A picture is worth a thousand words or less. Michelangelo could have used an Amazon Echo, which I hear is good for creating shopping lists. The attachment is a shopping list he created for his illiterate servants.
Some of the comments on this list are interesting.
Captain Obvious says:
December 30, 2013 at 3:15 pm
Srsly? Those doodles would not have helped his servant figure out a herring, tortelli, two fennel soups, four anchovies and ‘a small quarter of a rough wine’. They’re just doodles people.
I wonder if he would have found a way to prepare a list for today's modern supermarket with its 50,000 or so SKUs.
Perhaps he could have sketched them on his smartphone and an app could match them to the relevant SKUs.
Captain NotSoObvious would probably respond to the other captain by saying that Michelangelo probably made hundreds of these grocery lists for his servants and over time the servants became so adept at interpreting his every line and squiggle that what their great master wanted from the store became clear as day to them. In fact, it's not so obvious that Michelangelo had created the first emojis, which seemed to work quite well, and for which he has not been credited, I believe. I suspect that this was a shopping list from Michelangelo's younger days, for he was pretty much toothless, like George Washington, in his graying years and would have found it difficult to eat some of the food on the list.
As for adapting to the complexities of modern shopping, I'm sure Michelangelo could handle 50,0000 emojis, and he might enjoy doing the shopping himself, provided that someone had invented a horizontal shopping cart that would allow him to shop while lying on his back.
No Line Shopping: No free lunch--think again. I have heard from reliable sources that adept hackers will be able thwart the system to easily get a free cake and eat it too, without wasting free time that could have been better spent in the Sun.