Giving Christianity a Bad Name

As if God doesn’t already have enough on his plate, his so-called friends are busy burning up bandwidth with such twaddle as that reproduced below, which entered my inbox this morning. To make matters worse, it comes from a minister of my acquaintance…who, you would think, should know better. You would think so wrongly, as it happens.

I hereby spare you the torture of reading it in the original form, which necessitated endless scrolling and squinting against ill-advised color schemes. (Hint: Red type on a black background is to be avoided.) I haven’t corrected the punctuation and other oddities (“the ex-vocalist of the AC/DC”), either. Nor have I made the slightest attempt to verify whether “these facts” are indeed facts.

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DID YOU KNOW THESE FACTS?

I SURE DIDNT TILL NOW

Death is certain but the Bible speaks about untimely death!

Make a personal reflection about this.....

Very interesting, read until the end.....

It is written in the Bible (Galatians 6:7):

'Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man sow, that shall he also reap.

Here are some men and women who mocked God:

John Lennon (Singer):
Some years before, during his interview with an American Magazine, he said:'Christianity will end, it will disappear. I do not have to argue about that. I am certain. Jesus was ok, but his subjects were too simple, today we are more famous than Him' (1966).

Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times.


Tancredo Neves (President of Brazil ):
During the Presidential campaign, he said if he got 500,000 votes from his party, not even God would remove him from Presidency.

Sure he got the votes, but he got sick a day before being made President, then he died.


Cazuza (Bi-sexual Brazilian composer, singer and poet):
During A show in Canecio ( Rio de Janeiro ), while smoking his cigarette, he puffed out some smoke into the air and said: 'God, that's for you.'

He died at the age of 32 of LUNG CANCER in a horrible manner.


The man who built the Titanic
After the construction of Titanic, a reporter asked him how safe the Titanic would be.

With an ironic tone he said:

'Not even God can sink it'

The result: I think you all know what happened to the Titanic


Marilyn Monroe (Actress)
She was visited by Billy Graham during a presentation of a show.

He said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her.

After hearing what the Preacher had to say, she said:

'I don't need your Jesus'.

A week later, she was found dead in her apartment


Bon Scott (Singer)
The ex-vocalist of the AC/DC. On one of his 1979 songs he sang:

'Don't stop me; I'm going down all the way, down the highway to hell'.

On the 19th of February 1980, Bon Scott was found dead, he had been choked by his own vomit.


Campinas (IN 2005)
In Campinas , Brazil a group of friends, drunk, went to pick up a friend.....

The mother accompanied her to the car and was so worried about the drunkenness of her friends and she said to the daughter holding her hand, who was already seated in the car:

'My Daughter, Go With God And May He Protect You.'

She responded: 'Only If He (God) Travels In The Trunk, Cause Inside Here.....It's Already Full '

Hours later, news came by that they had been involved in a fatal accident, everyone had died, the car could not be recognized what type of car it had been, but surprisingly, the trunk was intact.

The police said there was no way the trunk could have remained intact. To their surprise, inside the trunk was a crate of eggs, none was broken


Christine Hewitt (Jamaican Journalist and entertainer)
said the Bible (Word of God) was the worst book ever written.

In June 2006 she was found burnt beyond recognition in her motor vehicle.


Many more important people have forgotten that there is no other name that was given so much authority as the name of Jesus.

Many have died, but only Jesus died and rose again, and he is still alive.

'Jesus'I have done my part, Jesus said

'If you are embarrassed about me,

I will also be embarrassed about you before my father.''

Lord, I love you and I need you, come into my heart, and bless me, my family, my home, and my friends, in Jesus' name. Amen.'

---

Oh my.

As usual, one wonders where to begin. First off, the whole thing is pretty damn insulting to God, for it all boils down to “If God gets mad at you he’s gonna kill you.” Worse, in the case of “the man who built the Titanic,” God kills dozens of people and terrifies hundreds because he’s mad at one guy.

I don’t know what you think of God, but as is so often the case it appears that I have a higher opinion of him than some of those who make a big deal about how Godly they are.

(It’s really quite astonishing to think that this was being promulgated by an ordained minister of a “real” denomination, and not prefaced with anything along the lines of “Can you believe the hokum some people send around?” One wonders what sort of things are being taught in their seminaries.)

It’s also difficult to see why God would be so upset with John Lennon. I don’t think Lennon was mocking God. I think Lennon decried what he perceived as the Beatles’ insane popularity, and the public’s insistence on hanging on everything the Beatles said or did.

Also, it’s playing a little fast-and-loose with the facts to say, “Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times.” Lennon's murder came nearly 15 years later. As my old debate coach was wont to say, “Your causal link is a little casual.” But in my experience, “Christians” don’t mind jettisoning the truth in order to make their point. Assuming that God is really that thin-skinned, why would he wait so long to smite someone who “mocked” him?

I have no idea whether the Billy Graham-Marilyn Monroe anecdote is true, but let's say it is. How, exactly, is her statement "mocking" anything or anyone? She is made to say she doesn't need Jesus. Okay. You may believe she was wrong, but to be mistaken is not to be mocking. And, again, it seems to be a little insulting toward the Creator, for it pretty much casts him in the role of saying, "Well, okay, I sent this guy to preach to her one time and she wouldn't listen, so ba-zip! off with her head." Wow. I had the impression that Jesus instructed his disciples to have more perseverance than that, but apparently not.

And all of this begs one big, fat, bug-eyed question: What about people who don’t “mock” God (no matter how fast-and-loosely you define “mock”)? I mean, everybody dies, no? And some very good, very devout people die ghastly deaths. So what’s up with that? The anonymous author of this pretty un-Christian piece of drivel would have us believe that those who “mock” God will die a horrible death. I happen to think that God’s got a stronger ego than that, but for the sake of argument let’s go with it. You mock God, you get smote or smitten or whatever the past tense of smite is. But that would imply that those who don’t mock God don’t get smote—don’t get murdered, don’t get cancer, don’t die of drug overdoses—and, well, sorry, but that just ain’t true. And I’d be willing to bet that plenty of people who do “mock” God—again, whatever that may mean—live long healthy lives and die peacefully in their sleep at the ripe old age of 89.

