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At the start of a new year, I try to purge various accumulations of paper before they reach potential avalanche dimensions. Just last week, I narrowly escaped injury when I shoved a fat file folder onto the shelf above my monitor.
It dislodged some books at the far end, causing two thick books -- reference manuals pertaining to a CP/M computer that I sold years ago, which I thought had gone with the machine -- to crash to the floor, which caused the room to vibrate (this house was built back in the days when joists could be spaced a yard or more apart), thus causing a long-forgotten coffee cup to tumble onto my delicate fingers. I've had a cold ever since, and I blame it on breathing the mold that was dislodged when that cup landed.
No matter how many computers I own, no matter how much
RAM or hard-disk capacity I shove into them, no matter how
much I experiment with scanners and optical character
recognition to convert ink into ether -- the paperless
office
gets farther away every year.
Among the papers that should be donated to the local
landfill for archival preservation and the edification of
future archeologists studying the midden heaps of the late
second millennium: the file of ideas that didn't quite
turn into columns.
· Why is everybody ragging on law enforcement in Boulder? Detectives there have quickly and efficiently solved every anomaly in the JonBenet Ramsey case: the escape of some autopsy photos, assorted media leaks, the computer glitch that was caused by a power-voltage variation.
Some old fogies might think that the police should put that time and effort into investigating murders, rather than these matters, but those stodgy critics should realize that we're in the Information Age, Boulder is a center of emerging technology, and that the extensive police investigation of information trails merely reflects modern priorities.
· We need a gender-neutral term for what used to be called a policeman.
Police agencies are generally organized along
quasi-military lines, and in my salad days as a reporter
covering cop shops, there was a distinction between
policemen,
who pounded the beats, and police
officers,
who were sergeants, lieutenants, captains,
even commanders -- that is, they held offices
and
were thus officers.
You would no more call a beat cop a police
officer
than you would call a grunt an army
officer.
Then the sex-discrimination barriers began to fall.
Some agencies adapted easily to the infusion of women in
their ranks: firefighters
instead of firemen,
letter carriers
instead of postmen, soldiers
instead of men,
etc.
But the generic police terms -- cop, flatfoot, heat,
fuzz -- were all disprespectful slang. So they all became
police officers,
even though the vast majority did
not hold an officer's rank.
That's just annoying, but as the officer
ranks
expanded to cover everyone with a badge, we began to see a
distinction between police officers
and
civilians
in crime reporting -- things like one
police officer and two civilians were slightly wounded as
they thwarted an armed robbery ...
The police are civilians, just like the rest of us. We are not under martial law, wherein enforcement comes from the military. We are under civil law, and those who enforce it are civilians.
I'd like to think that there's a difference between
martial law and the current state of affairs, and
remembering that police are civilians
is one way to
maintain that distinction.
· Why real campaign-finance reform will never happen. It will cost about $6 million to run for U.S. Senate from Colorado this year. Spread over a six-year term, that means an incumbent must raise about $20,000 a week.
This means that every Monday morning, he has to think of $20,000 worth of things he might do to produce a favorable impression on people who can afford to contribute that kind of money.
If you ever wondered why this country is a plutocracy, there's your answer. Those who thus donate to campaigns think it's a fine system, since they're thriving under it, and a candidate understandably isn't about to change any system that put him in office.
Since that about covers everyone whose opinion matters in this country, what's the need for campaign-finance reform?
An idealist might hope that we media jackals would
provide information about candidates who were not
well-financed, but we have only so much space and time, and
to be fair, those resources should go to serious
candidates, rather than flakes and crackpots.
And of course, we define a serious
candidate by
how much money he can raise, or, in the case of Ross Perot,
how big a check he can write for himself.
Neat system, isn't it? I just wish I could afford to buy into it. Oh, and Happy Election Year.
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