In Praise of Ebooks

eBook

Image by Kelson

I am so glad to be living here in the future. There are so many things I wished for -- or would have wished for if I'd have had sufficient imagination -- that now are an ordinary part of my life. The one I want to sing the praises of today is eBooks. I love, love, love eBooks.

I have always been a book-a-holic since my earliest days, and before I could read I insisted that my mom read to me (which, fortuitously, she was quite willing to do). And not just fairy tales; I made her read from the Encyclopedia Americana and a companion series for kids called "Wonder Books," which were filled with questions and answers: What happened to the dinosaurs? What were the labors of Hercules? What's it like on the Moon?

Books, I perceived fairly early on, were a door to other worlds, to meeting other people ancient, modern, and imaginary. As Mrs. Pleonic can attest, anyplace we live gets filled up with books. Right now though, all those books are in a storage facility waiting to be liberated. The way our stuff is wedged in there it's no simple chore to go down and pull out a book to read. In fact, it's so hard that I never try it.

But there are eBooks. When they first became popular I wanted nothing to do with them because I'm a Luddite. An actual book filled with actual paper and actual ink was the only true, honest way to read. "An elegant way to read, from a more civilized age," you know.

EBooks won me over, though. They became easier on the eyes. They learned to imitate turning the page and flipping back. Many of them -- the one's I most want to read, at least -- are free. They're sort of like cats: adapting to us so we'll feed them.

And most of all I can take my entire library with me on a SD card. Right now I'm walking around with (at last count) 4000+ books on my tablet!  And counting.

I understand that, according to some statisticians, eBook sales are leveling off and real books are staging a come back. And I still pick one up now and then, even though we have absolutely no room for them.

But -- 4000+ books!!!

There's just something about sitting in the doctors office reading Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum one minute, then being able to turn to Uncle John's Trumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader the next.

Eating the future

Bacon -- it's the future, man!

Graphic buried somewhere deep inside this game

In the year 2020 we will all get our food by jumping on counters at fast food restaurants and yelling. What a utopian wonderworld that will be! We know this thanks to the helpful efforts of a man from that far-distant time with the strange futuristic name of Dante Rashad Anderson, who came back to show us how it will be done.

His first attempt to demonstrate the future occurred at an Oklahoma City Carl's Jr., but they did not understand his ways and ejected him. Undeterred, the time traveler walked across the street to Arby's, where the patrons were slightly more enlightened and allowed his demonstration to proceed after he shoved the manager up against a wall.  After the obligatory yelling, the visitor grabbed a fist full of bacon and chicken, thanked them all for their kind attention by breaking a window, and left.

Karate-kicking random cars as he walked down the street (possibly an obscure greeting gesture from his time), the man beyond time was found passed out at a taco restaurant due to the strain of passing through the Time Vortex without a TARDIS.

Oklahoma police were skeptical at first of the man's description of the future until they remembered that Donald Trump will have been President for 3 years by then. Hence, all bets are off.

Meanwhile, the French invent something wonderful!

French science hard at work!

Photo by la Nouvelle République

The french are geniuses! While we slave away on space ships and robot cars, they've created the marvel of the modern age: The steak and sausage machine!  Hopefully, there will soon be one on every street corner as part of our long-promised Jetsons-like future.

But in case you're wondering, France does have its share of epic outer space adventures that have never been equaled.

Focused Like a Laser Beam!

Blogging picture by Erkan Yilmaz 

So, I'm a guy with several blogs -- just like all of you, right?  And depending on my mood and things I'm interested in at any particular time and which blog will take the least amount of time to write a post in and how tired I feel after work and random things people say and whether my cats have done something bad on the carpet and etc. and etc. I'll post in one blog for a month or two while ignoring all the others.  This leads to very sporadic blogs.

But there comes a time in every man's life when he has a rendezvous with destiny and a time for choosing, when he puts down roots and spreads his branches and picks a blog to focus on. And my friends, this is that blog.

I pick this blog for the best of reasons, chief among them the fact that it's about stuff I think and so takes a minimum of research. Unless I actually think of something interesting (unlike most of the time); then there may be a brief spurt of research, like that post I did about the secret, underground truth about of Labor Day.

So, hard luck for you all, but there will now be a sudden uptick in random, nonsensical writing on the A Few Paragraphs blog.

Just so you know.

The Future of Education

You know that Random Article button on the side of Wikipedia pages? I'll bet if you clicked it 6 hours each weekday (with breaks for recess, lunch, and holidays) for 12 years straight and read through whatever came up, you'd end up smarter and more well-rounded than most kids graduating from High School.

And don't start about "all the errors in Wikipedia;" my teachers fed me all kinds of things that turned out to be bologna.

My Chromebook

So I'm an IT guy, love gadgets, am always intrigued by new ideas, am drawn to things that aren't Apple products, am an early adopter of all things Google, am a partisan of Linux, and just like cheap stuff.  Got all that? Well, that's why I ordered a Google Chromebook from Amazon a week and a half ago.

