The time has come. The inevitable can be postponed no more. I’m switching my desktop computer to Debian Linux. I should have embraced Debian from the beginning. Please allow me to offer my excuse for not having done so 26 years ago.
It was such a cute gadget. A tiny computer, brushed aluminum on the outside, with a decent keyboard (albeit with chicklet keys), a Thinkpad-ish pointing stick that would even take a grippy Thinkpad “cat’s tongue” insert. A fairly fast X86 Intel processor, enough storage, and 8 gigs of memory. And now it was on sale at a low price.
Alvin Lee was a rock-and-roll singer, guitarist, and songwriter of some note. Anyone who has seen the “Woodstock” movie surely remembers him and his band, Ten Years After, performing “I’m Going Home.” It didn’t impart the sense that Lee was high in the intellectual hit parade. But he was at least a talented predictor of future events, as I was reminded this week.
WCBS Radio in New York, the originator of all-news broadcasting, will cease to exist before the month is out. Its famous call letters will disappear, replaced by something else. Rather than 24-hour live news, it will become round-the-clock sports discussion of interest primarily to gamblers. Also, there will be many ads for places where gamblers can lose their money. And other vices as well.
“America needs a full-time president, and a full-time Congress,” Nixon said. He also admitted errors in the events that led to his decision. “If some of my judgments were wrong — and some were wrong — they were made in what I believed at the time to be in the best interests of the nation.” The need for a full-time president no longer seems to exist, and the less time Congress spends on the job, as a general rule, the better.
There was a time, and it was not long ago, when you could sit down and write a column a few days in advance with a better than even chance that events would not overtake it. Reporters would even write “ever-green” columns and stories, to keep in the queue for events such as the sudden cancellation of a full-page ad or the illness of the columnist. The ever-green piece could be dropped in and all would be well.
Overloaded with politics and the contemptible collection of low creatures whence we must choose come November, maybe it is time to discuss something good and decent and pure: Snakes.
For a short while a couple of days ago it seemed that it might — just might — be possible for a person of conscience to vote for Donald Trump. But then . . .
Over the weekend I happened upon an online conversation about a small and specialized computer program, and was surprised to find something vanishingly rare in internet discourse: good sense.
The campaign to re-elect Bugout Joe Biden may, upon retrospection, conclude that it was a false economy to recruit as Biden’s makeup technician for last week’s debate a student from a mortuary college.