In short, it doesn’t work that way. God—any god worthy of the proper-noun status—is bigger than that. He must be, or he wouldn’t be worth discussing. And I submit that any religion that holds--as this bit of balderdash certainly implies—that you have to be real careful not to tick God off lest he send a lightning bolt your way isn’t religion at all but mere superstition.

It’s what I call Great Pumpkin Theology. You remember that bit from “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” where Linus, in the pumpkin patch awaiting the Great Pumpkin’s arrival, promises Charlie Brown or Sally or somebody to put in a good word for them if the Great Pumpkin arrives. And then he panics, for he said if. “I mean when! …I'm doomed! One little mistake like that can cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by.”

Well, I am of the opinion that a good many “godly” people are in fact thinking of the Great Pumpkin.

And isn’t that a form of mockery?

Happy Second of July!

I posted this two years ago, and thought it fun enough to recycle. Happy Second of July!

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On July 3, 1776, John Adams wrote this to his wife, Abigail:

"The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward for evermore."

Well, he had the "pomp and parade" bit right, even if he was off by two days. As you may remember from History class, July 2, 1776, is the date that the Second Continental Congress passed Lee's Resolution, declaring the colonies to be independent of Britain. So you might say that today, not this Tuesday, is the 230th anniversary of US independence. Or you might, as I do, say that this is something worth celebrating twice.

Let us hope, on this commemoration of freedom, that the United States might continue to be truly the land of liberty, dedicated to the ideals of its own Constitution, ever resistant to the tyranny of those who would impose their opinions and beliefs on others, a genuine defender of all freedoms, an exemplar for the rest of the world. And let us hope that everyone enjoys a safe and happy Independence Day...or two!

The Vision Thing

A little while ago I sent this off to almost everybody in my address book (excluding a few that I knew I had entertained with the story already, and a few whom I knew wouldn't give a rip). It seems worth putting here, too:

The Vision Thing
Some of you have heard this story--sorry about that; nobody likes summer reruns. However, it seems important to send to just about everybody, even if that means some repeats. (I'm sending this to about everybody in my address book, which is something I seldom do.)

About a month ago I noticed something "different" in the vision field of my left eye. I have always had many "floaters," more pronounced in the left eye, and scarcely even noticed them after 51 years. But now there was something different among the familiar old patterns, a couple of little blips that moved, jumpily, as my eye moved...unlike the floaters, which tend to go their own little ways. I determined to keep an eye on it. No pun intended.

That was on a Saturday. On Monday, at the movies with my son, I noted a flash of light in my left eye when I glanced toward him at one point. So of course I spent some time looking left-right-left to see if I could duplicate the feat. I did, a couple of times, though not every time.

That evening the pattern of floaters was different from the old familiar picture, and they seemed thicker.

Off to UrgentCare. The doctor there couldn't see anything amiss, and recommended that I hie on in to an emergency room if things persisted or worsened.

No change the next day, Tuesday, but I brought it to the attention of my family doctor at a previously made appointment. He sent me to an ophthalmologist.

On Wednesday at the ophthalmologist, I was informed that I had a tear in the retina and the vitreous had "collapsed," which sounded pretty awful but which seemed to bother the MDs less than the tear. The doctor I visited sent me down the hall to a retina specialist who confirmed the diagnosis and wheeled in the laser gear for, as he put it, some "spot-welding."

Well, all's well that ends well, as they say. A week later I re-visited the clinic, and the doctor was very pleased with how things were looking. No pun intended. I'll go back in a couple of weeks for another follow-up. From my side of the eyeball, the vision in that eye is back to normal, though the floaters aren't. I imagine I now have a new pattern of them that I'll have to spend the next 50 years getting used to.

The moral of the story is this: If you EVER notice anything suddenly different about your vision, get it checked immediately. A torn retina is a big deal, but a less-big deal than a detached retina, which would have been the next thing had I ignored my symptoms. (The torn retina was treated in the exam room with a portable laser unit. Uncomfortable, but not horribly painful. A detached retina would have required big-time surgery. After the "spot-welding" I drove myself home, and there were no restrictions on my activities. Such would not be so with a detached retina.)

As with so many other things in the medical realm, speed is everything. If you ever experience sudden visual changes or disturbances, don't wait for it to "go away." It probably will, but it will be replaced by something worse.

Consider yourself warned!

Are These Guys Even TRYING??

As faithful readers know, I am intrigued by various bits and pieces of spam that come across my radar scope. Much of it is snagged by various filters, which is fine, but every so often one or two slip through. Some of them in the past have showed great ingenuity, and you can certainly see how they must attract marks. But some of them are so half-baked that you wonder how serious the spammer even is. For instance, here's this that arrived this morning:

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Dear Customer,

MetaBank temporarily suspended your account.
Reason: Billing failure.
We need you to complete an account update so we can unlock your account.

To start the update process follow the link below :

https://www.ebankmeta.com/onlineserv/HB/Signon.cgi

Once you have completed the process, we will send you an email notifying
that your account is available again. After that you can access your account at any time.

The information provided will be treated in confidence and stored in our secure database.
If you fail to provide required information your account will be automatically
deleted from MetaBank database.

Copyright @ 2005 MetaBank. MetaBank is an Equal Housing Lender. Member FDIC.

Note:
* If you received this message in your SPAM/BULK folder, that is because of the restrictions implemented by your ISP
* For security reasons, we will record your ip address, the date and time.
* Deliberate wrong inputs are criminally pursued and indicted.

---

Now, we do have MetaBanks in my community, so that's a plus. (You'd be amazed how many times my accounts have been suspended at banks that don't even operate in my locale!) I don't have any accounts there, but that's not the spammer's fault. The rest of it, though, is pretty ho-hum. Sure, there's the MetaBank logo, but come on...anyone can grab a logo off the interweb. The body of the message conveys no sense of urgency, while the best spam of this ilk makes me think I had better get on this johnny-on-the-spot or Dire Consequences will follow! This particular message, though, does nothing of the sort. It comes off as plain old housekeeping. Sort of like all the "important changes to your account" stuff we're forever getting from banks and credit-card companies. ZZZzzz.

