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This is Election Day, which means this column really can't be about the election, and for good reason, since the targets of any political commentary would not have a timely chance to respond.
Or at least, I think this is Election Day. The phone
range on Sunday with a mechanized voice from the National
Federation of Independent Business, urging me to support
candidates who support small business
when I went out
vote tomorrow.
Tomorrow on Sunday is Monday, and regular voting is on
Tuesday. As an independent business
operator myself
(I'm a free-lancer, not a Post employee), I do realize that
you can get so busy that you can forget what day it is. My
daughters both distinctly recall one morning when I
discovered them at home at 9 a.m., and asked them why they
weren't in school. They explained that it was Saturday, and
the worst of it was that I argued with them before they
finally persuaded me by turning on the TV where many
channels were carrying cartoons to entertain children and
get them to beg their parents to buy certain products.
Martha answered the phone the next time it rang on Sunday, and it was the voice of America's First Lady, Laura Bush, urging her to go out and elect some Republicans, presumably so that her husband will have an easier time of it at work, and thus be able to come home earlier.
Even if you're on the no call list,
these
annoying recorded calls are still legal, because they're
considered political discourse, and thus entitled to First
Amendment protection.
That's reasonable, but couldn't we agree that only
people enjoy constitutional rights, and machines aren't
people? Thus the vote for our side
calls last week
from Joanne Gleason, my Democratic precinct committeewoman,
and from Rollie Heath, would be legal, since they were from
humans.
The calls from machines could then be outlawed, and the
machine operators could be sent to prison where they could
learn some socially responsible trade. Granted, some
bleeding-hearts would argue that machines, which do much of
the hard work of our society, deserve rights, too, and that
it just isn't fair to deprive them of their ability to
express political opinions. And to be fair, our nation does
have a long history of powerful political
machines.
Speaking of machines, has anyone else noticed that Microsoft might need a new advertising agency? For the past fortnight or so, the company has been promoting a new and improved version of its proprietary network, MSN 8, which competes against AOL 8. And the symbol of this product is a butterfly -- that is, a bug.
That's not exactly the image I'd want to project if I ran a software company, but then again, this could be the result of some little-noticed provision in the latest court settlement in the anti-trust litigation: henceforth, Microsoft will engage in truthful advertising, and in that case, a bug fits perfectly as the corporate symbol.
For instance, my primary computer is a dual-boot machine with two hard disks. One runs Red Hat Linux 7.1, the other Microsoft Windows 98 SE. A couple of weeks ago, the Windows side started crashing and hanging as soon as I clicked on anything.
Determining the difference between infected by a
virus
and normal Windows operations
can be so
difficult as to require a competence beyond my knowledge.
Since I'd just backed up that disk, I figured I'd take the
easy course: reformat the disk, re-install Windows 98
(which fortunately does not require product
activation
), and restore my files.
I've tried three times, always with the same result: the first click, even on the background, sends Windows into a frenzy of cryptic error messages. A tomato worm, or perhaps a blood-sucking woodtick, might be a better fit for Microsoft than an oversized butterfly, but at least they're getting closer to the truth.
With all those frustrations, and with the annoyance of the last-minute electioneering, I like to relax near a machine which has been working quite well: the Resolute air-tight cast-iron wood-burning stove in the living room. It's been more than a blessing during this recent cold snap, although it presents a hazard that has nothing to do with chimney fires.
It's known locally as wood-stove narcolepsy
(coined by Mark Emmer). It usually strikes early in the
afternoon. You get the stove running well, you relax in a
nearby easy chair and then you don't get up, or even wake
up, for hours.
But it's not a place to escape from politics. Whether I'll be able to get wood for it is a result of how our national forests are managed, and that is often a political question. Whether it will be legal to burn the wood is another, since some towns have banned the use of wood-burning stoves. There's no escape, but at least some momentary relief is in sight.
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