Monday, June 24, 2002

Every spring break for as long as I could remember, my sister and I would stay at my grandmother's house in Portland. One year - I'm guessing I was no older than eight or ten, maybe even younger - I invented a new game. My grandmother had several candles in the small main floor bathroom. On the back of the toilet she kept a box of matches. Immediately to the right of the toilet was the sink. Just past the sink was a wastebasket. The game was easy: in one fluid motion, I'd strike a match and throw it past the sink into the wastebasket. Usually, the match either wouldn't light, or it would blow out before it reached the target. Usually. I didn't know what to do when I first noticed the smoke. I'd already locked the door because I didn't want anybody to chance upon my fun little game. Now I had to make sure nobody found what I'd done. Cartoonish images of smothering flames pushed their way into action. I grabbed a towel and began, in truth, to fan the flames. I was too scared to get close enough to the wastebasket to actually attempt to smother the fire. By this point, my uncle's Irish Setter had started barking up and down the hallway. I think it was my dad who then started pounding on the door. Most of this is a blur, really, a strong childhood memory that is crystal clear before the fire, but not so clear after. It didn't take too much longer for me to realize that I was out of my league, and I unlocked the door. Dad came in and immediately tossed the entire wastebasket into the bathtub, quickly filling it with water. Although I can't recall the specifics of the punishment - although I think there was a comprehensive ban on flammables - I do remember the stern "you should have known better" tone everyone in my family took with me. They were right, of course. Even then I most certainly did know better. Fortunately, the damage was confined to a single wastebasket. But the fact that so much of that particular incident has stuck with me over all these years is all the more reason that it's completely beyond my comprehension what Terry Barton must be going through right now. So much destruction from one simple, stupid act. Unbelievable. 9:41:15 AM

It has been such a subtle shift, it only recently occurred to me that the way I get my news has changed drastically over the past few years. I never watch the local news. Very rarely will I turn on SportsCenter, or CNN, or any number of cable news networks. When I do it's usually to pass the time while I do some ironing. We only get the Sunday edition of the local paper, and that's mostly for coupons and comics. When Time arrives every week, I read it from back-to-front, seldom getting much farther than the middle of the magazine. Print media is almost always out of date before it is delivered to me. Televised media is much more current, but I'm not allowed to pick and choose which articles I follow, nor do I know exactly when the news that I'm interested in will appear. I suspect that my current methods of gathering news -- Google, RSS subscriptions, My Yahoo!, and a handful of other news sites -- will be the model for future media consumption. Our children will laugh at us when we try to explain the concept of only being able to watch certain shows or movies at certain times, as dictated by somebody else. To a certain degree, Esmé already has that mindset today, when she asks if we're watching the "regular TV SpongeBob" or the DVD SpongeBob. Neither of the girls care much for "regular" TV, opting instead for a video or DVD. Fine by me: no commercials. 9:27:16 AM

Retro-Post Here are two posts from last week that never got posted (one of which may not be at all relevant anymore). Chalk it up to some kind of odd, mangled post, being out of town all week with no internet access, and, even if I had internet access, some technical difficulties on the home front that are nearing a complete system rebuild. 9:25:06 AM