Then there's the URL. It so happens that "https://www.ebankmeta.com/onlineserv/HB/Signon.cgi" does indeed take you to the real MetaBank, which is actually a little odd. If I'm one of those people who doesn't trust hotlinks and I copy-and-paste the address (as I did above), then I end up at the real MetaBank and thus out of the spammer's clutches. Which I'm pretty sure is a bad thing, from the spammer's point of view. I'd probably click around on the MetaBank website for awhile trying to find the place where I update my account, and when that failed I'd probably send e-mail via the bank's "contact us" link, at which point I'd learn I'd been duped.

All in all, it seems the spammer has not thought this through.

Those of us of a cynical nature, of course, like to mouse over the links in such messages and see where they really point to. And doing so makes me think this particular spammer needs to be looking for a new line of work, for his heart is clearly not in his current profession. The real link is to http://mail.rottenmann.at/kk.html. Rottenmann? I ask you! He might just as well have used http://www.ripyouoff.com. Crimeny!

And as it happens, following the link in Firefox 3 produces a Reported Web Forgery! page, which is fairly cool.


I'm in general not a big fan of internet entities "protecting" us without our asking them to do so (see "No Worries! AOL Is Watching Out for You!"), but Firefox at least provides an "ignore" option, unlike virtually every other "protector" I've encountered.

So I don't know. Maybe it's me, but it just seems like the glory days of spamming--the days of the truly imaginative spoof, the really admirable phish, the electronic confidence game crafted by people who took pride in their work and really put the "art" in "con artist"--have passed. Now it's all just one step, maybe two removed from virtual pan-handling. I fully expect to open one of these things one day and have it simply say, "Give me money."

Truly, the artists have all passed on.

News from the Outside

A few minutes ago I "dugg" an article from the New York Times at Digg.com, and noted for not the first time the "blog it" link. Never having tried it before, I decided to go for broke. Clicked it. A few seconds later got back a notice telling me that my blog had reported it had been successfully posted. Rather anti-climactic. The results are viewable to you in the post that immediately precedes this one, "How to Put Civil Liberties in the White House" by Geoffrey R. Stone.

When I dugg the article, I added this comment:

Now THIS is an idea I can get behind. As the author indicates, having an advocate for civil liberties in the White House has historically been sheer happenstance. The way things have been these past eight years, it's high time to make sure somebody is charged with making sure this sweet land of liberty remains that way!

I always find it strange that so many right-wingnut types are simultaneously super-patriots and anti-liberty. Where I sit, you can't be both. If you're opposed to liberty--civil or otherwise--you're opposed to America, period. This is the "land of liberty," after all; the image of Liberty on our currency is as old as "in God we trust," which motto the right-wingnuts manage to twist into "proof," to their minds, that the US is a "Christian nation." Likewise the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which the Declaration of Independence tells us are inalienable rights granted us by our Creator. Representations of Liberty grace who knows how many state capitol buildings. And we haven't even mentioned the Statue of Liberty.

So the question remains in my mind: How can you call yourself a patriot--how can you call yourself a Christian--and yet believe that curbs on liberty are a good thing? Ever?

How to Put Civil Liberties in the White House

The next president should create a new executive branch position: a civil liberties adviser.

read more | digg story

Whose Blog Is It, Anyway?

While trolling the web recently for some advice on building an RSS feed for my employer (who doesn't yet know I'm exploring the possibility...won't he be surprised!), I came upon a nifty article at Stephen's Web, "Managing Your Blog Entry - 11 Better Tips" by Stephen Downes. I was immediately attracted to Downes's independent thought on the subject of blogging, being myself fully aware of the fact that, according to more than one article I've read, mine is not a "real" blog. You know the sort of article I mean--the kind that tell you what your e-mail "should" or "should not" be (it "should" be brief, it "should not" be detailed, etc.), what a "proper" web page "should" be...and of course what a "real" blog "should" do or be.

My thought always has been, "This is my blog. It "should" be whatever I want it to be. Ditto for my e-mail, my web sites, and, yes, my RSS feed. Sure, these things must follow certain protocols--my web site had damn well better be written in HTML or a successor thereto, or it plain won't work!--but for the rest of it, well, who says it should be thus or so...and who asked him in the first place?

Downes, I think, would not disagree (read him for yourself and make your own judgment), but he expresses himself far less pugnaciously than I just did. His springboard is a list of "shoulds" created by a journalist named Vincent Maher, whose list Downes carefully deconstructs. For instance:

Maher:

• A blog entry is a stub for conversation
  One of the key ways to create a loyal audience for your blog is to create a community of readers who interact with each-other on your blog. This means that your blog entries should be structured in such a way that they start conversations. This means they need to be short and punchy, with a clearly defined point or set of points.

Downes:

• No it isn't. The point of a blog isn't to gather a loyal cadre of readers around you dutifully writing comments. And you certainly should not be writing your blog simply to entice the commenters. And if your readers aren't capable of reading anything other than short and punchy, are you sure you should be writing to them? Think this through. A blog entry isn't some place you create to prompt conversation. A blog is a place where you say something. As for the commenters, they should be writing on their own blogs, where people can actually link to them.

Maher:

• Be active in your own conversations
  Don't sit and watch the comments streaming in and do nothing, get in there! Unlike traditional journalists, the blogger's role is to steer and be part of the conversations they start.

Downes:

• The blogger's role is to blog. If it feels to you that this includes responding to comments, do that. If you'd rather make sure your responses are highlighted and indexed, respond in a new blog post. But don't let anyone convince you that you have to be some kind of chatterbug to be a good blogger. Respond if you have something to say and be a good listener otherwise.

And so on. A nice, thoughtful, and entertaining essay. Give it a read.

Also, Downes did provide me some pretty helpful RSS advice, too, in his excellently named article "How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer." It worked, even without a beer, of which my employer would not have approved. During business hours, at least.

This Is What They Have to Say

Again, a smattering of collected quotations. I think all of them are from A Word a Day.

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it. -Ezra Pound, poet (1885-1972)

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible. -George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

God must have loved the people in power, for he made them so much like their own image of him. -Kenneth Patchen, poet and novelist (1911-1972)

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. -Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld, moralist (1613-1680)

We are all equal before the law, but not before those appointed to apply it. -Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)


If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. -Desmond Tutu, clergyman (b. 1931)

Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength. -Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. -William James, psychologist (1842- 1910)

The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others. -Carlo Dossi, author and diplomat (1849-1910)

There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare. -Sun Tzu, general (6th century BCE)

We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past. -Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion. -Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the U.S. (1809-1865)

Small Minds

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. --Mark Twain

I had occasion to reflect on that favorite quotation by one of my favorite authors this past weekend, as I listened to a speaker who mistakenly assumed himself to be in a roomful of Lutherans, make what I have come to think of as The Obligatory Slam against the Catholic Church. Readers of these chronicles will know that I work for a Lutheran organization, which this past weekend had its big annual hootenanny. My co-workers are all great people, and reasonably tolerant of the token Catholic in their midst. But of course it would be too much to expect that progressive attitude to infect all members of their denomination.

