Letters From Home

I am a late-comer to a lot of things my kids take for granted (or have used since practically Day One). I find this amusing, since I was the one who got them a computer when they were really young (a much loved Commodore 64) and encouraged them to explore anything that caught their fancy.

I also was “online” starting in 1983 with a CompuServe subscription. However, I was a latecomer to the internet/world wide web because my budget really didn’t stretch to cover a higher powered computer until I learned how to build my own, and the early browsers (Mosaic in particular) drove me nuts trying to get any kind of performance on a 386, which was all I had until well into the Pentium era.

I was a whiz at online chatting, though, sometimes using two computers and two phone lines to yack away on two different networks at once (and keep up with multiple public and private conversations the whole time span). I think the zenith of my chat experience was in the early days of cable network broadcasting when a group of us from across the USA all watched the same “Lost in Space” rerun on the Turner channel and discussed it in real time via chat room.

A lot of today’s computer/internet users were either not born or not “online” yet in the years when if you had a CompuServe account and your friends had The Source, there was no way you could send them an email directly. Strange but true.

My kids poke fun at me for my lack of in-depth internet experience and they’re light years ahead of me in discovering the wonders therein. They do try to help old Mom by sending all kinds of links via IM and email. And I’ve gotten addicted to sites like Gizmodo and Lifehacker that provide me with all kinds of other neat stuff to check out.

Not enough time in the day, really. Which is why I was so delighted to come across the “Habit List” in the Productivity 501 blog, which gives me a way to map out the things I intend to accomplish every day for a month, and mark them as done or not-done each day so I can see where I’m piddling away my time.

I have also (thanks to Lifehacker) finally gotten into the glory that is RSS feeds and have set up Google Reader on my Google home page so I can see all the various blogs, cartoons and so forth that I like to read every day and can pick and choose what I want to look at, all in one convenient place.

I don’t think I have gotten my time managed really efficiently yet, but these new (well, new to me at any rate) tools are a step in the right direction.

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My book arrived at 10:30 Saturday morning. Alas, I had already agreed to make the ultimate sacrifice and go to F’zer’s company picnic that day, so I didn’t actually get to start reading till about 4:30pm. (But hey, we won tickets to Disneyland and a Toys R Us gift card in the raffle, so it wasn’t entirely a vain sacrifice on my part.)

I finished it at about 12:30pm yesterday, having gotten to the “Battle of Hogwarts” chapter at about 2am and having thought that was probably the best place to break it off lest I do something stupid like stay up all night reading. (Not to say I didn’t consider it, mind you.)

Warning, spoilers ahead, as I revisit my predictions in the previous message and see how well I did.

My predictions and speculations on the final book:

• Regulus Black took the horcrux. It’s the locket they found in the glass cabinet.
  Indeed he did, and it was.
• Dumbledore was not dead. Snape agreed to make it appear that he was.
  Hmm… well, this one has no definitive answer, when you get right down to it.
• Dumbledore trusted Snape because they are related somehow.
  Dead wrong. However…..
• Snape was in love with Lily Evans.
  Yes, he was.
  
• Harry, Ron, Ginny and Hermione all survive.
  Yes, thank goodness.
• Draco and his mother survive but Lucius and Bellatrix get what’s coming to them. Draco ends up fighting on Harry’s side.
  Bellatrix gets a particularly appropriate comeuppance but the rest of the Malfoys survive.
  Draco and Narcissa turn out to be not quite as bad as they appeared in the beginning but
  they don’t come anywhere near redeeming themselves, as far as I’m concerned. Draco does
  offer Harry some very limited help. I was really, really hoping Arthur Weasley would kick
  some major Malfoy butt, but in that I was disappointed.
• Dolores Umbridge meets some kind of grossly appropriate comeuppance.
  She gets neither a bang nor a whimper, doggone it.
• Fred and George Weasley play an important part in the final battle.
  Yes they do.
  
• We learn something important about the relationship between McGonagall and Dumbledore when they first came to Hogwarts. The amount of time the two of them have been there figures into the plot somehow.
  No. Classic Rowling red herring.
  
• McGonagall, Hagrid and Flitwick get killed.
  Dead wrong, you should pardon the expression. The ones who do get killed are… unexpected.
  
• The fact that Bill Weasley was bitten by an un-transformed werewolf will play an important part in the final battle.
  Nope.
  
