Trab

Wow. How to put a relationship into a few words; gut busting words...one has to wonder at the life the older man must have had earlier on, to do such a thing. He too has his demons, as I suppose we all do.

Couldn't agree more. Fabulous read. Well done!

What are you guys talking about? There was something about skimming and shallow thinking, wasn't there? And some dude who researched our loss of brain cells, right? Seriously though, I was driven nearly nuts reading that article, what with those stupid ads, which insisted on blinking at me for some reason. Ugh. Then I remembered that Safari (my browser) has a Reader sub-program that actually grabs the article only, and strips off all the ads and other distractions. I was fine after that. I do think that there is a serious problem with our younger generation with this issue. They also seem to need, besides distractions, ever more elaborate 'programming' even in the 'real' world. A hike used to be good, but now they need a hike with a zip line, then next time a hike, zip line, and hang glider at the end, and again an upgrade to hike, zip line, hang glider and a bit of scuba. They get insanely bored by doing the same thing each time, even if the hike is a different one in different conditions. It is as if they need continual stimulation and can't relax at all.

It's flash fiction if there is no more. If we start to reject flash fiction stories because there could potentially be more written then there won't be an awful lot of it posted.

Nice, if a bit puzzling in the background premise.

Wow.

I find that reading books is infinitely easier than reading an electronic screen. So much so, in fact, that I often print out reams of paper instead of trying to read my iPhone at night. There are other minor inconveniences with ebook reading, and one of them is it crapping out due to lack of battery power when I'm on a reading roll. Another is an insane tendonitis problem from holding the small screen in position. If I turn sideways the stupid screen flips orientation instead of letting me lie on my side and reading it that way. If I touch the screen in the wrong way, which happens if I drowse a bit, the story goes careening over the screen in all directions creating a major challenge to locate my current 'read spot'. You can't dog ear it either, and the smell is putrid by comparison with the scent of a good book with good paper. God help you if you fall asleep while reading though, as the screen could smash in the fall to the floor, or even worse, you roll over onto it. And finally, if there is a long power outage you can't take pages from the ebook to make a small fire to warm up, or wipe your butt if you run out of toilet paper.

Congratulations for sure. But, but, but really? ELKO NV? OMG

Sigh. A moderator's job is never done.

It seems to have gone on hiatus.

If only it were that easy. Nice to dream of it though.

D. F. L. ????

They do seem to feel that freedom of speech should be freedom to say anything at all, right, wrong, and just plain asinine.

Some of the comments are hilarious, particularly that self proclaimed parody.

You might all want to take a look at this beauty. I'm on a Mac AND also a PC netbook AND a PC tower, and this lovely works with them all. In fact, I use it for me Time Machine backup mostly. For whatever reason, which started before my iMac, I have a history of burning out hard drives, whether they be internal or external. The last about 3 months, then pfizz and they're dead, with little curlicues of smoke often signalling the finality of it all. Only once was I able to recover the information with forensic help, and then only because they did it for me for free, not the $3k they originally requested. Side story: I had sent it in for determination of the cost, they told me, I said I'd think about it, I paid the estimate fee, decided to have them return it to me, and they LOST IT. They found it 2 years later, and as an apology they recovered almost all my data at no cost. Anyway, the point here is that you can pop any old or new HD into this unit and I haven't lost one to heat-stroke since.

Camy, maybe you should develop a naming system the incorporates name, date, and time, and always use Save As, rather than Save. For instance, as Story named Blue Shadow might be named "blue_shadow_CH01_2010_7_13_1417" If you put one somewhere else, you can still tell which is the more recent, as it would end in "_7_12_0932" or whatever

Camy, was my email any help to you? I tend to agree with Mtn Dude, and recommend an external drive, although I'd go with several memory sticks as I've lost entirely too many hard drives in the past.

I can't promise results, but I've asked my computer literate nephew and he says he'll take a quick look with his sources to see what he can find.

?Why hello, Fred! How nice to hear my brother?s voice! ... Bye Fred, and give our love to Dave.? My frustration at the run off at the mouth mom eclipsed and soured everything she said.

I guess if we were frogs that might work out, but we are not. My understanding is that humans almost invariably produce MORE children in areas of greatest need (i.e. hunger) and fewer when things are 'good'. (I recognize that these additional children most often die.) This more closely matches plants, since they tend to bloom more when under stress, than when living a comfortable life.

So true, James, so true. It is pretty obvious to me that we are barely better than cave people in our reactions to both others and natural occurrences. Sadly, we seem to be best at creating newer threats to our own existence than ever before. I suspect that, unlike in the past, at least some of us can see what we are doing (or not doing); but we can't change the course of things. I know that people will say that change begins with a single person making a single step, but that's a crock of hooey in that it doesn't matter how many single steps are taken by everyone on the planet, we aren't going to stop that well from gushing by that method, nor will we stop anything else. As long as we can't even stop screwing around and creating ever more people to add to the burden, and won't even try to reduce the increase in numbers, we are doomed to suffer our own demise at the 'hands' of our own loins. There are lots of problems facing people around the world, but pretty much every darned one of them is due to our perpetual growth in numbers, and secondarily our demands. The latter though, is only a side-note, as we could reduce our demands to bare subsistence levels and still perish due to increases in our numbers. Instead of reviling same sex, humanity should be embracing it, as the only viable way to retain sexual pleasure whilst not destroying our own worldwide home. Sorry. I guess my inner zombie got carried away there, derailing the discussion.

Unless one of the 4 couples chosen for voting is a same sex couple, it is really just rhetoric, don't you think? I suppose even the rhetoric is better than nothing, but it's really not much at this point, and hardly an upswell of popular support.

I think you'll be hard pressed to prove it wasn't God Save The King (or Queen) first.

That's just too funny.

Nice to hear from and about you, Eggman. Every so often in the intervening years, I'd wondered what happened to you. Glad to know you are mostly okay, albeit jobless, and good to know you're still writing.