computer nostalgia

A beer drinking buddy, Griff, was in Berlin lately and went to Artemis, which google agrees is a very prominent brothel, and he had nothing but praise for those orderly krauts (and krauleins). so maybe it was true that they were unionized.  Also maybe the way you had to do the approaching was some kind of rule to keep things orderly.  That familiar form has always puzzled me, on the one hand you use it with those you love but also with those who you think are inferior to you.  Suddenly I am thinking of the waitress that calls you Honey  I like that. I was sitting at a hot dog counter some years ago and a woman asked me to move over so that she and her friend could sit together and the way she phrased it was "could you move over one, Punkin?"  Punkin, my head was still spinning when I was wiping the mustard off my chin, is a little now, just remembering it.

The tale of Old Dog's laptop screen reminds me of my TI-99/4A. computer.  There was a cable that connected it to your tv.  The resolution wasn't very good but the only thing it had to show on the screen was letters and numbers.  To get any data in it you had to use one of those cheap little cassettes. buzzfrzgushbeepfrz..., the sound of data going into your computer, it was kind of a cool sound, I miss it.  And you could write programs in BASIC onto a blank tape and then you could put that into the computer and do things like play games.  There was a magazine for users that used to list all these games that consisted of hundreds of lines of BASIC that you would have to type onto a blank tape, and if you left out any comma, or put an extra one in, the whole thing went to shit.

I haven't read Mattis's letter.  I heard it was pretty stinging, but I thought well how stinging can it be.  I'll wager Trump still has not read it, just heard from his Foxie friends that it was stinging, so that's why he canned Mattis early.  I am no fan of our presence in the mideast or Afghanistan but it seems that we should have a more reasoned rationale than somebody pissed Trump off.  Even as I type the Turks are building up their army on the southern border and the Kurds are awaiting their annihilation.

There is some pooh poohing of the shutdown since it is the holidays and all, but it is very likely that it will go on for some time Trump will be taking the blame so the dems are not likely to cave and Ann Coulter and Limbaugh will only see their popularity soar so they have no incentive to cave either.

And the investigations, and the dems, but still we will have to wait for that drop in the polls to put any starch in the rep backbones.