Here's the set-up: The keynote speaker intimated to the audience that he was grateful that his parents, in their youth, had decided to leave the Catholic Church and become Lutherans. The implication being that had they not done so, he might today be -- gasp! -- a horrible, benighted Catholic and not an enlightened and superior Lutheran.

Well, golly. It so happens that my parents were Catholic, too, and did not move to another religion, and they were not especially horrible people. And it so happens that I have decided -- consciously -- to remain affiliated with the Catholic Church, and I don't consider myself especially horrible, either. I'm at least sensitive enough not to elevate myself by running down others. Much.

The keynote speaker being a minister, I imagine he must have read the Gospel of Luke. But perhaps he missed the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

In case you missed it too, it's in Luke 18, beginning at verse 9:

He then addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.

"Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.

The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, 'O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity--greedy, dishonest, adulterous--or even like this tax collector.

I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.'

But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.'

I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted."

Ironic, no?

Ironic, too, that after making his Obligatory Slam against the Catholic Church, the speaker then went on to tell us how difficult it was for him to be in the minority in his largely Catholic community. Do tell! I know I felt pretty lonely and oppressed at that moment, too, as probably a minority of one!

As my anger at his insensitive and stupid comments faded -- a little -- I began to reflect on other occasions when I have endured The Obligatory Slam against the Catholic Church at Lutheran gatherings, and I began to wonder about the phenomenon. Of course, to elevate oneself by tearing down someone else is human nature; I suspect that's why Jesus felt obliged to warn his followers about it. And I have no doubt that there are plenty of Catholic gatherings in which Protestantism is denigrated. (In my earshot, it's always "Protestantism," not a specific denomination or body.) But I am curious as to why a denomination that prides itself on having moved "beyond" Catholicism (for instance, they like to term theirs a "mature" theology, by which of course they mean that Catholic theology is immature, that is, not as sophisticated -- good -- as theirs), a denomination that believes its nominal founder re-formed a defective church, seems to find it necessary to keep reaching backward across 500 years and take a swipe at its ancestor.

A feeling of inadequacy, perhaps? A feeling of guilt, perhaps? Even after half a millennium?

I am reminded of the feeling I get upon reading certain atheist authors' essays. Now, I have nothing against atheists. In fact, I consider atheism a pretty reasonable point of view. (I need not share a point of view to consider it reasonable. It is both blessing and curse.) Someone's inability to believe in that which cannot be proven hardly seems something to revile. Indeed, I have often said that I doubt that God has anything against atheists either.

But a good many atheist authors whom I've read are in fact anti-theist...and I don't cotton much to that. If you can't make yourself believe in a Deity, fine. But let it go. This business of deriding people who do believe, and making it a personal mission to tear down their beliefs, is inappropriate. (Interesting to note that some atheist authors decry religion on the ground that it stifles thought and expression...which is not necessarily untrue, but I find it ironic that so many atheists seek to do exactly the same thing by belittling those who believe: it is an obvious attempt to stifle the expression of those who hold a different point of view.)

Well, I feel much the same about these slams against my church. There is a whiff of insecurity about them, a certain scent of fear. and often a fair amount of ax-grinding as well. For they're invariably directed not again "other" religions, but quite specifically against the Catholic faith. I've yet to hear anyone of them express gratitude that his parents left the Episcopal Church, or the Congregational Church, or the Greek Orthodox Church; I've yet to hear one of them grouse about problems she had with unsympathetic Jewish leaders, causing her to leave the Jewish faith. I've yet to hear any of them bemoan the fact that other Lutheran bodies don't ordain women. It is always the Catholic Church they feel obliged to lash out against, and usually superfluously. The keynote speaker this past weekend made no point other than that he was glad to be a Lutheran. Well, good. He should be. That's all he really needed to say, no? The rest of it was unnecessary, insensitive, stupid, and immature. "O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity."

I realize that the Mark Twain quotation above isn't quite dead-on -- he refers specifically to small people who belittle others' ambitions -- but the sentiment applies, I think. Small people will attempt to make themselves great by belittling others.

The words attributed to Jesus, on the other hand, are spot on.

Perhaps Not Exactly a "Sprint"

It's possible that the horse has already expired, but here's some more about Sprint (Previous whining here and here.)

Faithful readers may recall from "Almost Helpful" that I was not wowed by Sprint's close-but-no-cigar response to an e-mail query I sent after making several circuits through their less-than-helpful website.

A little while after the exchange (which I never followed up on), I received via e-mail an invitation to fill out a customer-satisfaction survey. Which I did, and honestly. A day or so later, I received the following response:

Thank you for responding to our survey. We are sorry to learn that you have an unresolved issue as your satisfaction is very important to us.

A Sprint representative will contact you via your PCS phone at no charge, within 3 business days to assist you.

Please do not respond to this email. If you have any questions please contact Customer Service or visit one of our websites:

http://www.sprint.com or http://www.sprintpcs.com

Which is all well and good. But that message was e-mailed to me on May 15; here we are on June 2 and I have yet to hear from Sprint. I don't have a calendar in front of me, but I'm almost certain that it's been three business days...although, as I think about it, how would I know what Sprint considers a "business day"? Maybe every other Thursday is a "business day" in Sprint land. Who can say?

I can say a couple of things: First, don't make promises you can't keep. In the Business Communications class I taught this past semester, I had to disagree with the author of our textbook, who was a fan of specificity and would have approved mightily of "A Sprint representative will contact you via your PCS phone at no charge, within 3 business days to assist you." In theory I agree, but as I pointed out to my class, if you are going to pin yourself down like that, you'd better make bloody sure you can deliver. Or someone might just post an unflattering blog entry about your broken promise.

Second, the mystery of why Sprint is experiencing customer defection becomes less and less mysterious with my each passing encounter with them...