• Cornelius Fudge turns out to be braver and less of an ass-kissing weenie than he has appeared up till now.
  Nope.
• Dudley and Petunia Dursley turn out to be a lot better than we’ve been led to believe.
  Definitely true, and Harry learns something about the way he treated them, too.
  
• Percy Weasley was only pretending to be a twit in order to gather information inside the Ministry of Magic.
  Not true, but what happens with Percy works out to pretty much the same thing.
• There has to be some reason Grawp was introduced into the story, beyond getting Harry and Hermione away from the centaurs.
  Yes!
  
• Neville does something absolutely spectacular and his parents recover enough to be released from St. Mungo’s.
  Yes to the first part, hoo boy, but no to the second, alas.
• Goes without saying that Voldemort is toast.
  And how!

I had also noticed the connection between Harry’s blood and Voldemort’s in Goblet of Fire because of Dumbledore’s reaction when he heard about it. And when I heard what Ravenclaw’s object was, I immediately said “I bet it’s that ratty old tiara Harry used to mark his Potions book in the Room of Requirement.” So I followed many of the clues pretty well. I thought the fact that Dumbledore offered to hide Draco and his mother by making them appear to be dead was a clue that Dumbledore himself only appeared to be dead. That was a bit of very clever misdirection.

I loved finding out more about Dumbledore’s past. He’s always been presented as such a perfect but mysterious character up till now and this book filled in the blanks.

Now I have to wait for F’zer to finish reading the book so we can discuss it. And of course so I can read it again and go over the good parts at my leisure.

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Seems odd to think that after Saturday there will no longer be a world in which people didn’t know how the Harry Potter story would end.

When I first started working at the library, the staff decorated their table at the yearly city-employee potluck with a Harry Potter theme.  Being a bunch of librarians, they had already read the books.  But nobody else (including me) had read them at that time, so the clever details of the table setup and staff costumes flew right by everyone else.

It did inspire me, however, to read the books for myself, and for that I’m very thankful, because I was able to snag the first two books without difficulty from the chidren’s room and then buy them without having to wait, and I’ve bought all the subsequent books promptly upon release.

The only other series I’ve been so caught up in has been Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books, and the final installment of that series is due sometime in the next year or so and I’m champing at the bit to read that, too.

F’zer’s company picnic is on Saturday, and we’re going, and I hope he appreciates what a monster sacrifice I’m going to be making to do that when my Harry Potter book is due to arrive from Amazon that day!

My predictions and speculations on the final book:

• Regulus Black took the horcrux.  It’s the locket they found in the glass cabinet.
• Dumbledore was not dead.  Snape agreed to make it appear that he was.
• Dumbledore trusted Snape because they are related somehow.
• Snape was in love with Lily Evans.
• Harry, Ron, Ginny and Hermione all survive.
• Draco and his mother survive but Lucius and Bellatrix get what’s coming to them.  Draco ends up fighting on Harry’s side.
• Dolores Umbridge meets some kind of grossly appropriate comeuppance.
• Fred and George Weasley play an important part in the final battle.
• We learn something important about the relationship between McGonagall and Dumbledore when they first came to Hogwarts.  The amount of time the two of them have been there figures into the plot somehow.
• McGonagall, Hagrid and Flitwick get killed.
• The fact that Bill Weasley was bitten by an un-transformed werewolf will play an important part in the final battle.
• Cornelius Fudge turns out to be braver and less of an ass-kissing weenie than he has appeared up till now.
• Dudley and Petunia Dursley turn out to be a lot better than we’ve been led to believe.
• Percy Weasley was only pretending to be a twit in order to gather information inside the Ministry of Magic.
• There has to be some reason Grawp was introduced into the story, beyond getting Harry and Hermione away from the centaurs.
• Neville does something absolutely spectacular and his parents recover enough to be released from St. Mungo’s.
• Goes without saying that Voldemort is toast.

Just a couple more days and I’ll be able to tell how much, if any, of this came close to the mark.

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Like many people, my level of expertise varies widely, subject by subject.  Get me going on ancient history and I’ll talk your ear off, with references.  Ditto American history of the mid 20th century and later (heck, I lived through most of it, why wouldn’t I know about it).

