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Vol. IX, No. 42 October 18, 2003 IN THIS ISSUE:
 EDITOR'S NOTE: My thanks to my good friend Dean Smith, who perservered in the face of program difficulties in sending out the Spinners while I was on holiday. If anyone missed any of issues 39, 40, and 41, please write for a replacement. Not only Dean has problems with computer programs - I came home to find my computer had lost a few more marbles - ah, programs - and I can no longer access my account with 995.ca. Until I get my new IMac (hurray!) on Monday, I am relying on good old MindLink to keep open my window on the world. If you have written to my other account, there will be a short delay owing to unforeseen difficulties in my answering or preserving your contributions. Thank you once again for carrying on in the face of technical difficulties, Dean.
Margaret Manning is not the only one addicted to COMPUTER GAMES It's just as well the first computer I used didn't have any games attached to it. That was back in 1980 and, strictly speaking, was a Word Processor with a facility for doing simple arithmetic. It cost my boss a great lot of money. It the first Word Processor within 100 miles. The Wang W.P. took 8-inch disks and had two disk drives. It certainly made the typing of complicated legal documents a lot easier and faster. We got our own computer in 1985 and soon got into Freecell, solitaire, and Tetris. We also had a game on it involving skyscrapers, two men and bananas. A banana was thrown from one man to the other and was supposed to miss the tops of buildings, but unless the angle was absolutely accurate, the banana exploded and knocked bits off the skyscrapers. We spent hours on this late at night when we should have been in bed. We also tried a bit of programming. When we upgraded to a "286", Eric had that and I used the old machine. He bought a lot of computer games to try out on his new toy. The flight simulator program was a big hit, possibly satisfying his unrequited desire to be an airline pilot. By the time he'd sold that (I still had the first computer), the exploding banana program had been lost and the other entertainment packages wouldn't work on the new machine. But we bought some mah jong games and enjoyed trying those. It was in 1996 that a Pentium arrived. At that time Myst was a popular program and we certainly had a lot of fun with that, again staying up late to figure out some devious clue. We also had an interactive general knowledge game where you started off in the basement of a castle and worked your way to the top. That year we added Riven and the First Degree to our stock of games but never solved either of them. The new millenium arrived and I was bequeathed the old Pentium, while Eric had a new H.P. computer. The H.P. didn't like some of the newer games so they were discarded. But we had Mavis Beacon to teach both of us how to type and found that a most interesting program as it, too, had games of a kind - speed typing exercises and novelties. With all the typing I do, we got a new computer with the latest keyboard for me. Eric still has his H.P. But my version of Mavis Beacon didn't like my computer so she's been banished. We received other matching tile disks as gifts. These soon proved to be addictive. I spent so much time on them they had to be uninstalled and the disks hidden. Some of the games we purchased didn't live up to the packaging and had a very short life with me. I returned to Freecell, solitaire and Tetris, which have been with us since 1985. After a further twelve months I yearned for the programs I had put in a very safe place. The problem is, I can't remember where I've hidden them.
Dick Monaghan, accompanied of course by Miss Kate, recently attended an Elderhostel in New York. He tells about it: OUR VISIT TO THE BIG APPLE We arrived on 9/11. The first thing we noticed on the way in from Newark was the twin-vertical-lights memorial. Our hotel (for the Elderhostel) was the Financial District Mariott, one building removed from Ground Zero. It wasn't the big hole in the ground that moved us; it was the small fire stations scattered around the city. Each had maybe a dozen members who died in the collapsing buildings. I remember Engine Co. 54/Ladder 4, just off Times Square, where pictures of the victims were posted, and where a flag with their names sewn on was displayed. Elderhostel: The program was about "The Gangs of New York." The movie was historically inaccurate, in that it confused periods and gangs. There is a book called "Five Points," (the neighborhood that gave rise to the gangs) that explains it all in detail. Suffice it to say here that Five Points was to American crime what Ellis Island was to immigration. The gangs originally were mostly social, and they gave rise later to the fire department, since they competed for the rewards for putting out fires in the early days. We walked a good deal around Lower Manhattan, Wall Street, the Seaport Museum (near the Fulton Fish Market) and Battery Park. We passed Trinity Church, where the tombstones of Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton look down on you as you pass. We passed The New York Stock Exchange, now barricaded. Across the street from it is the J.P. Morgan