Memorial Day 2008

Well, here it is again. Memorial Day. I was moved to revisit my post in re Memorial Day from lasy year, and find that little has changed. My son again played at the Memorial Day service at a local church, a service that this year was a little less blindly pro-military but still uncomfortably tilting toward hero-worship. I'm too much a believer in our American concept of a military that is subordinate to civilian authority, and consider it more than a little dangerous when "honoring" turns into "elevating."

There seems also the ongoing argument about what Memorial Day is "supposed" to be. Again was repeated the refrain, "This is not All-Saints Day," the implicating being that one is not "supposed" to be remembering non-military dead on this day. And yet the service in question tilts heavily toward honoring all those in or ever in uniform--there was the obligatory moment where all veterans in the congregation were asked to stand, and everyone else applauded. Well, this is Memorial Day, not Veterans Day, and if one is to be technical (as, evidently, one is), then one should stick to the idea that it's "supposed" to be about honoring those who have died while in service to their country...not those who served their country, came home, and died 50 years later.

That said, I have already devoted a certain amount of the day reflecting upon my parents...even though Mom was never in the military and Dad did his two years back in the '50s. I have decided to forgo the cemetery visit--I prefer to do my mourning in a more private way, and the place is just too darn populated on Memorial Day. I don't mind the deceased population; it's the living who are a little too much to take. We planted flowers at the grave on Saturday, and I will visit there at some other time, some more private time.

You see, every day is Memorial Day.

Ahead of Their Time

Yesterday morning I was on my favorite TV-listing website, Zap2It.com, where A&E is heavily promoting its remake of The Andromeda Strain. Maybe too heavily. Somebody in Marketing got a little bit ahead of him- or herself. He's a screen print; you may click on it for a bigger view:


The sharp-eyed among you will note that the topmost banner tells me that The Andromeda Strain is "Premiering Tonight 9PM/8C." The left-hand banner tells me the same thing.But the banner atop the listings, just below the blue Zap2It field, assures me that it's "Premiering Tomorrow 9PM/8C" (emphasis added).

Clearly a mistake, but in which direction? A preponderance of evidence would cause me to think it was premiering last night (Sunday)...after all, two out of three banners agreed! But as luck would have it, I was on a TV listings site, and a quick search revealed that Box No. 3--"Premiering Tomorrow"--contained the right information.

This is what we in the trade term an Oops, and as has been previously revealed, there are few things in life so satisfying as evidence of the fact that one is not alone in Oopsing...no matter how often the people with whom he deals on a daily basis seem to think he is.

That said...I'll be curious to see whether this new Andromeda Strain is worth the three banner ads, to say nothing of two nights of television. It's been several years since last I saw the 1970s feature film, but the last time I did I recall marveling at how well it's stood up over the decades. Of course the emphasis was on suspense and not special effects, which always helps. I'll record The Andromeda Strain, and may even get around to watching it (the upcoming two weeks will be a bearcat, so it's unlikely I'll watch anything before June 10 or so), but I'm dubious. It does not strike me as a story that's in need of "updating." If anything, it strikes me as the sort of thing that will have me checking to see if the original is on DVD...

...Turns out I was right: It hasn't even aired yet and I already checked on the original. DeepDicount.com has it for about ten bucks. Widescreen. Free shipping.

A Quota of Quotations

A little something for our tmes:

There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague enemy who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population. -Paul Rusesabagina, humanitarian (b. 1954)

Also:

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. -Alexis de Tocqueville, statesman and historian (1805-1859)


And a few general-interest quotations. These and the above are from A Word A Day.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition. -Jose Bergamin, author (1895-1983)

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period. -Nicholas Sparks, author (1965- )

I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us. -Konrad Lorenz, ethologist, Nobel laureate (1903-1989)

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone. -Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal. -Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and author (1900-1980)

If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues. -Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author (1803-1873)

We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves. -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. -Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on? -James Richardson, poet, professor (b. 1950)

Just One of Life's Little Mysteries

This appears this morning on Bloomberg.com:

Sprint First-Quarter Loss Widens as Customers Defect (Update1)

By Crayton Harrison

May 12 (Bloomberg) -- Sprint Nextel Corp., the third-biggest U.S. wireless carrier, said it may sell some assets after its first-quarter loss widened and more than 1 million customers dropped their contracts.

The net loss expanded to $505 million, or 18 cents a share, from $211 million, or 7 cents, a year ago, Overland Park, Kansas- based Sprint said today in a statement. Sales fell 7.5 percent to $9.33 billion, compared with the $9.39 billion average estimate of analysts.

Sprint said it may get rid of assets to meet obligations to lenders. Chief Executive Officer Dan Hesse is firing 4,000 workers, closing outlets and discounting wireless phone plans after the stock lost more than half its value in the past year. Nextel, which the company bought in 2005 for $36 billion, may be worth as little as $5 billion, according to some analysts.

"Sprint has had a really bad reputation for customer service,'' said Steve Clement, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon, who expects the shares to perform in line with the rest of the sector. "They've struggled to figure out a way to market themselves, and I think they're still struggling.''

Do tell. Given my recent experience with Sprint -- and some not-so-recent experiences, like dropped calls, no signal when the guy standing next to me is happily chatting away on his phone, a web site that keeps taking you back around to the front door where you can log in for the eleventieth time, and invoices that are byzantine even by cell-phone standards -- the amazing thing is that Sprint's stock still has half its value.

Suggestion: Quit the gimmicks, improve the service.

Almost Helpful

This has happened twice in the last couple-three weeks. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm not expressing myself clearly, or maybe I'm expecting too much of e-mail.

It goes like this:

I e-mail a given corporate entity with a fairly specific inquiry, and they promptly e-mail me back with a reply that almost does what I asked.

For instance: A couple of weeks ago, confronted with a massive cell-phone bill, I e-mailed Sprint to see what we could do to get it to quit competing with the house payment. I told them what we wanted in the way of calls, texting, etc., and for how many lines, and, in effect, asked for a quote.

(This was after some time banging around on their web site trying to figure out their Simply Everything plan, but the site is simply nothing on details.)

Well, I get back a very nice, very prompt reply from a customer service woman who is very much on board with the idea of trying to save me money...and if I just let her know what plan I want, she'll get me set up with it. Well, yes, thanks, but I had rather hoped that she would put the plan together and tell me about it. Helpful...but not quite.

