Can I send Email from an old leather boot?

A couple weeks ago I got a package from my mother in Florida. It arrived by express mail, insured for four hundred dollars. In it was a surge suppressor. One of those big rectangular jobs that your monitor sits on and your computer sits under. I recognized it as the same one that, in the mid 90s, I personally placed under the monitor and over the computer that I bought for my mother.

This computer, from "Zeos", I think, had a catchy name which I've forgotten, and was marketed as an all-in-one, "zippetty-doo-da" fast, productivity-increasing, feature-packed system, from a company who'll be there tomorrow. It was, like most computers you'd buy for your mom, immediately obsolete, but great for email. It was also great for playing computerized bridge and pinochle which is as far as my mother wants to go in computer gaming. For a couple years this Pentium 75 zippety-doo-dahed along quite happily, raising my mother's productivity considerably before trying to retire early, by pretending its motherboard was fried. Unable to convince it otherwise, I buried the "fried" motherboard unceremoniously at the curb and replaced it with one scavenged from a derelict PC carcass which was camped in my office.

This "new" PC was even faster than the previous, which made it about as current as writing email on parchment with an ostrich feather dipped in India Ink, but bought me another year of not buying a new system. That was a little over a year ago. A few months ago, that computer died too. So, a new computer was ordered, with a place to plug a complete modern life right into the back. USB ports, Serial ports, Modem Ports, Mouse ports, Ethernet, Fishnet, Parallel ports, Perpendicular ports, car ports, Video out, Video back in, and PDA handheld-infrared-ultraviolet-see-in-the-dark-intradimensional wireless toaster ports, pipe anything and everything into a tiny beige box. This box is great for email, and for playing computer bridge and pinochle.

For a month, my mother became really productive (mom's productivity is measured in forwarded joke emails), and then, abruptly, stopped being productive at all. Concerned about the uncharacteristically empty "Mother" folder in Outlook Express (a subfolder of "Deleted Items"), I sent several emails which went unanswered. It occurred to me that she might have been sucked into some port on the back of the computer and was deadlocked in a virtual game of computerized cribbage with either Keanu Reeves or a rogue supercomputer from IBM, but I didn't follow up on this. The next time I heard from her was on my answering machine - "You can cancel my internet access, I've packed up the computer and put it in the closet. Bye."

My mother's messages often sound like epitaphs, but this sounded particularly dire. I knew that either Keanu had beaten her in cribbage or her computer had died. Despite being totally generic, the new computer was still new and still under warranty, a warranty that the computer gnomes in her closet were unlikely to honor, but which my local computer supplier probably would. I took drastic measures and called her. A frustrated woman answered, close to tears "Well, it stopped getting email two months ago and then one day I turned it on and no picture showed up and I didn't want to bother you because 'You're so busy' and I know its my fault and…"

She was not particularly helpful in troubleshooting the problem. Furthermore, the computer's condition of being unplugged in a dark closet made successful diagnostics so grim a prospect that I patiently explained the whole "gnome-warranty" thing to her and asked that she send it back to me. Swayed by my logic, she agreed, and several days later a package arrived from her.

Understandably excited by the prospect of fixing a computer I bought because it wouldn't need much fixing, I tore open the package to reveal one unremarkable, heavily over-insured surge suppressor. Remember the surge suppressor? Confusion descended. I felt as though I'd ordered a latte and been handed a stapler. Was it the words I'd used? Did the gnome story scare her? Did I say "Please just send me any object and I'll use it to fix your computer from a thousand miles away." Again, I took emergency measures and called her. I pretended that I hadn't opened the box in case it was an early Christmas present. "Please tell me this is an early Christmas present" I said. "No, it's that damned computer" was the reply that I both feared and got. Because this surge suppressor is about as mistakable for a computer as an old leather boot, I had two painful options; one of making my mother feel like a total boob, and the other of configuring an email client on a mid 90s surge suppressor. Boob it would be. I said, as delicately as possible "Mother, this isn't a computer, it's an old boot!"

On my desk now sits the multi-port roadster of a computer that arrived today from Florida. Sure enough, there's the bridge and pinochle CD still in the drive and, sure enough, it doesn't work. I suspect that the huge dent in the case, indicating some sort of collision, trauma, impact, stampede or other violence might have something to do with that. Maybe the tech gnomes took a whack at it. Whatever. She's my mother. I love her. I'll just fix it.

Distracted? Attach Things to Your Head

Some laws seem incredibly stupid at first and only prove themselves after going into effect.. So, when New York's "no handheld phone use in car" law went into effect a few months ago, I was initially wary. It seemed to be another waste of effort Band-Aid law which addresses one symptom instead of treating the disease. However, after using a headset for a few months now, I'm convinced. Strapping things on your head is the only way to drive safely.