For all those reasons and more I'd been interested in Chromebooks and the Chrome OS since Google came out with its first prototype in 2011. Somewhere in the future, Google proposes, the entire Earth will be blanketed with free, high-speed internet for all. It's already happening in many places with the growing ubiquity of Wi-Fi.  Once that occurs it is possible to do and store everything we've been doing and storing in our laptops on the internet -- aka the cloud.  Google Chrome is an operating system that does that now. Based on Linux (which is free and never breaks)  and doing everything inside a browser, Chrome makes light, thin, cheap machines  possible that start in seconds.

My problem tho had always been that all the Chromebooks were tiny little things with 11" screens. But larger versions are being built now, like my spiffy new HP Chromebook 14, so I got one.  If you decide you want one, be sure you DON'T get this one, an earlier version from HP that needed a much better processor, which it now has.

I'm very much loving my Chromebook so far. Google Chrome apps enable me to do Microsoft Office-type things (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets, powerpoint slide shows, etc). I can store reams of stuff in Google Drive, and as a bonus for my purchase they offered a free upgrade from 15 GB to 1 Terrabyte. That should hold me. Of course there are apps for music, movies, books and such like.

A Chromebook isn't for everybody tho; it's definitely taking a leap into the future. The biggest thing, of course, is that it doesn't do much without an internet connection. You can still word process, send emails and some other things, and Chrome saves it all until the next time you're connected and it can upload it all. If you're willing to pony up $9.95 a month for Google Music you can have offline tunes too.

There is a shortage of decent apps, but Google announced last year that they plan on making Android apps run on Chrome. So far there are only a handful of those but opening Chromebooks to the Android Play store will make them much more inviting devices.

"Super-Agism"

"I'll destroy you all!!

Photo by Marge

What's the most urgent threat faced by the world today? Terrorism? Climate change? Asteroids?

Not according to Moody's. The greatest menace our planet faces in the next two decades is old people! There are too many of 'em, and they're growing exponentially! By the time they reach critical mass around 2030 the malevolent aged will be sucking the world economy dry, with 34 major nations thrashing blindly about in a condition economists call, with hushed, trembling voices, "Super-Agism!"

Is your nation Super-Aged already? Well, take this test: 1.) Are you a doddering old coot (<-- inclusive term) of 65? 2.) Is 20% of your country's population just like you? If you answered, "Yes, consarn it, ye young whipper-snappers!" both times, then you are a plague on humanity. Right now that only includes ancient 65-year-oldsters in Germany, Italy, and Japan, but just you wait. Age is like cockroaches, and sooner or later it will overwhelm us all!

What are we to do? What regrettable but necessary measures will your children be forced to take so that the pillars of civilization won't crumble down around their iPads??

Two words: Soylent Green.

I Can See My House From Here!

NASA looks at my house

NASA has finally done what I always wished they'd do: let me see my house from space!  Sure we've had Google Earth for years but some of those photos are years old. I want to look down upon what's happening right now.

Now they've mounted high definition cameras on the outside of the Space Station pointed at the Earth and are leaving them on 24 hours a day. So as long as they're overhead (I'm sure that must happen sometimes, right?) I can peer down at myself -- and everything else in the world! Even at night!

I call that progress!

All we need now are some really, really powerful zoom lenses...

Blood Moon!

Income Tax Day!

Photo courtesy of Peter Gaylard

In further proof that Income Tax is of the devil (or at the very least a pox upon mankind), the Moon will turn to blood on April 15th -- tax day! 

Now the more prosaic among us might call this a "total lunar eclipse," but what fun is that? Calling it "Blood Moon" lets us consider it a sign of the end of the world, especially since 3 more Blood Moons are coming in the next year-and-a -half. And 2 of them fall on Jewish holy days, which must mean something. But only 1 of them is visible from the Holy Land. 

This end of the world isn't as popular as the Mayan Calendar end of the world, or the Niburu end of the world or even the Harold Camping end of the world, but at least some folks are selling books about it. 

Which brings us back to the pestilence of Income Tax. Beware! Repent and pay your taxes on that book income before it's too late!

Lasting Impression

How do you want to be remembered through all eternity (or at least until the sun explodes)? What you have put on your tombstone is pretty much the last chance you'll have to spin your story. When I walk through a graveyard (and yes I do, because I'm a bit morbid) my sole impression of the person beneath my feet is whatever somebody put on their marker. It's sort of like those crucial "first 4 minutes" when you form your opinion of a stranger, which thenceforth is written in stone and can never, ever change. Unless you're a famous or profitable person,  I most likely wouldn't find you on Wikipedia either, even if I thought to look. They have "notability" rules, you know. 

What sparked this post was the tale of Sonny Santiago. He was an up and coming 23 year old Massachusetts rapper who performed under the name of 'Uno.' Sadly, his life was cut short by a car crash in February. To honor his memory down through the ages his family commissioned a three foot stone decorated with an expletive-laced verse from one of his songs that went something like this:

"You gonna remember the d*** name, I give a f*** if I die with no d*** friends, I got my fam by my side and that's until the end" 

Fortunately or unfortunately for the thriving rap world of 200 years from now, when the Pine Grove Cemetery reviewed the designs they rejected the lyrics. Luckily, the expensive gravestone hadn't been engraved yet. Uno's family was cooperative and selected a new, profanity-free verse from his repertoire. No word yet on how that one goes.

Personally, for my epitath I'm torn between "Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble." (Job 14:1), "Friend of the worms," or "Hey, check out my blog at www.AFewParagraphs.com !"