Arthur D. Hlavaty

Many of us have some sort of vermin we want Orkin to apply extreme measures to. For John C. Wright it’s people who put queer content in children’s TV. For me it’s the computer mouse.

I’ve always been dyspraxic. My prep school classmates knew I was smart enough to be there but wondered if I could walk and chew gum at the same time. Predictably, age has withered and/or custom staled, and I find myself making more and more mistakes with the allegedly user-friendly MacVermin.

It’s an analog device trying to do a digital task. In many ways we live in a world of approximations, but there are some areas where it’s a matter of discrete digits, such as the Pythagorean number mysticism Dmitri Mendeleev called the Periodic Table of the Elements. A list of sites or Word files is similarly discrete, and I’d make fewer mistakes if the mouse clicked from one to the next.

This goes with the change from the computer screen as book page to the computer screen as constantly moving TV screen, but one cranky-old-man rant a day is probably enough.

ETA: Can’t resist one follow-up. It seems that the book-to-TV shift combined with dumb ideas like “only boys like to play games” and “games, being a boy thing, should be coded by boys” to chase women out.

Thanx to andrewducker

I am old & cranky, and so I tend to see things getting worse, so maybe it's me and maybe it’s the Intarwebs. I click on something and likely as not as soon as the browser gets it for me, something defecates on my screen and I have to click in the corner or sometimes find where to click in order to wipe it off. Then I wait while various programs check to see if the gummint wants to watch what I'm doing and to make sure that various entities get to collect rent on what others have created. Then sometimes a television show begins playing at me. (This is limited by ad-block software, for which I am pathetically grateful.) Then I hope that the whole thing doesn't stop entirely until eventually I am told that a script that someone else is running on my screen has malfunctioned and I should click if I want it to stop.

I have applied for a passport, bitterly resenting that we now need one for travel to Canada.

Canada used to be just like us, but now it's a Weird Foreign Country with dangerous ideas like legal marijuana, same-sex marriage, and civilized socialized medicine.