Safety Covers


"And you can not real move
and totally remove 'em
like an African imbecile."
- What I've been hearing for 25 years

"And you can act real rude
and totally removed
and I can act like an imbecile."
- What's actually being sung

If only there were some way to get that mild euphoria you get when a hangover fades...without the hangover first.

My cousin has a laptop. Being the kind of person he is, this means he has the computing power of the pentagon in a machine the size of a box of chocolates, costing the annual GDP of three small African countries. Slight exaggeration, but you get the picture.

Here's something that's not an exaggeration. It has a one terabyte hard drive. 1TB. That's one thousand and twenty four gigabytes. 1.024 * 10^4 bytes. The equivalent of two hundred and thirty eight DVDs.

I just tried to calculate that in terms of listening time for CD quality mp3s. It came to about two thousand years.

Now, my cousin isn't dumb, but he doesn't know much about computers, so he's got the whole hard drive in one big partition. Which means when something goes wrong with the operating system or the master file table or the boot sector, the whole thing stops working and he loses all data. Unless someone like me or mother can do a few hundred pounds worth of specialist work for the promise of a cup of tea sometime, to fix it.

Yes, something has indeed gone wrong.

I like analogies so here's one. Someone who can just about boil an egg purchases the kitchen of the Ritz hotel to make one piece of cheese on toast. He does this by turning the enormous oven up full blast and throwing in unopened packets of bread and cheese, getting angry and baffled when the result is a black stinking mess.

Now imagine this is happening in every street in the country, with smaller versions in every second home. There is however a fairly small number of highly trained, highly paid professionals, whose job is to clean up the ovens and give lessons (always ignored) on basic kitchen operation. There is also a much larger number of highly self-trained amateurs who do most of the cleaning and teaching, in exchange for being summarily dismissed when they've finished and being ridiculed behind their backs.

Because the cheese-lovers think it's easier to fuck up and have someone else fix it than to learn to use a fucking toaster.

If my cousin proves capable of belatedly grasping that he has to learn how to use a computer just like any other tool, he'll be worth helping.

I took an online quiz to find out whether my brain's male or female. And apparently it's 25% female. But not to worry because the average woman is only 50% female. Which is...nice.

But if you think this is just a steaming pile of junk science and pseudo-statistics, think again! Because it also showed that I'm also useless with language, highly empathic, and very organised. How do they understand me so well?!

I didn't see President Obama's inaugural address, but I'm guessing it went roughly "Change...strong America...moving forward...unity...face challenges". Is that about right?

The morning news had Will Smith being elegiac about the dawn of a new age, presumably on the basis that he's (a) black, (b) famous and (c) got nothing to say. If there's a gay president next time maybe they'll interview David Hyde Pierce.

Now we'll just have to see how long it takes the world to realise (a) Obama can't reverse the recession, (b) he isn't really on the side of the people, and (c) he isn't going to do any of the nice things he promised, on the grounds that he didn't actually promise them.

1 comment:

  1. Okay, really long reply:

    Pres. Obama also added that it's our own fault we're in this mess for putting off hard choices and we now have to make sacrifices. He also called for the public to engage in service--public, community, military, etc.

    I just luv the fact that not even 5 months ago, the so called political experts were writing him off as a lost cause, that Americans would not vote for a minority much less a man with a strange middle name (that happens to be common in the Muslim world).

    I like his ideas. I voted for him--drove over 5 hours from where I was working so I could vote for him the primaries (when political parties decide who represents them in the federal elections). Months later, I stood in line for hours just so I could cast my vote for him on election day.

    I like that he's from Hawaii (born and raised), Hawaii celebrates it's 50th anniversary as the 50th state in the Union this year. I like that he's the son of an African immigrant and a white woman from Kansas. I like that he's white grandparents raised him for a while, and that he grew up in the multicultural environment of Hawaii. That's where America is heading--a country made up of mixed ethnicities! In a few years, the white population will be a minority. But until that happens, America is the first country to elect a minority as it's leader.

    His ideas are not really liberal or conservative. He's very practical and he seems moderate, which is something I like. He's all ready stated that the economic crisis will take a long while to fix, but he's surrounded himself with great people. And he is also the first ever US President to ever use the term gay Americans in a victory speech when he won the election!

    For us, and esp. young voters who finally took action and voted in the greatest numbers since they lowered the voting age to 18, he does represent hope and change. He's not from some rich family with long political ties. He's the epitome of the American dream. If you work hard, study hard, you can achieve anything you want.

    He didnt' come up from the old corrupt political machines--he built his reputation and his support from working years among the community. He did not just beat the great Democratic Political machine that backed Sen. Hillary Clinton and her former President husband. He also beat the Republican Political Machine that had choked the country for 8 years. He beat the old pros by engaging the disaffected, the old, the young, the minorities, the different classes, and by speaking clearly about his ideas and visions, and not resorting to old dirty politics.

    He's not perfect, but he seems more human than any other politician. He's not really a politician. He's a statesman, and America has not had one in years. I, for one, am so gratefully to have lived and taken part in a historic event in American history. We have the first mixed President in the history of our country, and it was the coalition of people long ignored by major parties that made it all possible.

    He won't be able to fix all our problems; no one can. But he provides us with the opportunity and new direction we need to grow and improve as a nation, and move forward as a people.

    *Steps off soapbox*

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