I consider computers to be friendly things; you know tools to be used as we need them. Like hammers… yes, that’s it’ just like hammers. Oh, I realize we get frustrated and discouraged whenever they lock up or send us confusing messages that are meaningless. Messages such as warning’ error #214’do not attempt to press any key for any reason.’ These messages tend to raise our blood pressure and to wonder why in the world we ever strayed from faxes and letters in the mail, but soon all is well and we are back in the real world once again, at least for the time being.

This usually happens only after you’ve either called someone who has a title with the words ‘ technology’ in it or your 12 year old child or grandchild has dropped over for a visit. I’d rather pay someone to come out than to admit to one of my children that I can’t get anything to work. It just doesn’t seem right to me to go begging for help with modern day electronics. President Obama may be a wonderful person and all of that and some might think he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. However my vote would go to the guy who invented the atomic clock that keeps our DVD recorder on the correct time rather than blinking 12:00 from now until eternity or until one of the aforementioned individuals comes along and fixes the thing.

I will give my children credit, when they do fix something in my house that requires a degree in computer engineering or technology, they do have the decency not to smirk. I can’t stand smirking; smirking gets under my skin really bad. How do you feel about people who smirk’ I thought so.

Anyway, the use of computers has pretty much taken over our lives. It’s hardly a day goes by that we don’t run across some application involving computers or the internet. I’ve personally been using the internet for almost twenty years. I first started with a dial up service which as I recall was named Prodigy. I believe this was soon after Al Gore invented the internet. In any event, the internet is truly an amazing invention; I suppose you could call it an invention. I can’t think of any other word to describe it, outernet just doesn’t sound right to me.

I suppose with the population of the world standing at over six billion it should come as no surprise that virtually anything you want to know about something is probably already posted on some website and is available for anyone to review.

As an experiment I typed in the words..potato sculptures and yes, there is a web site devoted to these as well as one for bread sculptures. Tasmanian Devil Association’there’s one listed. You want the history of pepper’ There are over 22,000,000 references for you to peruse, should be enough to get whatever you need. There is a museum of bad art. A vast collection of ‘ you guessed it .bad art. Their motto is. ‘ Art Too Bad To Be Ignored. They’ re having an on-line auction for one of their paintings..the price thus far was over $150. (US dollars only) The piece was listed on E-Bay, but had been removed so I can’t tell if it was sold or just taken off the market until a later time. The piece was called Studies in Digest’ and was a colored pencil rendition of the human digestive system as interpreted by four different artists. I use the term artists loosely.

I know you’ re always wondering where I obtain these choice morsels of information and as much as I would like to tell you, I find that I cannot. I suggest you go on line yourself and let your fingers do the walking. My final internet topic this week is what happens when you Google the term’ navel lint or belly button lint. I was surprised to find there were over 81,000 references to these terms. They range from a belly button lint collection (gross—this guy started in 1984) to a navel lint study (government funded, no doubt) to a couple of papers on why belly button lint is blue. The results may surprise you. I won’t reveal them to you, and will just let you go and see for yourself. Let me just add that ABC did a survey of over 4,000 people and found that older, hairy males with an innie rather than an outie are most likely collectors of BBL (belly button lint).

That’s enough for now.I hope you have a good week.