Interesting about the meteor. I would think that would be headline news, but I guess it's no big deal, on a national level, anyway. There's no coverage of it here. Is it big news in California? Maybe meteors are constantly exploding all over the world with a loud bang. It really must have made people jump in the area where it was bright and forceful.
It's interesting that Downieville would want to commemorate being the place where they lynched a woman for killing someone who tried to rape her. Maybe they should add other attractions, like a statue showing a Downieville priest who abused little Mexican boys, and a plaque honoring the house where a local crazy woman drowned her two children in the bathtub.
Awhile back, we were talking about about how you like nature, and are not in favor of man's screwing it all up. I was reminded of that today when I was taking our dog Ryder for a walk. I was watching a pair of sweet little birds called the Eastern Bluebird. They are larger than a chickadee, smaller than a robin, and are red on the breast and a nice shade of blue on the wings. Before my time, they used to be a very common songbird on the east coast, but now you hardly ever seen them, in Maine, at least. They have been wiped out by the millions by sparrows and starlings, which tend to find bluebird nesting spots, destroy the eggs, then take them over for themselves. I wouldn't have seen any today except that a bluebird loving guy in our town erected a bunch of bluebird nesting boxes in a field. I guess the entrance to the boxes somehow prohibits the other birds from getting in. Sparrows and starlings are both non-native birds, introduced by man. Of course, on the other hand, if a man hadn't come along and set up all these bluebird boxes, they wouldn't have returned, or wouldn't have survived, anyway.
You might be surprised after all my talk about technology and how i-devices are turning people into viruses, that yesterday Margaret and I went out and bought an i-pad. We needed it to replace our old, heavy laptop, which finally died, probably because of all the humidity in Costa Rica. Spilling Costa Rican coffee on it didn't help, either, I guess. These i-pads are amazing devices, and I have to say they are incredibly well-designed to turn people into virulent viruses, more so than I had imagined. They make it so easy to access and buy different kinds of technology, games and software, and also to share photos, thoughts, and who knows what else, to anybody you know, or don't know, that has an e-mail address. You can even call people on the phone using the thing, and see each other as you speak, if you're both hooked up to that technology. And of course it's got a great camera, and any time you take a picture, it's asking if you want to send the photo to other people, which you pretty much can do with just the tap of your finger. And any time you write something, it wants to know if you want to send it to someone. And any time you look at something, it wants to know if you'd like to show it to someone else. When the saleslady was showing us the i-pad at the Apple store yesterday, I commented "these things are training us all to be blabbermouths." I could tell I had hurt her feelings, so I had to sort of back off that statement and try to explain it away, even though it was absolutely true. At any rate, there is no question that these devices have the ultimate effect of encouraging people to become human cancer cells in a vast electronic chain of marketing and chatter. Yesterday I looked up "Twitter" on Wikipedia because I wasn't really sure what it even is, and I noticed that a research firm has analyzed the messages that are sent via Twitter, and it determined that a majority of them constituted what they called "pointless babble." And now, to contribute my own visual pointless babble, I am going to attach this photo I took of myself using the new i-pad. Why is the picture sideways? I have no idea. I notice that I I look like a cross between Bill Gates and Uncle Steve. I wonder if I could get a job as a Bill Gates impersonator. If I moved out to Seattle, and put on a little weight, and studied the way Bill Gates moves and talks, I bet I could fool a lot of people. The only problem is that they'd all be asking me for money.
--edward
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