Computer stuff is hit or miss.  I’m a good diagnostician.  I can usually figure out what’s wrong, even if I don’t know exactly how to fix it.  I like fixing computers so learning how to do new things is easy and usually fun.

But when it comes to applications, it seems like either I know it or I don’t.  I’m not well versed on things like IRC (my daughter had to help me get it going the few times I tried it) or a lot of the really cool internet sites that everyone seems to understand.  (No, I’m not into digg & co and haven’t bothered to learn, yet.)  I hate the Windows XP interface even when it’s modified to a pseudo-classic interface and have done my best to avoid learning it in the same kind of depth I have for previous iterations.

And I don’t, as yet, know much about sound, video et al.  I have a video editing program that I can’t quite figure out (the manual that came with it sucks).  I only recently got into iTunes and am still far from expert in its use.  I’ve thought about doing my own podcasts but haven’t gotten going on that, either, although I did buy a copy of Podcasting for Dummies when I found it on a closeout table.   (Um, haven’t read it yet.)

However, yesterday when I found an old cassette tape with the voices of my children from their very, very early childhood, I realized it was as good a time as any to learn how to transfer audio tapes to CD.

So I downloaded Audacity.  Looked for a manual of some sort.  It doesn’t have one.  I loathe trying to learn how to use software by poking through help files.  Loathe.  But as it happened, a Google search turned up good, clearly written instructions for exactly what I wanted to do.

So…  today I did it.

I also tried modifying the recording by removing all the background noise, although I’m not so sure that really improved the recording because it seems to have taken out a bit more than just the noise.  I’ll have to burn the two versions to CD, though, and listen to them carefully through headphones.  My itty bitty speakers aren’t going to work for critical listening, not to mention that the only way my little corner of the office is habitable when it’s hot outside is for me to keep a fan blowing right at me, and you can’t hear clearly over fan noise, for sure.

Still, though, I consider myself now to be On My Way to learning about sound recording in the computer age.  I did plenty of it back in the years when the only way you could edit stuff was to sit down with a tape block and a razor blade and cut and piece together chunks of audio tape.  I was an expert at doing that.  Now I have to learn the bladeless way.

I can do this!

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I’ve just gotten started on this, and it’s already one of the most satisfying books I’ve read all year.

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Not one single song-lyrics site has the words to Arlo Guthrie’s “Presidential Rag” correct. They must all be feeding off each other, because they all have the exact same mistakes. And the transcriptions have obviously been done by someone who wasn’t even born at the time. “You said you didn’t know that the cats with the birds were there,” indeed!

In the interest of clarity and a weary observation of history repeating itself:

Presidential Rag

You said you didn’t know
that the cats with the bugs were there,
and you’d never go along with that kind of stuff nowhere.
But that just isn’t the point, man,
that’s the wrong wrong way to go.
If you didn’t know about that one, well then what else don’t you know?

You said that you were lied to,
well, that ain’t hard to see,
but you must have been fooled again by your friends across the sea,
and maybe you were fooled again by your people here at home,
’cause nobody could talk like you,
and know what’s going on.

Nobody elected your family,
and we didn’t elect your friends,
no one voted for your advisors,
and nobody wants amends.
You’re the one we voted for, so you must take the blame,
For handing out authority to men who are insane.

You say it’s all fixed up now, you’ve got new guys on the line,
but you had better remember this while you still got the time:
Mothers still are weeping for their boys that went to war,
And fathers still are asking what the whole damn thing was for,
and people still are hungry, people still are poor,
An honest week of work these days don’t feed the kids no more.
And Schools are still like prisons,
’cause we don’t learn how to live,
and everybody wants to take, nobody wants to give.

Yes you’ll be remembered, be remembered very well,
and if I live a long life, oh the stories I could tell,
Of men, wars and poverty. of sickness and of grief,
Hell yes, you’ll be remembered,
be remembered very well.

You said you didn’t know,
that the cats with the bugs were there,
And you’d never go along with that kind of stuff nowhere.
But that just isn’t the point. man,
That’s the wrong ,wrong way to go,
If you didn’t know about that one,
well then what else don’t you know?

Copyright© 1974 Arlo Guthrie

The song was very popular on the braver radio stations in 1974. I doubt it’d get past the Chain Gang bean counters today. One unusually fearless radio station from Green Bay played that song and back-timed it perfectly… to end right before “Ladies and gentlement, the President of the United States…” as Nixon stepped up to resign. Can you picture any of the Chain Gang stations having the balls to do that today?

