#108 Fair and Balanced

So I was writing about Lakefair the other day. And I’m tapping merrily along and something horrible happens. See, I’m a miserable typist. You’d think after all my years as a writer, I’d be able to settle down into the classic QWERTY touch-typist consistency, but I still look at the keyboard, and run my hands and fingers every which way over it in a quest for letters, oftentimes crossing over to hit a shift key and or find the q, z, or tildy. Thank god for computer editing.
Anyhow, as a consequence of this mad chaotic scramble of fingers across the keyboard I am often looking down as I compose a particularly inspired passage. Sometimes I’ll get a whole paragraph along before I even look up at the screen. (If I need to correct any spelling I can do it later, and I just don’t want to interrupt the flow by looking up.) Only occasionally does this mean that I’ve spelled a word so badly that even I can‘t figure out from the context what it means.
Unfortunately, I’ve had this weird computer hiccup. What happens is, a pop-up tries to come into my computer across the cable modem (always on, always vulnerable) and somehow in the process of trying to get through my two firewalls and my three pop-up stoppers the thing doesn’t end up being an actual pop-up. But it does cause a blank page to occupy my screen. The page is not completely blank. In fact, it says “this page cannot be displayed” because the internet site to which it wants to be connected was blocked—mostly—by my pop-up stopper. The really big problem is, now anything I am or have been typing into my Word program didn’t get there. And because I had my head down looking at the keyboard while I dashed off the last inspired passage those sentences didn’t make it into my document. So I finally look up, realize what has happened, curse profusely, X out the pop-up fossil, and try to figure out what I need to retype. Fortunately, I’ve been married for many years and have, as a result, developed the capacity to instantly replay the last four sentences of a conversation when called upon to prove that I haven’t been ignoring my spouse. I was too listening honey... Certain primal survival instincts come in real handy even when dealing with modern computers.
All of which is to say, I left out a couple of Lakefair Observations the other day. One was that I went to the Democrat Booth for one of the Demo burgers they have year after year. They’re not like demo burgers at Costco though, you have to pay for them. They were really crowded and had a bunch of people working there. Funny thing, only 2 percent of them was dead felons. I then went over to the Republican booth. Not many customers. Of course it may have been because they only had one thing on the menu: Sour grapes. Which was even worse, cause last year they had something different. Republicans, here’s a tip if you want more biz: don’t change your menu year after year. Find a favorite junk food and stick with it. A couple of years ago it was French Fries, then last year it was Freedom Fries. Who can keep up?
America, ya gotta love it.