I'm an inventor, so, I've since invented several new headsets which allow people to do more things while driving than ever before. First, is the Whopper Champ. This allows busy, but safety conscious drivers to eat on the go, without looking at their food. It has a platform which holds a large fast food sandwich, fries, and has a three foot straw for a soft drink. The sandwich is fed to the driver at intervals, giving time to enjoy each bite interspersed with French fries which get vacuumed from their packs and launched into the mouth along with aerosolized ketchup. Just clamp the Champ to your head and chow down in perfect undistracted safety.

I've also developed the Coffee and Doughnut Focuser, so called because it let's a driver keep driving while it focuses on morning coffee and doughnuts. I had a few bugs in this one, at first. It turns out that coffee sucked through a straw is hotter than coffee sipped from a cup. I can't explain this, but its true. Tests also indicate that people prefer not to have coffee and doughnuts pre-mixed. This made one clever single-straw design unacceptable. The current design features a spring-loaded doughnut hopper, which ratchets doughnuts one at a time into the driver's consumption chamber...err...mouth. The driver sets the pace and, yes, it also works with bagels. Warm (not hot) coffee is sucked from a sponge leading to a coffee cup.

Another new headset I call the Babysitter. There's nothing more distracting than a child, particularly an infant, sitting in a car seat in the back. Kids say all kinds of distracting things from back there; like "I want more Juice, Dada!", "I wanta Get out!", "I need a new dinosaur, now!", "I took my diaper off", and "Who's this stranger back here?" The Babysitter solves all that by constantly stimulating a cranky child with a selection of favorite toys, snacks, beverages, and soothing songs, all while perched on the driver's head. If the troublesome child becomes too unruly, the Babysitter can calm him or her with a patented Ritalin-derived vapor called Happy Gas.

For myself, I know that pretty soon I'll have so many headsets, that I won't be distracted at all. I am already so keyed-in to my driving that I hardly pay any attention to my conversations anymore. In fact, half the time I don't even know who called. I just venture a tentative but highly undistracted "umm, what?"

I may have become too undistracted, in fact. I keep thinking about a headset that let's me take up smoking. And because I have developed so many headsets, I now seem to need a Headset Manager, which I think should also be a headset, called the Headset Headset, or maybe the Head Honcho.

I really want to thank New York State for making this article possible. After all, without this law I might have blown all my driving attention on holding my phone and wouldn't have been able to write this piece safely, using Head Pen and Head Paper, on my way to work.

The Dog's Point of View

Sometimes the difference between a prized possession and a money pit is simply a matter of perspective. For instance, I have a pure bred dog. She's a Belgium Tervern...Turvyuren...turveyon...a Belgian Turv. Her given name is Bora, which I think is Belgian for "expensive". I call her MooCoup Bucks, because that's what she cost - about twelve hundred of them. Her nickname is Moolah. She arrived as a puppy, making her worth about two hundred dollars a pound. I thought that was excessive. "Ah, but she'll grow" the breeder assured me with a twinkle.

You'd think that certain undesirable traits could be bred out of a dog - like chewing, barking, digging, and running away. But Moolah does all of those. Mostly though, she chews...and chews...and chews. She chewed the bark off the peach tree, which then died after making only one peach. A three hundred dollar tree. She chewed the seat-belts out of the car...all the seat-belts - nine hundred bucks. She brought back a neighbors shoe and chewed it in half. They won't sell you just one shoe so we replaced the pair. A hundred and fifty bucks. She chewed several toys, my gloves, a pillow, 2 dog beds, a shovel handle, her own leash and an old hat on the same day.

She also digs. And after pulling a handful of my son's beloved plastic dinosaurs, all with their heads freshly chewed clean off from one of her excavations, I knew I needed to find a new way of thinking about Moolah. So she became an investment.

To protect the neighbor's footwear, I surrounded about three acres of land with Invisible Fence. It cost about two grand and increased her value accordingly. I added everything up including her crate, air fare, collar, training, the tree and the other chewed items and figure she's still worth $200/lb...only now she weighs about 70 pounds.

I now look for ways to increase her value, like tying pork chops to 100 bills and leaving them in the lawn. I smeared peanut butter on the rest of the fruit trees, hoping she'd debark them and further add to her mounting worth.

In all truth, I know that I'd take a beating if I tried to sell her, but the bank doesn't know that, so I took out an equity line on her and if I do sell her, I should be able to declare the loss on my tax return.

The breeder was right. Moolah has grown. She's grown from a soft fluffy ball of liability into a beautiful full grown asset. And no matter what,she’s still beating the stock market over the past three years. See? It's all about how you look at it.