A Word On Nothing

Gentle visitors, the lateness of the hour and the endness of the week have combined to render your humble Contributor unable to contribute anything of substance to these otherwise fulsome pages.   The concerns and tasks of these last five days have, in effect, sucked dry the dewy tendrils of thought leaving a brittle tangle of straw.  The bright insights have gone dim; the colorful images, gone gray; the bon mots, gone sot. 

Thus, he is left to draw out -- in a manner most painful to visitors -- an extended rumination on what is wanting in his own rumination. 

The very act of bringing pen to paper -- he speaks figuratively, of course, since he is in fact stroking a QWERTY input device  -- itself an anachronism, designed for the mechanical typewriter such that's it's keys would not compete for the brief passing of the ribbon -- though, as those who remember such things, they often did, sticking together in a most inelegant fashion, seizing the carriage and leaving a smudge or a poor hybrid of a letter resembling misspelled cuneiform -- such that the keyboard (against its will, one would guess) became an monstrously inefficient digital interpreter -- and, too add to the sorrow, this ungainly arrangement of keys doggedly persists, despite the introduction of the Dvorak alternative and the fact that type-bars have long since given way to electronic signals, converted to binary bits, thence to hexadecimal bytes, thence to ASCII alphanumerics according to sets of characters ones mother would never have approved -- to say nothing of the multiplicity of typefaces only a mother could love --

This very act is accomplished only with the greatest of labor, producing little of value or meaning, except the aformentioned exposition on vain and fruitless pursuits.

All of which is to say, nada.

Comments

[Ned]

I am not very dexterous with either pinky finger, especially when it is called upon to leave the home row and strike keys below the home row. I believe this is the reason for my aversion to words containing the letter "z" and may contribute to my aggressive and arrogant attitude (since I find it so difficult to effectively execute a question).

[Harry]

(Take Two)

I so well know the feeling; oy is our collective vey, at times.

The ribbon and the hung keys reminds me of one of my dad's best service calls he made for a machine gone haywire -- the new-fangled electric skipped incessantly, a buxom secretary complained. Dad had her go fetch a new ream of paper, and while she busied herself with that distraction, he tactfully readjusted the height of the over-endowed woman's chair.

Naturally, he billed the firm for his expertise.