Late. Oddly enough, one of the things I've been trying to write is a poem about Losing Track Of Time...
Armed Citizen Fights Crime
Another category of stories that newspapers controlled by the Censorship Party avoid printing. If you didn't see it in your newspaper...
Books
Why are people revisiting this post? Because the school year is just beginning. Any teacher or student can benefit from the book reviewed.
Poetry
Flamenco dancing celebrates physical passion through exhausting physical performance. Its predominant sound is a fast rattling beat produced by the dancers' fast-moving feet, by castanets and other percussion instruments, but it can be accompanied by music, including songs. When songs are used they have a traditional meter that is surprisingly hard to imitate well in English (the songs are of course in Spanish). The Dverse Poets challenged themselves to write canciones flamencas in English. Most of them described videos of flamenco dances, but this poet not only made the form work in English but attempted to relate it to spiritual passion. Great? The greatness of poems is judged by subsequent generations. What can be said now is that it was a brave, innovative attempt.
One about the dance;
Technology
"This thing is a phone." The Android wasn't hard enough to keep from slithering down into sewers to pollute the water supply forevermore?
Now, THIS is a phone. Not that the shape is the only consideration if reasonable people ever go back to using phones.
See how convenient the size is: Fits into the same pockets and wallets as a card or a folded dollar bill. Matte finish, well balanced shape, fits between thumb and fingers, so it's not constantly sliding out of your hand or even off your desk, much less out the car door and into the sewer. Screen will not display pictures, much less snap pictures of you without your consent--yes, that's a thing. And you paid for the service by buying a plain card, cardboard, not even plastic, with a string of digits on the card, which you punched into the phone after paying for the card in cash. People could hear your voice but that did not enable them to steal your identity because it did not connect to any other piece of information about you except your location...which was mobile. Picking up this phone was not an instant breach of basic common-sense personal security, the way picking up the Android is. This was a good kind of phone. If the companies want people carrying cell phones everywhere, they need to get back to the design that worked. This time, make sure the phones, which are permanently locked into a fee schedule of 10 cents per minute of conversation or 3 cents per text message, are guaranteed to be fully maintainable for a minimum of 50 years from the date of purchase or the lifetime of the company. Throw in a year of free service to make up for having forced the useful kind of phones out of service, and the companies might have a deal. Though there needs to be something to offset the companies' unilateral decision to cancel their contract with their loyal customers, too...something like "Customers may set up a service agreement by furnishing their legal names to the company, after which they may reset the cost of 'additional minutes' cards to 1 cent per card if they feel like it." Seriously. You don't cancel the contract under which you sold an object if you want to sell anybody any other object, ever again!
I wish I had a link you could follow to find a local retailer that sells sensible phones. There is no such link. But if the phone companies want to survive., there will be one...before everybody discovers the convenience of switching to e-mail only and then not making time to check our e-mail if not expecting any special messages.
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