Friday was one of those Fridays that give Fridays a bad name. I bought a printer-copier-scanner at Sam's Club for use here, but it didn't work, and my mouse died in the middle of the screen. It sat there and smelled, just as real dead mice do, all weekend until this morning, when my Geek repairman came and discovered that I had a returned/used item that didn't work and my wireless mouse was indeed dead. (It also overheated its rechargeable batteries.) I had tried repeatedly from Friday through Monday to dynamite that frozen pointer and rescucitate my computer, without success, obviously. He re-installed the little printer I originally had, put on a new mouse I had bought and tried to install when I couldn't do anything because of the dead pointer, downloaded my first digital camera photos, whizzed through some shortcuts I can't remember, but he couldn't get rid of an annoying error message I've gotten for months. Expensive morning of a beautiful day.
In the meantime the weather had turned pleasant so that I opened my windows and promptly closed my sinuses because of all that ragweed and other pollens and molds from a lead story in the World-Herald, which is also presently annoying me beyond allergens. First, it made a big story out of Joslyn's holding outdoor movies against the east side of Sir Norman Foster's blank-walled addition, blah-blah-blahing about "not since outdoor drive-in movie theaters," which were once abundant in the Omaha-Council Bluffs area. Well, lah-di-dah, we had a sheet on the north side of the bank for our free outdoor drive-in movies on Saturday nights in Center next to Dad's garage in the early 1940s; then later the movies were projected on the south side of the old hall until Wes Mach finally built a large wooden screen he painted white and erected high on two telephone poles by that old hall. (I have already written that we went inside the hall in wintertime for Saturday night movies. They were not free but a dime, a quarter, then thirty-five, then fifty cents as we got into the 1950s.)
Of course, the Weird-Horrid, which is when I'm irritated with the World-Herald, has also been annoying me just as I've been defending newspapers and the written word over, say, TV ha-ha newscasts. The W-H has accelerated its decline into the People pit. When it pimped its way into publication, People Magazine speeded up the trend of televidiocy with lots of space around small content, more and more pictures. (We bought Life and Look once for magazines of nothing much beyond photos.) Don't want to be too literate, after all. That progression has been so obvious with the National Geographic that every year I seriously consider dropping my subscription, since there's perhaps a fourth of the word content it had when I borrowed the carefully saved copies of many years back in those same decades, the 1940s and 1950s, from Charles Stevenson, who only allowed me to have two at a time. The National Geographic photography is stunning, however, and I consider photography as most do, another of our fine arts, even as it's become easily manipulated in our technological progress.
In the meantime, the W-H has more and more white space around more and more photos, even photo essays, with less and less words in larger and larger type, artfully arranged, of course, about which I can do nothing but damage my dentures. There. Now my verbal emetic has freed up my constipated emotions. And I can pick up where I left off before these last six days.
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