The other shoe
By Roger Owens
In 1861, before the start of hostilities in the American Civil War, both sides held their fantasies, those delicate, oh-so-vulnerable baskets into which we are forevermore enjoined by our mothers never to put all of our eggs. The Johnnies said the Union boys didn’t have the sand for one real fight, let alone a real war. They didn’t have the honor, the pride that would sustain the Southerners through the few months it might take to kick those invaders from the sacred soil of Dixie. The Union fellows told each other they had the vast advantage in manufacturing, which would provide the railroads, the cannon, the powder and shot and food and horses and rifles, and those Rebs wouldn’t have a chance. Many of the Union boys were from the cities, and they saw themselves as legion. How many Rebs could there be, after all? Just a bunch of farm boys. Neither side listened to their mothers, as so many generations have not, to their everlasting regret. So, as the shooting started, each side marched smartly off to disaster, figurative baskets of eggs clutched uselessly in their hearts and minds.
By Roger Owens
In Windows 10, you hold the power button down for 15 seconds, then release. Press it again and begin tapping “F11,” until you see the boot menu. You select “Troubleshoot” from the menu, and then click “Advanced Options.”
By this point you feel a little smug; that feeling gamers report when “reaching the next level,” that sort of thing. You are now confronted with options including one known as “System Restore,” and when you click on that, you get to chose from a few dates in the not-too-distant past at which time, in your fondest dreams, your system had not been corrupted by God only knows what virus, power surge, plague, disaster, war, famine, or election gone awry that might have had illicit cyber-congress with your hard drive and impregnated it with some vampiric succubus.
By Roger Owens
In just the next few days, life, for my wife and me, will be turned on its head. The Devil has invited us to dance. It’s not the kind of invite you can turn down. You see, there’s this lump. Yeah, that kind of lump. It’s been x-rayed and ultra-sounded and mammogramed – the medical equivalent of an RSVP for the invitation, if you will – our grudging, involuntary response that, yes, we will be attending the ball. We really have no choice, do we? They, and the biopsy tomorrow, may be the first salvoes in what could be a long, hard war. Or what could be, heaven forbid, a short, deadly skirmish. It’s like this: by itself, the lump isn’t too terribly scary; lots of women have them. They could be fibroids, which run in Cindy’s family, while breast tumors do not. Even if it’s a tumor, they can do so much these days, right? Right? But then there’s this cough. The cough has been around for a few weeks, a bit longer than we have known about the lump. Just a holdover from that bout of bronchitis last year, you understand. Or so we have been telling ourselves; but then, the lump. Yeah. So now the cough has grown claws and teeth and turned into something entirely different than a “lingering viral infection.” Quick: name another situation in which a “lingering viral infection” would be a thing to celebrate!
