SmartRemarks

It’s been quite a few weeks since my last post. That’s because during most of that span, whenever I’ve had time to sit down with my laptop, it’s been to work on restoring things from the catastrophic hard drive failure I suffered just before Christmas. I’m happy to say that as of now, I’ve finally got the computer back to a state where I feel my life is under control again (as much as it ever was, anyway), and in fact the system is (in some ways) better than ever.

All the gory details below the fold…

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Yesterday’s inbox contained a political e-mail message forwarded by my girlfriend’s parents. They’re not especially political people; their sensibilities (to the extent they’ll even discuss them) tend toward a somewhat mushy moderate conservatism, the kind of folks who instinctively vote Republican, even though the party’s center of gravity has moved far away from them. Indeed, they even said as much in the forwarded message—”you’re much more interested in politics than either of us”—yet they invited a response, practically asking for an informed rebuttal even as they implicitly treated the viral message as credible and worthy of attention.

Which, once I read it, was really hard to believe.

This is the message they forwarded, word for word:
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I love computers. Really, I do. The Internet is a wonderful thing. E-mail keeps me in touch with people I would otherwise have lost track of long ago. I can’t imagine researching anything anymore, or even following the news, without access to Google.

And yet… sometimes one can’t help but wonder if these lovely life-enhancing benefits really need to come at the cost of so much annoyance and confusion. Read the rest of this entry »