HURRR

That is all.

Elaborate rattle with plastic beads that bounce through wiggly pipes, rings that slide down the same wiggly pipes, and a disc with a face painted on it that spins as it slides down a corkscrew in the center:  $15.00

Child prefers:  the measuring cup.

You, dear reader, will be shocked to find that this daring and original setting for blogging does not particularly lead to daring and original writing on my blog. I find myself all too easily falling into fantasies of pointless mobility; what if I could read Crime and Punishment while swimming laps, I might hypothetically think, thus toning both muscle and intellect at the same time; I might then frantically purchase a waterproof e-book reader, springing for expedited processing and same day air.

Three days later, that hypothetical Scotchgarded tablet lies forgotten under the couch, its surface baptized either once or not at all, and its innards holding not Dostoyevsky, but Clancy.

It’s taken me a long time to realize that tool ownership is not the same as tool use.

It was sort of strange, what happened–first the key board clicks cut out, then the next morning I could place a call, but the person on the other end couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t hear them. Songs and video clips also had no audio, but if I hooked up the headset, I could make calls and listen to everything just fine.

Just another chapter in the ongoing nerd saga.

It’s not uncommon to mistype, but what the autocorrect doesn’t catch can still be spotted and fixed faster than I suspect I could overall type on physical buttons.

The Nokia I’m replacing is only a couple of years old, and Nokia is known for exceptional call quality, and my new iPhone is markedly clearer. It also seems like it has less latency, but maybe that’s the Reality Distortion Field talking.

Steve Jobs apparently owns my soul.

When Rachel Corrie was killed it horrified me; that’s why I was interested in seeing the play. I wanted to know something about her, something more than I’d gotten from the fairly feeble media coverage around her death.

Like I said, though, I wasn’t really expecting much from the play. Given that the script is compiled from the diaries of a woman in her young twenties, and given that she was political enough to travel to Gaza and stand around in front of IDF bulldozers, and given that the script was co-edited by a Famous Movie Star (Alan Rickman), I expected a shrill and self-indulgent anti-Israel screed. That wasn’t what it was at all.

She wrote beautifully, she was clever, she was funny. She reminded me of people I knew in college. She dedicated herself to doing real things to improve people’s lives. She travelled halfway around the world to put herself in danger on behalf of strangers, because she was worried about them. It’s a good play, and a fitting tribute.

Today would have been her twenty-eighth birthday.