A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, March 9, 2009

Brain Strain

I did my taxes today, which took the usual sweating and scrabbling. But what made it even harder is that I tried to load TurboTax on my ailing laptop, which has never worked right since I cursed it by switching to Vista. Fortunately, my dear old neglected desktop computer still has XP on it, and it slurped up the new software like a kitten lapping cream.

I have come to the conclusion, sadly, that my laptop has a brain abscess. When I first came down with my own abscess, I would read names like "Julian" as "Ian." I think laptop is doing something similar. Instead of "Install," it sees "Stall." Which it does. Often. I think my tax refund is going to be used to replace it.