And then yesterday I e-mailed a bank in Omaha in re a little mystery my brother and I have encountered regarding safe-deposit box keys that seem to belong to nothing. It dawned on me that my folks had done business with a particular bank when they lived in Omaha (through the mid-sixties) and wondered if they had somehow forgotten about a deposit box there. Unlikely, but possible. So I went online, found the successor to that long-ago bank, and e-mailed their customer service department with all the information I have: my parents' names, the number written on the case containing the keys, my parents' home address in Omaha, etc.

And this morning I log on to a very nice, very prompt reply from a customer service woman who provides me with the bank's phone number so I can call and talk to someone about it. Uh-huh, okay, but isn't it safe to assume that I could have found the phone number easily myself and that since I went to the trouble to find their email address and compose a message to them, perhaps I had a reason for not calling in the first place? ("Your call is important to us. That's why you're on hold. Please stay on hold, and enjoy the music we keep interrupting to tell you how important your call is to us...")

Again, almost helpful.

I recognize that there might be practical reasons for these and other entities to shy away from conducting certain aspects of business via e-mail. If the bank had said, "For security purposes, please call a personal banker," I probably would have thought it bogus, but at least I'd have had a reason of sorts. But in Sprint's case, wouldn't it have been better for them to have replied with, "Based on what you tell me your best bet would be Plan 9 from Outer Space, which would cost you 600 bazillion dollars a month for three lines"?

Especially since just last week I signed our daughter up for a really nice Verizon plan, and as long as we were in the store I asked the sales associate to give me some info on putting the whole household on the same plan.

Which he was more than happy to put together for me.

No Worries! AOL Is Watching Out for You!

Well, they're at it again.

A couple-three years ago, my e-mail to friends and relatives who are still benightedly using AOL as their internet provider began to bounce. After some detective work, I deduced that AOL didn't like one or more of the links I include in my outgoing-mail signature. These included my e-mail address, my personal web page at Geocities (which they seem to hate), my genealogical page at FortuneCity (that seems to be the one they really hate), and gifs that link to Thunderbird and Firefox.

For a time, I gamely deleted the signature from AOL-bound e-mail, but never without a feeling of resentment. What business is it of AOL's if I want to put a link in, say, my correspondence with my cousin? Seems to me that that's between him and me, and AOL's paternalistic "at least one domain in your email that is generating substantial complaints from AOL members" is neither here nor there: I'm not e-mailing those whiners, I'm e-mailing my cousin!

And of course there would be those instances where I'd forget to delete the signature, and the e-mail would bounce back, and my resentment would increase, etc.

But then one day it seemed that there was no problem anymore, and my e-mail was making its way past the Moral Guardians of AOL Customers with no untoward difficulty, and life was good, or at least not too crappy.

Until this weekend. AOL is back to "protecting" my cousin--who is well into his adulthood, mind--from receiving any seditious materials from me. My cousin doesn't have any say in the matter. I don't have any say in the matter. AOL makes the decision for us, pre-emptorily, supposedly because of "substantial complaints" from members about other communication, having nothing to do with me or my cousin, they appear to have received from "one or more" of the domains referred to in my e-mail.

Get that: I'm not SENDING from a blacklisted domain. I'm merely referencing an address they don't like in my e-mail to ONE person who, foolishly, is a customer of theirs.

Yes, I'm working on the cousin to dump AOL. But of course it's a hassle to change ISPs, and I can't blame a guy for being unenthusiastic about it.

In the meantime, though, I find myself pretty peeved at the high-handedness of AOL.

But that is nothing knew. I recall a certain brouhaha some years ago when the media caught wind of AOL's having dumped a customer because she began some kind of online support or information group for survivors of breast cancer--and had had the nerve to use the B-word in the group's name, and in referencing the disease, and so on! Everyone knows that br**st is a dirty word, and so AOL, in its best Big Brother mode, blocked her from their network for the benefit of all. Until, that is, it hit the media, and AOL looked both stupid and paternalistic.

Obviously, the corporation learned nothing from that episode, and is once again setting itself up as the arbiter of what people may or may not read, and the Great and Wise Protector of All who might be exposed to such atrocities as

wjreynolds@yahoo.com
http://www.geocities.com/wjreynolds
http://wjra1.fortunecity.com
http://williamjreynolds.blogspot.com/

---

Oh no! Your eyes, your eyes!!

Visible Man

Colson Whitehead, in today's New York Times:

"Most folks don’t know much about me, apart from the feeling of injustice that hits when I walk into the room with my easy charisma and air of entitlement. I understand. It’s weird when your government passes legislation, like equal opportunity laws, that benefits one single person in the country — me, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black."

And:

"Frankly it’s a lot better than my last two gigs, The Guy Who Left the Seat Up and The Guy Who Took the Last Beer, although I do suffer from a lot of work-related injuries, as you can imagine. For all this jibber-jabber about how I don’t understand a working man’s problems, you should take a look at my medical chart. I have carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, miner’s lung, scapegoat rash and vintner’s dropsy, and just last week I burned my thumb making horseshoes. The funny thing is, I didn’t want to be a blacksmith. But I heard they had an opening and I couldn’t help myself."

This is excellent satire--biting, funny, true, ridiculous, and acid all at once. Read the whole thing at the Times or via Whitehead's blog.

Conservative Hypocrisy Revisited

Speaking of that post from AlterNet (as I was below), "Anti-Choicers Are Communists!," posted by Amanda Marcotte, raises an interesting point, one on which I've reflected myself on occasion, viz., how does a group of people who claim to prize independence and individuality, whose very mantra is "Get government off our backs!," who insist it's every dog for itself out there (no "nanny society," thank you!) justify its constant harangue for government to step in and tell women what they may and may not and must and must not do with their own bodies? How do they justify their slavering desire to have government tell women's doctors how to practice medicine? How do they square their disdain for anything that smacks of helping anybody with their insistence that having the government forbid women from making their own health-care decisions is in fact "protecting" women (from, apparently, themselves)?

Nanny society, indeed.

