The world is trying to drive me mad, or my mother at least.

She always locks the car. Always. So why, when she went out today, was there a pair of glasses on the passenger seat? They belong to neither of us, and no one rides in that car, ever. There were no glasses there the last time she used it. Don't you just love stuff like that?

-- Mal

I have a lovely little wireless Internet service, unlimited data, and it only costs fifty bucks a month. All I had to do was plug in a modem they provided, and that was that. Too good to be true, it appears, and now that it is going out of business, I'm not sure how I'll have any Internet at all. Yeah, there is a cable company, they wired our TV, but they did a lousy job of it and they'd have to drill a hole in the wall to run the cable to my box. And then there's all the other associated crap. Plans, phones, cable packages, bah, humbug. We still have a single land-line phone and no cute techy stuff at all except for my one computer.

You'd think getting a simple Internet setup for one lousy desktop and nothing else would be cheap and painless. It doesn't look that way.

-- Mal

As expected, Clearnet is going bye-byes in November and leaving me with no Internet (and a leased, dedicated router which I'm not sure what to do with). So I need to start checking options for a new service.

All I want is wireless Internet for one computer. I have no mobile devices, no fancy phones, and have no wish to fool around with television deals. I just want the fastest, cheapest, bare-bones access available so I can continue to share the riches of my soul with my pals here at DU (and elsewhere, of course).

The good news is I live right outside Philly, so I should have plenty of options. The bad news is I live right outside of Philly, so I have plenty of options.

Suggestions are welcome.

-- Mal

On the off-chance that somebody around here might know anthropology trivia, I remember reading years ago about a tribe on the Amazon known universally if informally as "those bastards" in anthropological circles because they were the only culture known not to honor the guest-friend relationship. As far as I can recall, it wasn't the Yanomomi, although they certainly qualify for the characterization otherwise. Is my memory faulty? It's been bugging me off and on for decades.

-- Mal

My very ancient box has started glitching on startup. Twice, now, in about five starts, it has not booted correctly the first time: the disk spins, but the BIOS does not start and the monitor times out for lack of input. I have to toggle the power and switch it on again, which is not something I'm happy about doing while the disk light is on. So far it has booted correctly after the power has toggled, or I wouldn't be writing this.

Since a new box, or even Windoze 10 is not an option financially right now, the question is whether I should leave it on 24/7 or just continue to toggle the power when/if it happens again.

Housekeeping details: It's a dual-core AMD running under Windows XP SP3 Home (I said it was ancient). 2 gigs on the motherboard, the BIOS is American Megatrends. I use Firefox, incidentally, but that is up to date.

-- Mal

I was watching my mother do this at breakfast (she's 90), and it occurred to me that there are probably people who no longer drink the milk from the bowl because they think it is somehow un-adult. Heck, I had one correspondent on the 'Net who was amazed that I still ate Sugar Frosted Flakes because it was "kid's cereal."

I guess, though, some of us here would only drink it if it were bacon-flavored...

-- Mal

It's probably not an original observation, but as my mother was watching an old Lawrence Welk show on the tube, it occurred to me that 50-60 years ago, MCs and TV personalities actually had individual voices, not the speech-coached moderate midwestern baritone that is about all one hears today. (Well, at least as far as the men go) Thinking of Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, etc... they all could be recognized by their voices. Today, it's hard to tell the players without a scorecard, especially when the hearing is half-shot to begin with.

I'm sure this has something profound to say about our society, if I could just work out what it is. I certainly doubt Lawrence Welk would get a job in broadcasting today (well, if he were alive that is). Whatever you might think of his show, I feel like something's been lost since those pioneer days. This raises the question, what has been gained?

-- Mal