. The “magic mirror” uses Microsoft Kinect “to detect and follow your movements, while deploying voice recognition technology to execute your commands,” according to the website “Engadget.”

You can, I’m told, hold your prescription bottle up to the mirror and it will tell you how many pills to take, and how often. Shucks, all I need is a pair of bifocals to read the labels the pharmacist sticks on every prescription container.

The mirror is a marvelous piece of ancient technology. You don’t have to plug it in, turn it on or boot it up. It’s just there, ready to capture your image and reflect it back to you. It tells you immediately whether your hair is combed, your tie is straight, or your nose hairs need trimming. It will last a lifetime without growing obsolete, which is probably what irritates the Internet nerds. Anything that doesn’t become obsolete before you’ve paid off the credit-card charge is unacceptable to them.

The mirror’s only drawback is that it reflects mirror images. That means that when you part your hair on the left, the mirror shows it on your right. That’s a minor matter for me. I’ve been looking at my own mirror image for nearly 75 years, and I’ve never had a problem recognizing myself. I can shave while looking in a mirror, even though it shows the razor in my right hand instead of the left, which is my dominant hand.

The ambulance people have found it advisable to paint the word “ambulance” backward on the fronts of their vehicles so that motorists looking in their rearview mirrors will see it written forward. That’s no big deal with me, either. I worked for newspapers in the era of hot metal, when you had to read raised type in reverse, because its inked surface had to be pressed against newsprint to form readable letters. I can read backward and forward.

The mirror image produces no obstacle when it comes to knotting my tie. My hands and fingers learned the formula for the Windsor knot decades ago, and I need the mirror only to tell me whether the broad part falls below the narrow part, and hangs the proper distance below my belt.

I don’t want to think about the complications of using a “magic mirror” to dress.

I don’t want to stare through bleary eyes at an “error message” that tells me in some kind of code what icon to press to bring my image into view. I don’t want to worry about my mirror going blank during a thunderstorm or winter storm that is too much for Duke Power to handle. I don’t want to dial technical assistance and get connected with somebody in Bangalore, India, who tries to tell me in heavily accented English how to make the mirror tell me what I want to know.

In short, I want a mirror that does what mirrors were doing way before the time of Cleopatra: reflecting the image of the person looking into them.

There are times when I need to escape the interlocking grid of Internet addicts and just be alone. I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would need, or want, a magic mirror keeping constant vigil on my thoughts and actions.

The magic mirror can offer a full menu of New York Times articles and videos, but I can call them into view at my leisure while sitting in a comfortable chair in front of my computer monitor. If I want to relive 9-11 ten years after the event, I can turn on my old-fashioned television set or pop in a DVD. If I want to revisit World War II, I can turn to the Military Channel. The world is constantly at my fingertips.

I don’t want it following me into my bathroom.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.