Wednesday Prompts

One prompt came from LongAndShortReviews. After last week's prompt, which everyone answered at some length, usually with a longish list of favorite foods, this week's prompt seems likely to generate really short answers.

"What was the first web site you remember visiting?"

That ought to tell how long we've been online...In the 1980s there were corporate computer systems, the function of which seemed to be to keep the Office Computer Expert busy fixing the steady stream of problems with awkward early programs, and there were freestanding, unconnected personal computers. I was an advocate of personal computers. I didn't think good was likely to come from linking them--still don't, actually. The fad has lasted long enough and the Internet has grown big enough that being online can certainly be interesting, but let's face it, word and data processing programs still work about five thousand times more efficiently when you're not online. 

So it was late in the 1990s when Zahara Heckscher talked me into looking up things online. She had Compuserve, like Rush Limbaugh. It wasn't free; you paid per minute, so you minimized online time and didn't surf around. Beyond her Compuserve account, the public web site we visited was an early search engine called Ask Jeeves. 

The Internet was less cluttered even in the early 2000s. I remember Asking Jeeves about Zambia. Jeeves found all of the four web sites that mentioned that country. One was a US government site, two were UN, and one was the official Zambian government site, which, most memorably, tried to attract tourists with the promise of "a treat": being allowed to hunt rare semitropical animals. The Zambian government site said nothing about the antimalarial drugs tourists would be taking, or their potential side effects. The reason why Z needed a writing assistant was the nerve damage, the chronic pain, which typing aggravated. 

Another prompt came from Spencer George, and recalls our old long-abandoned phenology theme:

"What's blooming where you live?" 

Well, yes, I suppose he does write for fellow Southerners.

I think of February as generally a beige time of year, where I live. Things aren't blooming yet, in a normal year. November is brown, the month when the dead leaves cover the earth. December and January are not always, but usually, black-and-white, the months of ice and snow. February is most often a chilly, muddy, dreary season when the dead leaves are faded and worn, and the overall color of the ground, hills, and trees, is a sort of deep rose-beige or rose-tan or rose-taupe.

This year's unusually mild winter followed an unusually long summer. The flowers that are most often tricked into blooming during the February thaw, and frostbitten in our "redbud winter," bloomed and were frostbitten in December, so I'm not seeing many of them despite temperatures in the sixties. Some years, dandelions will pop up in the January thaw. This year, I've not seen them; they all bloomed in December.

Nevertheless, in town, on the sunny side of someone's lawn, forsythia has bloomed; and I've seen the first few dandelions of this February.

What's blooming where you live, Gentle Readers?