bank, which still bears the scars of America's first urban terrorist act in the 1920s, when someone drove a wagon loaded with explosives up to the exchange and detonated it, killing 33 people (and knocking Joseph Kennedy down). The Morgan people decided to leave the pockmarks in the building. As part of the tour we ate at Chumley's, an old speakeasy at 86 Bedford St. in Greewich Village. It's like eating in a literary graveyard. The walls are decorated with book jackets, allegedly for books produced by people who ate/drank there. The manager, who appears not to let undue modesty or a slavish addiction to fact mar his discourse, said that four Nobel Laureates had written there, and that Woody Allen had bailed him out of a rent arrearage by hiring the place for film shooting. (No mention of which movie, or whether the footage had ever been used.) My favorite tale, though, was about the address. The manager claimed that today's term "86," meaning to eject somebody from a saloon for rowdy behavior, originated with them. He said the joint originally had its main entrance on Barrow St., and that when the cops arrived (during Prohitition), they would "86" the patrons out of what is now the main door. There were also pictures of 20 firemen who worked there who died on 9/11. Baseball: Miss Kate, good scout that she is, insisted we go see the Yankees. I had not wanted to force her into this, because time was limited, but she persisted. We took the subway from Lower Manhattan, but got on the wrong train. The people aboard were very helpful and told us how to get off at Times Square and take the shuttle to Grand Central, then get the 4 train to Yankee Stadium. The trains are new, clean and air-conditioned, but the platforms are dirty and noisy. The humidity was beyond belief, and we streamed perspiration. We bought two tickets on the street ($35 each, face value), and although you're not supposed to do that, they turned out to be just dandy. They were under a tier, which was good, because there was a light rain. We rejoiced to see Tampa Bay (managed by Lou Piniella, the former Seattle manager) beat the mighty Yanks 5-2. There is no doubt Yankee Stadium is baseball history, but taken as a stadium only, I much prefer Safeco Field. Of course, Yankee Stadium was built in 1922, and remodelled in recent years. There was only one food outlet on our level, and it had nothing spectacular. There may have been a food concourse somewhere else. The stadium (and other sights) look smaller in real life. Transportation in general: We used four methods of public transit: subway, bus, taxi and black car. You buy a "Metro Card" on the subway platform - it is much easier than trying to deal with cash. There are several kinds, good on both subway and bus. You can buy a one-day, unlimited rides; or you can buy 12 rides for the price of 10 (all fares are $2, no matter where you're going), or you can buy monthly passes. The curious thing is, the busses won't take dollar bills. You pay either with a Metrocard, or in coins. Another curiousity is that on a bus, you sort of dunk your card in the fare box, which spits it back out at you after reading it, but on the subway you swipe the card in a slot, and you have to do it exactly right, neither too fast nor too slow. It will not let you through until you do it right. There is a river of taxis (unless, a native told us, it rains), but (another curiosity) the hotels can't call them. I had not previously heard of black cars (they're all Lincoln Town Cars), which differ from taxis in that you can't hail them, they have no meters, and hotels can summon them. We went between Manhattan and Newark airport in black cars ($50 each way, plus tunnel and turnpike tolls, $6 and $1, respectively). None of the taxi drivers we had spoke more than very rudimentary English, but they got us where we were going. You don't give cab drivers exact addresses; you give them cross streets. Our midtown hotel was the Ambassador at 130 W. 45th, but we should have told the driver "West 45th and Times Square." On being a pedestrian: We discovered that New Yorkers are friendly and helpful - unless they're moving. If they're standing still they're regular people, but if they start to walk or drive, their canine teeth grow two inches and their eyes turn a hideous red. There's a reason for this: when you get a pedestrian "walk" light and start across, say, Seventh Avenue, you will immediately be nuzzled by a taxi or automobile wanting to make a left turn. You barge straight ahead. If you hesitate a nanosecond, the vehicle will turn in front of you. The driving is insane, with quarter-inch clearances considered normal. I saw more bicycle riders than I thought I would. Most of them ride clunkers, and carry chains of a size usually associated with anchoring ships. Broadway: After moving to the Ambassador, we were within walking distance of the "on-Broadway" theaters we had tickets for, the St. James and the Golden, and our one "off-Broadway" venue, the Westside. We saw "The Producers" at the St. James, the same theater where I saw Henry Fonda and David Wayne in "Mr. Roberts", after hitchhiking to New York in 1948. It hasn't been painted since. I thought the show lived up to its billing, despite some understudies appearing