01/29/2004: "Back from the Dead"
Music: Opus 51Mood: Amused
I’ve been buried alive beneath a mountain of work, woe and warfare. But after a gritty week, I see the clichéd light at the end of the tunnel – unless what I’m staring at is actually the headlight on an onrushing locomotive.
Accept this by way of apology for my failure to blog the past few days. Maybe what I need is a bottle of Blog Viagra. I haven’t received any offers for Blog Viagra in the tidal wave of spam that washes into my e-mail in-box every time I log on. No doubt it’s only a matter of time.
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Add to the list of things that annoy me Microsoft Word’s proclivity for turning three asterisks into bullets when you type them into copy and hit the return key. If anybody knows how to turn off this valuable automation feature, please enlighten me.
I switched to a Mac a year or so back, when my trusty Compaq laptop began spitting up blood and proved unable to stand without the assistance of an aluminum “walker.” It was a risky choice, I know, but I haven’t regretted it in the least. This iBook is the most stable computer I owned since … well, since I owned a Mac, back in the Paleo Macintosh era, before the advent of Windows 95 and triumph of Microsoft’s commissars.
Freedom from a Windows OS means my computer only gets rebooted when I want to reboot it. It has never – NEVER – crashed. I believe OSX is based on Linux, although it is so stable that they could call it Snoopy for all I care. IBM has been running commercials promoting the open platform, featuring a little boy talking to Lavern and Mohammed Ali. I don’t really get it, but obviously I noticed the ad, so in that respect it succeeded more than most.
Apple has come out with its own browser and email program, which are, ahem, free. I use them and they’re great. And iTunes is without parallel in regions of the earth enslaved by Windows. I did buy MS Office OSX, figuring I’d be burned at the stake for a heretic if I didn’t. At this point, I’m waiting for Apple to bring out a Word program so I can be just that much more free from the evil Microsoft empire. The only program that ever gives me any grief is Word. I'd be happy to be free of it.
If your reading this, Steve Jobs, let’s get on the stick.
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I stumbled onto a defunct website today, looking for something else, and found one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. The setup is there’s a guy named Will Leitch, who had a job for a time summarizing newspaper articles for one of Steven Brill’s sites. Almost as soon as he landed the job, he started getting blistering critiques from a reader about the quality of his writing, or rather the lack there of. Eventually, he decided to reprint the criticisms as part of another column he wrote, called “Life as a Loser.” Excerpts are below. For the whole thing, visit the site; the url is at the end.
“I am forced to conclude that you are plainly not up to the modest task at hand. The way your words clunk and wheeze across the screen suggests that you are hobbled by a serious mental impairment. If this is incurable, I will recommend to your editor that you be taken round back and shot. If something can be done, please activate your benefit package and seek help.
“Reading you is evocative of great pity. Not a compassionate pity, as I felt when those iguanas were burned alive in a Fresno zoo some months back. No, this is a pity informed by contempt…
“How long exactly did it take you to walk to Manhattan from Appalachia, and did you make the walk barefooted?…
“Please acclimate yourself to your new surroundings, you bumbling savage. Register for a primer on the English language as used outside the Ozarks; familiarize yourself with the mechanics of brushing ones teeth, as well as all the other toilet habits in common use in cities (I’d wager you are innocent of most); learn that anyone of any refinement whatever capitalizes “Scotch.” On this last point I am particularly sore, though it is fully understandable that one whose only experience with whiskey was helping uncle Jeb rebuild his illicit still should stumble so fearfully…
“Were you nursed on lead paint, you numskull? Perhaps you could be so kind as to provide me with a translation of today’s update from the Ebonics…
“Was I correct last week in speculating that you are from the hills of West Virginia? It must have been some place at least as stifling to a Refinement of the upperworks. Perhaps you were raised in a Romanian orphanage? A cave in the Cappadocian valley? An old storage shed on a derelict Port Arthur, Texas, industrial site?…
“Coming up with the decisive explanation for your stupidity is a task at least as daunting as attempting to come up with the decisive reason for human suffering (which your writings, of course, contribute to in large measure)…
“I entered both your name and the magazine’s into Google, and was returned a link to Ironminds, a site you apparently edit. (What an awful looking site, Mr. Leitch. Does the Web development team work on Commodore Vic 20s? Please change the vacuum tubes, servos, and relays on the Sperry Univac hosting that terrible site.) The writing is of a familiarly poor quality, but I’m digressing…"
http://www.ironminds.com/ironminds/issues/010321/loser.shtml
“Life as a Loser” apparently is alive and well these days at:
http://www.getunderground.com/underground/author.cfm?Contributor_ID=55
Selah.
