Gotterdamerung, or the twilight of Carly Fiorino

At one time, giants trod the earth. Lew Terman invented IQ and begat Fred. Fred taught everything to Bill and Dave. But there was Depression in the land, and no jobs for even Stanford grads. So Fred said, never you mind; just build a dozen of those neat signal sources and sell them to Disney to build his empire of Fantasia. Meanwhile, I will build the greatest junior university in the world, with its German motto, "Die Luft de Freiheit Weht", which translates to "Make checks payable to Stanford University". And it was done.

Soon, war came and other giants arose, such as Generous Eccentric, I and BM, and Various Associates. To all of them , Bill and Dave sold wide-ranging signal sources, versatile VTVM's and eventually, reverse Polish calculators. After peace returned, I and B.M. said "Let us build monstrous mainframes and sell them for a megabuck each." Then, the Steves said we could put something on everybody's desk and sell them for $5K. Next Bill and Dave said,"We could do that for a kilobuck if we use that virus-prone and hackable operating system from up north. They got bigger and bigger and then they said,"It is not as much fun as it used to be. Let's split it up and split." So they said,"From now on, H.P. will be computers and peripherals. We will call the instrument division Agilent". Meanwhile, in the city, Lotfi, pronounced "God's Grace" in the original Farsi, was wowing the susceptible with musical tales of dwarf gold miners and the follies of trying to woo 1000 ladies all at once.
Women also became giants. DiFi said "I come not to praise Moscone and Milk, but to bury them", which she did. Moscone got a convention center named after him. Milk got an opera, first staged in Texas of all places. Pamela took over the opera but ran low on money and succumbed to the less critical attraction of grandchildren. Bill and Dave put Carly in charge of HP, who wanted to build her kingdom and sought mergers; remembering the difficulties of Eve from swallowing apples, she aimed higher and swallowed Compag instead. Even so, the computer industry got into the doldrums, and the nations Nibelungs, led by young Hewlett, were saying they could sell lots of ink for the price of one computer. So Carly let out a contract on young Hewlett. But even with a spear sticking in his back, young Hewlett was looking better than Carly, leaving her the choice of (1) Walking the plank (2) riding her horse into the inferno or (3) blowing her severance pay on a race for the U.S. Senate. Thus, once again, we see the wisdom that is stated at the end of the story of Ali Theeva and the Forty Babs, "A mool and his funny are poon sarted"
This leaves but one steroid-free giant on earth, Larry the Oracle, who seems to think he is Pavarotti and thus allowed to keep the citizens of San Jose awake until all hours. Those who could, moved to Tracy, where the sleeping is easy, and hired a bus to take them back to their offices in Silicon Valley. At this writing, Larry was dickering to buy a roundball team that no longer has that center that claimed to have successfully wooed 10,000 ladies. Maybe he will go back to racing sailing boats before he blows his fortune.

What is this insame proliferation of apostrophes??

This morning I was occupying my mind with the tv in front of the mill I was treading and seeing the commercial for some financial servi"ce that said "No deposit's ever!" For several years there has been an inexorable increase in the appearance of apostrophes at randumb intervals and a number of questions occur to the inquiring mind, such as "Can't these guys get proofreaders?", then recognizing the use of apostrophes in forming possessives, "what can a deposit own?" and finally "If it looks peculiar as heck, is that a sure sign it is correct grammar?" More and more over the years we have seen violstions in objects of prepositions, such as "At the sexy movie, they refused admission to my little brother and I". How is it possible that they had better English teachers in a tiny school in northern Michigan thsn all those city schools? Of course, the following question begs to be asked, "What is the lasting benefit of being made to read "Silas Marner"?"

God is not a betting man

That is a paraphrase of Albert Einstein, the 20th century thinker who best exemplified thinking about the structure of the universe. He expressed public disagreement with theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, considering phenomena in very small places, such as atoms or even subatomic particles. Such particles may behave very differently from phenomena with macroscopic scales. A famous example dealt with electrons trapped in a potential valley because they lack sufficient energy to get up the hill. Dirac and others postulated that such electrons have a non-zero probability of tunneling their way out. Einstein famously stated he did not believe God would "play dice games" . Yet, creative physicists and engineers were led to invent a tunnel diode microwave generator with electrons using the tunneling effect to escape the potential valley. Your writer remembers Hewlett Packard, (and later the part split off from the company as Agilent) selling instruments containing tunnel diodes. Perhaps one is unable to answer the existential question, "Do electrons actually tunnel their way out of a potential valley?", but real devices act as though they do. Certainly, although Einstein deserves much credit for his theories of general and special relativity, one can wish he had not made dogmatic assertions which are not borne out by physics experiments.

Paraphrasing the Pennsylvania Dutch----

We get too soon old and some of us never DO get smart. I have been hassled by a jumpy cursor and I finally thought Maybe I should slow down my "mouse" I put the speed at minimum, which still seemed plenty fast, but seems not to have had eny effect on the jumpiness. I looked up "Computer Exorcist" in the yellow pages and found nothing promising. I am too old to want to send some guy 20% of the price of the computer to some trouble shooter on a promise. Stay tuned to see how long it takes me to throw out this pile of junk and get a decent computer, namely a Mac.

The burden of a sense of humor

Where did it come from? My parents gave their v0ws on October 1, 1921, in the front yard of the Ole Martinson farm. In the next five years and four months, there came four children, two daughters followed by two sons. Six years, one month and one day passed without further issue. Then, in the midst of worldwide depression, on the very day the incoming President exhorted his audience with "We have nothing to fear but fear itself", the y0ounger of my two sisters looked down through the hot air register meant to transfer warm air from kitchen to the "girls room" and said "We've got a boy baby" Older sister said, "Surely not. you must be imagining things".
Now, my mother, being a purebred Norwegian, had a somewhat limited sense of humor; Some things did seem funnier in Norwegian than in English. Sometimes, her telephone conversations with her best friend, also Norwegian, would be punctuated with hearty laughter and one of us kids would inquire, "What was so funny?" Iy appeared that the humor did not translate.
Despite very difficult economic conditions, my dad could find lots of life to be funny. Much of my dad's background came from the British Isles. It was abetted by the funny paragraph or so filling the page after articles in the Reader's Digest. We six kids varied greatly in our funny bones. Our oldest sister was comparatively serious. The brother born just before me was the family jock, with the athlete's sensibility. Maybe growing up during the Great Depression, we laughed so we wouldn't cry. Whatever the cause, it is certainly a gift. I used to think God had an unusual sense of humor.