But the Marcotte post takes things further. She writes:

Now there [Romania] was a state that Leslee Unruh, Phill Kline and the whole cast of panty-sniffing misogynists could really get behind. Modern American anti-choicers make the same argument used in communist Romania to deprive women of basic rights: We aren't having enough babies to sustain the economy! Under Nicolae Ceausescu, contraception and abortion were strictly banned unless you had already had four children and done your biological duty to the state. In a strong echo of our modern anti-choice community's disconnect between what they actually think and what they say they think, it was widely believed that the contraception and abortion ban of Romania mostly functioned as a way for men in power to get off on controlling women. It certainly didn't do anything to lower the abortion rate -- under this regime, they had one of the highest abortion rates in Europe. Highest maternal mortality, too, which was a direct result of the high illegal abortion rate.

That's the utopia they're looking at with their communist-borrowing strategies. A world where a misogynist's nose is in every panty drawer, and women who run the risk of dying every time they have sex.

You should read the post for yourself. It's short, but it links to other posts from which Marcotte draws and which buttress her point, viz., the we'll-do-your-thinking-for-you crowd borrow pretty heavily from the very type of totalitarian Communists regimes that they have always professed to despise.

Might they protest too much?

Too Much for Coincidence?

A brace of eerily similar occurrence in the past couple of days deies coincidence.

First: I received notification the other day that Mail.com, whose remailing services I have found to be handy on a couple of occasions when I've needed to switch mail accounts, had tried to renew my subscription via a credit card that had expired, and to I would need to go online and give them new info. (Actually, I just needed to tell them when the card would next expire, but either way...) Okay, I follow the instructions helpfully laid out in the e-mail...well, they would have been helpful if they worked. They took me right where they said they would, but there was nothing there in the way of updating billing information, as had been promised. Being fairly independent, I tried "My Account" and the online Help file, but no luck. Indeed, the Help file repeated precisely the same instructions that didn't work. (This is not the first time I have detected irony in the sobriquet "help" file.)

In the interests of completeness, I tried the procedure on both a PC running Windows XP and my new iMac running Leopard, with identical results. On the Windows machine I even logged in with Internet Exploder, in case it was a Firefox issue. But no.

So I dashed off a few lines to Customer Service, which this morning replied with instructions that sounded suspiciously like the old instructions. But I can be a sport, occasionally, so I went through the exercise again...and, interestingly there now were a couple of clickable buttons next to my "service options," buttons that were not there yesterday. (And I know this for a fact, since I took a screenshot to send along to Mail.com for reference. Also, I clicked around on the page on a couple of my expeditions yesterday, just in case I was overlooking something. I wasn't.)

Bottom line, as near as I can conclude: Something got changed between yesterday and today, even though there was nothing in Mail.com's e-mail to indicate they had found a problem on their end and fixed it.

Whatever.

But now here comes that Eerily Similar experience I mentioned above.

Last evening I came upon an item in the New York Times that I decided to submit to Digg. So I click the link and all the usual stuff, and--also as usual--get the screen that says they think it might duplicate an essay already submitted. (Anyone else notice that when Digg says that, it's almost invariably wrong?) But the part of the screen that usually lists the other stories, and gives you the button with which you swear your contribution is original, was blank except for a couple of lines indicating an "unknown fatal exception." I tried a couple of other stories, tried the Windows/iMac bit again, and kept getting the same results.

Sort of forgot about it till this morning, when the same thing happened, so I clicked the ink to report the issue to Customer Service. This evening they replied, suggesting I wipe out associated cookies and I forget what-all else.

Which I didn't do. So imagine my surprise a few minutes ago when I clicked to send a story to Digg ("Anti-Choicers Are Communists!," on AlterNet)...and it worked!

Oh, sure, I had to go through all the usual we-think-this-might-be-a-duplicate balderdash (as usual, it wasn't) but otherwise everything was up and at-'em again. Without my having done a blessed thing.

Bottom line, as near as I can conclude: Again something got changed between yesterday and today, without any indication to me from the party in question that they were doing anything to fix anything. Weird, huh?

Well, okay, it could all be coincidental, especially the Digg case. Stuff happens and unhappens all the time in the computer world: How many times has rebooting the computer solved the problem? But the Mail.com instance smells a lot like someone fixing a problem and then not admitting that there ever was a problem to be fixed in the first place!

I have to say, I've been tempted along those lines--as recently as yesterday--but have always resisted. The case yesterday had to do with someone rather hotly insisting that they had made repeated requests for an update to a web site I handle. A search through back e-mail--going back some five or six months--revealed no such thing. It was indeed tempting to make the update, backdate the page, and then strongly suggest that the complainant see an optometrist. But I like to think I'm bigger than that. (I'm not, but I like to think so). I made the change, then e-mailed the Offended Party that the change had been made.

And, yes, I do think I'm a better person for it.

Made With Macintosh

On March 12, I acquired my latest Macintosh, the new iMac, with a ginormous screen that I feel I am sitting too close to. Quite a far cry from my first Mac, which was the first Mac, the original, adjectiveless, numeralless plain ol' Macintosh computer, which looked like this:


It is hard to imagine now how thrilling that little Mac, with its monochrome nine-inch screen and its Imagewriter tractor-feed dot printer was back in 1984. To put it in context: I was working for a magazine-publishing company that had recently installed a very expensive computerized editing system, giving us all big green-screen terminals on which to compose or edit manuscripts. We had to insert various codes in order to use the correct typefaces, point sizes, column widths, etc., for our publications. Likewise, we needed codes before and after words we wanted italicized, boldfaced, SMALL-CAPPED, etc....and if we forgot the end code, well, then, everything was bold/italic/small caps up until the next time we inserted a code. If we put something in bold, the plain green lettering on the terminal monitor showed up somewhat brighter, giving us some kind of visual clue, at least; but there were no such clues for italic, small caps, etc.--or for the wrong typeface. Characters appeared onscreen sans descenders, so a g looked a lot like an s, and a lowercase p looked a lot like an uppercase P, since they both sat on the baseline. Not idea...but a heckuva lot better than the typewriters and paper we had used up till then!

Personal computers, such as they were, were much the same--green on dark-green, or amber on dark-amber, or white on black...no such thing as a Graphical User Interface--with all sorts of command codes and break codes and who knows what else. And the dot printers of the day were nothing to dream about, certainly not for someone interested in producing professional-quality manuscripts.