at our performance. We saw "Avenue Q" at the Golden. It's adult "Sesame Street", although it carefully distances itself from Jim Henson or Public Television. The puppeteers are right in front of you in street clothes, with the puppets (torsos) on one arm. There is no attempt at ventriloquism, but you soon see nothing but the puppets. We saw "Trumbo" at the Westside, after once again buying tickets on the street. (We paid face value, and I was sitting about 20 feet from Nathan Lane.) "Trumbo" is not really a play; it's a reading of Dalton Trumbo's letters, as collected by his son, Christopher, and read by Nathan Lane. Trumbo was a screenwriter who refused to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committe and did a year in prison for contempt of Congress, and was blacklisted from Hollywood for 13 years. (He won two Oscars under assumed names in the meantime.) To a contractor to whom he owed money, he wrote: "You'll get your money in 60 days, although, considering what you did to me, I ought to make you wait the full nine months." To someone who had betrayed him: "I found you last letter loud and witless, but to deny you those two qualities would be to silence you forever, which, on Consitutional grounds, I decline to do." We thought we got our money's worth in all three shows. Circle Line Tour: I would advise anyone going to New York to take the three-hour Circle Line boat trip around the island of Manhattan. You get a great view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and a spectacular view of Manhattan. We started about West 43rd St., sailed south around the Battery and under the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. (I had never heard of the Manhattan Bridge.) I had not thought about the Harlem River at the north end of the island. I didn't know that the Rockefellers bought a chunk of land there and preserved the only hill left on what was named "Island of Hills." Museums, sights, etc.: We bussed it to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, I suspect, is the only place in the world where you can enter a gallery and be approached by four armored knights mounted on armored horses, lances raised. We hardly scratched the surface, of course, but I was much taken with a stature of "Mimi and Sabu" in the Egyptian section. Sabu is shown with her arm around Mimi's waist, while he has his left arm around her shoulder and is cupping her left breast in his hand. She is looking away, indicating that this is their usual stance. They've been standing like that for about 4,500 years. We also saw the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Graphics and Design (in what was once Andrew Carnegie's home). I was wearing a shirt I bought at the Portland (OR) Saturday Market, and a woman walked up to me and said, "That shirt belongs in this museum. It fits right in." I hope it was a compliment. Much imagination on display: sculptured metal flowers that opened and closed in response to light sensors. Naturally, we tried to visit the Guggenheim on the one day a week (Thursday) it's closed. The store was open, though, and I made my only puchase of the trip, a poster of a Picasso I'd never seen before, a 1900 impressionist-style painting of a nighclub, much closer to Toulouse-Lautrec than to the geometric style he later favored. Miss Kate was much taken with Bryant Park, next to the New York Public Library, where rolling book carts supply you with reading material, and Gertrude Stein sits cross-legged on her pedestal. Further deponent sayeth naught.
Gerrit de Leeuw wonders how we ever learned to spell in the first place. THE PAOMNNEHIL PEOWR OF THE HMUAN MNID Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
Anne Rahamut writes: Here's a follow-up of my earlier account on the perfect period fire. THE PERFECT PERIOD FIRE? As I described in an earlier issue, our family has been working earnestly to produce the perfect gas reproduction of a coal fire in our fireplace. When I left off, we were about to pile up some old glass coals on a perforated shelf in the old cast-iron coal grate. So there we were, in the livingroom, coals artfully arranged in grate, husband sparking the gas flame to life - and within seconds, we began to hear a series of pinging sounds - as glass splinters flew everywhere. W-h-i-l-e we were cleaning up the mess, I wondered how the devil my grandparents - or anyone - ever used these glass coals in their fireplaces. Was I taken in as a child by light bulbs behind and under the glass to give a beautiful fire look? Was the gas distributed differently, not so hot? Any ideas, anyone? My husband says not to give up. The old ignition system for our present gas fireplace is on its last legs and I am to aim for a new goal, that of replacing the whole system. I picture multi-bucks up the flue here. But I'll let you all know anon.
Tom Williamson forwarded this SENIORS' ALPHABET
A for arthritis,
D is for dental decay and decline,
H for high blood pressure (I'd rather have low),
L for libido - what happened to sex?
N for neurosis, pinched nerves and stiff neck,
Q is for queasiness. Fatal or flu?
U is for urinary: difficulties with flow.
Y for another year I've left behind,
Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. - Albert Einstein |