My 12″ iBook G3 has gone the way of all laptop flesh bearing self-destructing logic boards. Let’s lower our eyes and say a few words of remembrance.

A Reading from the Holy Book of Monty Python, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 19

Pie Iesu domine, dona eis requiem.

16. And Saint Wozniak raised the iBook up on high, saying, ‘O Lord, bless this Thy G4 that, with it, Thou mayest let thy people gallivant about the internet in Thy mercy without fear of the horizontal rainbow lines.’

17. And the Lord did grin, and the people did check stats and their feeds and carp about the price of gas in various forums and realize that the number of weeks of data lost were three-and-a-half.

18. Not four, because they did obey the Lord and back up, but three-and-a-half, because they were wicked and did not back up as frequently as the Lord demanded and thus deserved their most unnecessary loss.

19. And because they did repent of their wickedness, they refused to pay the $99 transfer data fee to the Genius Bar but decided instead to upgrade to a 14-inch with a Super Drive.

Amen.

mac, ibook, logic board

The Fall 2005 issue of Porch magazine came out. On page 26 you’ll find a little essay called, “A Spoonful of Sugar.” Please go to the store and buy the magazine right now.

Ahem.

I should mention I wrote that little essay.

Hubby’s in it, and my neighbor Rita’s in-laws, and lots of little interesting odds and ends: a DVD player, a box of Splenda, and some high-flying Legos. I even managed to cram in the Kama Sutra.

Some might call this New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial an example of righteous indignation. I call it an example of the best defense.

Nearly a month after the storm, officials have come up with no hard evidence to back up stories of murder, rape and other violence that supposedly happened among those who took shelter in those places. No matter how convincing the eye witness accounts, the bodies that back up their stories aren’t there.

“OUR OPINIONS: Hurricane-force rumors,” an unsigned Times-Picayune editorial dated Sept. 27, 2005.

This stern disapproval comes from a newspaper that didn’t exactly count any bodies before hatching its own set of lurid rumors.
(Read the rest of “Post-Katrina Times-Picayune points a righteous finger”)

When the kids went out yesterday afternoon, Hubby and I locked the doors, turned down the lights, and … put in the DVD of Sin City.

Yowza! I’d heard it was violent and it was, but nobody told me about the Jiggle Factor. Let’s just say Hubby was enthralled. Lots of lucious boobalas and bottoms all over the screen–enough to make a forty-something housewife sigh as she remembers her forgotten resolution to work out regularly.

My favorite lines came from Marv:

Wendy: You sat there and took it… when you could’ve taken my gun away from me any time you wanted to…

Marv: Sure, but I thought I might be able to talk some sense into you. And I probably would’ve had to paste you one getting the gun and I don’t hurt dames.

We need more movies that use the term “dames.”

Hubby’s Greatest Moment:

(Carla Gugino makes her appearance as the lesbian probation officer/pharmacist, wearing nothing but a thong and a concerned expression)

Hubby: Hmmm. That girl needs to do some squats.

I drive an afternoon carpool of teenage boys.

“So?” you might say. “No big deal!”

Yeah? Well listen up. I drive an afternoon carpool of teenage boys in a school district that no longer requires mandatory showers after P.E.

Perhaps now you comprehend my ambivalence to carpooling. Perhaps now you might even grasp the reason why my car seats smell the way they do. And perhaps — just perhaps — you might understand the message I got last Friday: “Mom says to tell you she died so she can’t drive anymore.”

(Read the rest of “Strong Enough for a Man, But Made for the Carpool”)

I am viewing the world through Mac Internet Explorer 5.0, and it is not pretty.

Last night my iBook fried its fourth logic board.

The FOURTH.

IN 19 MONTHS.

When did it fail? About five minutes after AppleCare shut down for the evening, natch.

(Read the rest of “Pop Goes the Logic Board. AGAIN.”)

The latest addition to our household is my nephew Wolfie, who has moved in with us until that great day when:

1. he resumes his interrupted college career,
2. he finds a job that pays him $100,000 to start, or
3. George Clooney persuades him to star in Oceans 13.

For him the benefits of this living arrangement are:

(Read the rest of “Call me “Dudette””)

My old hand-held showerhead was a champ. It outlasted one dishwasher, two refrigerators, three cooktops and four kitchen faucets. Hubby and I weren’t the only ones using it, either: for several years it was the power tool I used to scrub the boys squeaky-clean — until the sad day they realized they could outrun me.

Now they’re lots stinkier than they were back when I was in charge of hosing them down. I think my old showerhead died of despair.

I needed a new one, but the Home Depot guy was getting kind of personal about it.

(Read the rest of “The Right to Remain Silent in Bathroom Fixtures, Aisle 7″)

Ye best be learnin’ t’ be talkin’ like a buccaneer. Shiver ye timbers on over to the Pirate’s Vocabulary page.

That be too much work? Yer a swabbie who ortin’ t’ be keel hauled! Arrgh! Try ‘t Pirate Speak translator instead, ya lily livered lanlubber.

If ye be nay smart enough t’ reckon what t’ say t’ a member o’ th’ opposite sex, here be a pickup line fer t’ lads:

Avast, me proud beauty! Wanna know why my Roger is so Jolly?

‘N fer the lasses:

So, tell me, why do they call ye, “Cap’n Feathersword?”

The most embarrassing thing I learned whilst cleaning up my site this weekend: every time you update a post, the RSS feed at Bloglines shows it as another post. Yowza.

Thought I was being smart, adding “Done!” to my To Do lists! My apologies to my two (count ‘em, TWO!) subscribers.

The fun thing I learned this weekend: when you subscribe to a feed, you can see how many people have also subscribed. At the time of this posting, Bloglines shows

• 43 Folders has 4655 subscribers
• A million monkeys typing has an even 200 subscribers
• Binary Bonsai has 366
• ProBlogger has 445
• Interdictor has 456
• Bonnie has 2 (count ‘em, TWO!)

…and so on.

I also learned how one can keep her subscribed feeds private, so other readers snooping about amongst the public blogrolls can’t discover her secret vice.