This requires your immediate attention!

[ashling]

Now, I think technology is a fine thing - some of the time. But we are loosing a little bit of ourselves to it, I am afraid. As it ever was, I suppose. As the historian of the Gilded Age put it, the tramp comes with the train.

Now, obviously I am posting this on one of these new-fangled computer machines for you to read on your own computer machine. Or - and this is probably the better plan - you could print this out on paper first, and be sure to scribble in the margins and furiously underline those passages that you agree with. After reading it, put it on the corner of your desk under a paper weight of a slightly overfilled cup of coffee or hot chocolate - or tea, if you desire. Trace around the cup and the spilled beverage and then put it in a drawer or at the bottom of a stack of papers for you to come across later - much later.... maybe, folded erratically and stuck in the pages of a book.

There is a kind of sensual pleasure in the tactile feel of paper and a visual delight in words , notes, doodles, scribbles, et al., in actual pencil or ink. A pleasure that I feel less and less as I read more and more on my computer or, as my students do, on their blackberries, i phones or whatever the latest gizmo is called.

I could go on, but I won't, lest I become too melancholy ... is it still possible to do that, or did that gone out with the mimeograph? But read this article in the New York Review of Books:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/oct/12/take-care-your-little-notebook/

[rrneck]

1. I wish this was in GD so I could rec it. nt

[Bake]

2. Nice post, Hitler

:hi:

Bake

[ashling]

3. Achtung! Deise messengen hast deine ausgattention requiren!

Danke schoen....

Wo dost deise typen machine nicht umlaut gehaben! Wir type und wir type un wir type uns schtill nein UMLAUT GEHABEN!
Was?
Softwahren? Was ist deise Schaftwehren?
Musst ich die Microshafte und ud die HP komputer gemache auscheinvaden?!!!.
Wir invaden und wir invaden und wir invaden ... und was haben sie? Hmmm?!!
Was gut is deise planet entire occupiren und wir haben nein umlaut fur getypen? Wo? Wo? Wo?

[Bake]

5. As best I can tell, you're upset about not having an umlaut symbol?

And of course I could make out Microshaft ... er, Microsoft!

:hi:

Bake

[ashling]

6. Ja, das ist recht!

:hi:

[Bake]

7. Go back to your country!!

I can't understand youuuuuuuu!

(in my best Dave Chappelle voice ...)

:hi:

Bake

[ashling]

8. This is as close to German as

Latin is to pig-Latin

akesma ona ensema! (I think pig-Latin was invented by a Canadian - eh) LOL

[yankeepants]

4. I always have a small notebook

and I have saved all of them. They chronicle my life. It is sad to think that they may become a thing of the past. Not in my world they won't.

Thanks for the article. I just read it to Mr. YP he loved it because he knows my little notebooks keep us organized and we can go back through them from time to time and have a good laugh about where we've been.