It’s going to be a short post, and I’ll get to the meat (think: Rocky Mountain Oysters) of it in a minute. In the meantime, I’m at my keyboard at my usual table at Barnes and Noble. By now, they really should have a plaque or something on it. If I become a famous writer someday, it’ll be on display at the Smithsonian. Anyway, my frustration is mounting as my browser has basically locked up and forced me to reboot about a dozen times. That makes blogging more difficult than ditch-digging, and just as much fun. It’s hard to include hyperlinks when every click on every article results in little more than several minutes of watching the Microsoft blue circle of “I’m thinking about it” glowing on the immovable position of the mouse until I’m relieved by the sweet escape of control-alt-delete. And yes, all my computer geek friends…I have rebooted the entire system several times with little to show for it except about half an hour of wasted time.
I’ve talked about my difficult relationship with electronic devices before, and how Mrs. Left, in particular, doesn’t believe that it’s due to much of anything but my apparent inability to click correctly. But part of the reason I’m at Barnes and Noble this morning is because of two books I bought and downloaded which subsequently produced nothing but a blank page when I tapped on them, apparently in a manner with which my tablet found irredeemable fault. So I took my Nook to the Nook expert at the Barnes and Noble information desk, where her first response was “Hmmm”. After that, she tried the same thing I’d tried about a dozen times, rebooting the device. To my great relief, that had no effect. To my eternal amusement, the Nook did do several things, including briefly visible warning messages and sudden shifts from the chosen page of text back to the desktop, all of which are routine occurrences for me when dealing with anything comprised of chips and LCD’s, but which prompted the young lady helping me to say, “Hmm…I’ve never seen a Nook do that before.” Yeah, well, welcome to my world, lady. In the end, she did do her magic, which involved archiving the chosen books back to the cloud and then re-downloading them. She tried to explain all this arcane technology to me, and I explained to her that as long as she was available, I’d just return with any future problems…which will almost certainly occur.
Meanwhile, let’s briefly revisit the outrage of the week, the heinous Hobby Lobby decision. It’s probably just a rumor, but I’ve heard there is consideration of changing the motto on the Supreme Court’s west facade from “Equal Justice Under Law” to “What Would Jesus Do?” Truth in advertising and all that. Unsurprisingly, the devout old men running Hobby Lobby are not nearly so offended by Viagra and vasectomies as they are by IUD’s and Plan B pills. It may be because they never got to the chapter in their high school physiology classes that explained that the thing which Viagra facilitates is a necessary prerequisite for that which results in pregnancy…but more likely, they just figure that that’s the woman’s problem. I wonder if there’s a biblical passage that reports Jesus’ thoughts on erectile dysfunction…”For thou with no iron or stiffness in thine rod are an offense unto the eye of God.” Probably somewhere in Revelations.
BW
Kibbitz Corner 