(If I were Arlo, I’d have written that fifth verse as “men, wars and poverty, of sickness and of greed/ Hell yes, you’ll be remembered, remembered well indeed.”)

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My final two years in high school, we lived in a little armpit town called Beatrice (”Bee-ATT-riss”) Nebraska.  My dad had been teaching at Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa, and its president Millard “Doc Bob” Roberts was hoping to expand the Parsons “we take anyone as long as they can pay the bill” system of college education to a wider potential audience.

So two new Parsons-affiliated campuses had opened up starting in the summer of 1966, one in Beatrice and one in Albert Lea, Minnesota, with at least three more in the planning stages.

Unfortunately, Doc Bob & Co. hadn’t done too much in the way of research in Beatrice.  They might have been able to get the land cheap, and get the buildings built, and all the other things physically necessary to put in a college, but they didn’t take into consideration how the people in Beatrice might feel about the presence of a campus filled mostly with students from Elsewhere.  You know, those slimy people from New Jersey who didn’t appreciate the finer points of life in armpit towns in Nebraska.

My dad hired on as Dean of John J. Pershing College without knowing much about Beatrice other than that the poet Weldon Kees came from there.  My mom tried hard to fit into the mold of Dean’s Wife, among a faculty that was pretty heavy on East Coast pretensions itself.  My brothers and I settled in to school among peers whose parents were mostly vocal opponents of the college and did the best we could.

One of the worst hoity-toity faculty families ended up as our back-door neighbors.  I forget what Mr. Leland taught–probably something like business administration.  Mrs. Leland was short, fat, and had obviously dyed auburn hair, and tried her best to lord it over the other people in the neighborhood.  Of course, my parents had inadvertently bought property in the snootiest neighborhood in town–the city had torn down an old elementary school on that block and had put the land up for sale very cheap–so Mrs. Leland was trying to out-snobbify people who’d already been lording it over Beatrice for generations.  With predictable results.

Which left her and her three obnoxious little brats to try to lord it over my parents, neither of whom could possibly have cared less about that kind of crap.  My dad was the Dean, and he also had his own kind of internal stratigraphy where the pure academics (who had Ph.Ds and taught English literature, like he did) had little use for the people with lesser degrees who taught lesser subjects like business administration.  My mom came from New York City society and knew what real rich folks were actually like, and Mrs. Leland’s pretensions amused her mightily, when Mrs. Leland wasn’t pissing her off by telling her kids to tell my brothers and me to “Git off our poppity!” if we came close to the fence that separated our yard from theirs. (It wasn’t even their “poppity” to begin with–Mrs. Leland would happily put people to sleep telling them how smart her LeRoi had been by taking the “lease, with option to buy” approach.)

Most kinds of fireworks were legal in Beatrice in those days, so in the days before the Fourth my brothers and I stocked up on firecrackers and bottle rockets (the days when our dad refused to let us have anything more lethal than sparklers were long past).  After dark, the four of us and a couple of my brothers’ friends settled into the back yard with a bottle and our supply of rockets.

It took us a few tries to get the range, but eventually I had the bottle situated perfectly so I could launch a rocket in a shallow trajectory over the fence to explode right outside the Lelands’ back door.  I’m not sure how many I managed to launch before all of a sudden the lights went on at the back of their house.

We all hotfooted it in through the sliding glass doors to our darkened dining room and huddled in the back of the room laughing our heads off.  Pretty soon the phone rang and my mom answered it.  Now, my mother got her first job as a professional actress when she was four years old, so she was prepared.

“Hello?  Yes, Audrey?”
“They what?  No, my kids aren’t here tonight, they’re out with their friends.”  (we’re all rolling on the floor trying not to make a sound in the next room)
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How dare you accuse my children!  They’re not here.  You’re imagining things.  Are you sure all your kids are in the house?”
“Audrey, I’m not interested in listening to any more of this nonsense.  Good night.”  *click*

One of my mom’s finest hours.  But she did advise us we’d better aim the bottle rockets somewhere else for the rest of the night.

After all these years that still makes me smile.  Let’s hear it for the Fourth of July.

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Lethal injections in Texas, pats on the back in Washington. This is justice of the Buford T. kind.

I, for one, am utterly disgusted.

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