Neanderpundit

Alexander Bain invented the fax machine. Actually, it wasn’t what we know today but it wasn’t a great deal different either. You put an image on paper on one end, and the image printed on a specially treated paper on the other end.

Communications technology has been leaping forward ever since, and now communications are- frankly, too cheap to meter. Where overseas calls once cost megabucks (The Altar and Rosary society took up collections so that Sister Corentina could make her quarterly call to talk to the family back home in Austria, as I remember her 10 minutes cost around $40) you can now walk into a public library damned near any place on earth and Skype with just about anyone just about anywhere on earth without dropping a coin in the slot.

And that ready availability of simple and easy long distance communication has sort of spoiled us. We have gotten so used to blogging something or sending an email or even picking up the phone and talking to someone that the idea of being even moderately inconvenienced in our communication is anathema to us.

Don’t get me wrong- I am extremely happy that I can see partner online and sit and yap at him for a couple hours, or any one of a dozen friends I chat or IM or email with. it’s great to be able to have a quiet conversation like that and do so at my convenience.

I have always been a bit paranoid about who I said what to online- I learned early on that once it’s on the internet. it’s there to stay. So, years ago, if I had something I wanted to say to someone and didn’t want it to be common knowledge, I would do things like print it out and scan it and then send a compressed jpg of the scan with a bogus file extension so you had to know to look at it.

These days there isn’t anything someone won’t figure out.

So these days being a patriot has become- like Tony Soprano said, “A face to face business”. So I make a point of having important conversations out of the range of telephones, with nobody or nothing there but me and whomever I’m speaking with. Lord knows, I don’t need to do this often, but when I do, it’s the only way. I don’t think- never have thought- that there is such a thing as being too paranoid.

Working from phone. Storm ripped a >45 yr old elm out of the ground by its roots in our backyard. Healthy tree with apparently insufficient roots. We’re OK and the electronic less night was peaceful and pleasant. Had the guy across the street turned off his bloody generator we’d have been in fat city.

Update: the tree in question

the picture embiggenates. For scale, the top of the roots sticking out of the ground are about 12 feet in the air.