I just got a new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite, with all manner of bells and whistles. I expect it to make me quite prolific at this journal thing–at least once I figure said b & W out. My old desktop had no speakers and consequently (duh!) no sound, so I rarely put in any music. Now I will–eventually. Those of you who are computer-adept are…all younger than I am???? I kept on top of the computing scene for a long time, but now I feel like a fogey–and that pisses me off. Part of the problem is that they don’t include manuals with the electronic gear these days and when they do, they’re incomprehensible. It’s as if you have to understand the language to understand the language. Perhaps I need to move to India and get retrained…

That last is a reference to The World Is Flat,Tom Friedman’s book, which I got on CD (15 of ‘em!) to listen to on my way back from LA. I got through the first five hours, and it was fascinating. He made real sense of this outsourcing thing and removed, for me, the xenophobic qualities from it. I started to feel like we’re all quite cheery in this thing called Life together (and yes, I know that sentence is a grammatical mess). If only we can control the bad guys who want to own the world–like WalMart.