And then came the Macintosh. If you wanted something underlined, you underlined it. Bold? You made it bold. Change the font? Hey, shows up right here on the screen...in black, on a pleasantly bluish background. And when it came time to print, the serviceable Imagewriter (my recollection is that the W became uppercase with the later introduction of the ImageWriter II) printed pretty much what you saw on the screen!

Sold!

Coincidentally, at about the time the Mac came on the market I had just sold my first novel, The Nebraska Quotient, upon the conclusion of which I vowed I would never write another book on a typewriter. There was a small Apple Computer store just around the corner from my wife's workplace in St. Paul, Minnesota, and so I left to pick her up a bit early one day in order to look at the Mac in person. They were so new, and so much in demand, that the man had only a single demo model in the shop. No matter, my mind was made up. The proprietor tried to convince me that the Mac was a fad and that for "real" computing I needed one of the Apple II computers that would soon be gathering dust on his shelves (did he really believe the Apple II to be a superior machine? Or was he trying to unload them before the Mac overtook them? We'll never know...but even then I had my suspicions!), but I was unconvinced. WYSIWYG was a term that had not yet reached my ears, but I know it when I saw it, and I saw it, and I wanted it.

It so happened that a friend of mine was still in college and thus able to score the coveted Mac package with a student discount, and so I placed the order via his good offices, and waited. Indeed, I had begun my second book on a typewriter when finally the Mac arrived one October afternoon in 1984. I taught myself to use the enclosed MacWrite software by retyping the two or three chapters of Moving Targets that I had already pounded out on the Smith-Corona. The Mac boasted 128 kilobytes of RAM, no hard drive--to my knowledge, they didn't yet exist--and a built-in microfloppy drive that read and wrote 400 kilobyte disks. MacWrite had a memory-use issue that slowed everything to a crawl after about 14 pages, but that was okay: I soon learned to break chapters up into smaller chunks, stretching them out across a couple of floppy disks. To avoid the risk of damaging the printer heads on the Imagewriter, Apple recommended letting it cool down after an hour or so of use, which meant--dot printers not being noted for speediness--that it took two solid days to print a book-length manuscript. This involved a certain amount of "babysitting the printer," since you never knew when the tractor-feed paper was going to go off-track, and it was pretty frustrating to wander into the office to see how things were progressing only to discover that the Imagewriter had been overprinting the same line for the past half-hour. Since you could do nothing else on the Mac while printing was in process, I quickly learned to drag the rocking chair into the office and kill time with a book whilst "babysitting."

By today's standards, primitive. By the standards of the day, The Jetsons!

A year or two later, Apple introduced the Macintosh Plus, the so-called Fat Mac, pretty much the same machine but with with 512K of RAM and a double-sided floppy-disk drive. I bought a kit from a mail-order house (this was pre-online retailing, mind), cracked open the Mac's clamshell drive (which required special tools, for the Mac was not designed to ever be opened by the user), popped in the green board with extra RAM, popped out the old floppy drive, slid in the new one, put everything back together...and held my breath when I plugged it back into the wall and booted it up.

Not much later I would add a LaCie hard drive and a LaserWriter II, and worked happily with that configuration on into the early 1990s--I'm thinking 1991, but maybe 1992--when I invested in a Mac IIsi:
One of my everlasting regrets is that, when I bought the IIsi, I traded off the original Mac in return for some extra RAM. I wish I had saved it and turned it into an aquarium or something. Alas.

The IIsi was a nice machine, certainly faster than the Mac, and with the added bonus of color, but it was hardly a standout computer. Indeed, I don't remember that much about it. So I assume it was neither especially fabulous nor especially terrible. I worked with the IIsi until about 1996, when I invested in one of the Mac clones, from the time of that short, ill-starred experiment that Apple Computer undertook. Mine was a PowerComputing PowerCenter Pro IINT, which looked like this one:


The PowerCenter Pro was a lovely computer, and I eventually replaced it only because I had bumped my head against the upgrade ceiling...Mac OS 9 was as good as the PowerCenter got. But it was a fun, speedy, and trouble-free computer for a lot of years, and I was sorry when Apple discontinued its clone program, for that seemed to be the end of PowerComputing. I still have the PowerCenter Pro, on a card table in a corner of my office. As far as I know it still works...tough to judge, though, since the last time I powered it up the monitor refused to cooperate. Might have to fuss with it some one of these days.

The next Mac was a used Blue and White G3, code-named Yosemite, which I bought via eBay perhaps five years ago.


It too was a useful and enjoyable--and pretty!--computer, right up until January of this year when it started running...dreadfully...slow. My attempts to fix it were unsuccessful, and I sometimes wonder if I made it worse. (Hard to see how; I suspect that it was simply failing--perhaps a hard-drive issue--and would have conked out no matter what I did/didn't do.) One fine day last month the silly thing quit booting at all--I'd get the start-up "spinning gear" for, literally, hours on end, and then--perhaps--my desktop pattern, followed by hours of the spinning beachball, followed--perhaps!--by a log-in screen, followed by more beach ball. That is, up until the time it started to refuse my log in. Which is about when I decided it was time to go shopping again.

Odd thing about the G3 purchase: It came as a package, CPU, monitor, keyboard...and no mouse. Why no mouse? I mean, no big deal--I went to Best Buy and bought a USB mouse--but I wish I had asked the seller what the story was with the mouse. Did it fail and he just decided not to replace it when he sold the G3? Or did he have a mouse that he really, really liked and didn't want to sell? Whatever, I guess.

Earlier this month I went online to the Apple Store and ordered up the latest iMac:

This a simply a grand computer, fast, quiet (hell: silent), simple, and a pleasure to work with. I could have stepped down to the next smallest monitor, but what the heck. I do have to reorganize my office to accommodate it--I currently have to peer around the edge of my desk lamp in order to see the extreme left side of the screen--but it seems worth it. Of course, my old scanner, my old LaserWriter II (still works, though hasn't been used in a year or more), my old Zip Drive, my old CD burner (which I don't need, thanks to the iMac's built-in CD/DVD burner), and that old, old LaCie hard drive are now completely obsolete. No idea what to do with them, so I suppose they'll head up to the attic to be dealt with "another day." That's progress, I guess.

Upon learning of my recent purchase, a family member commented, "So you decided to get another Macintosh, huh?"

What a question!