Bad Decisions-Worse Results

Bad Decisions-Worse Results

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and we are on the way. K-12 teachers, products of liberal arts college educations, naturally think that’s the way to go, so promote college. An attempt to raise K-12 results forces teachers to teach students to pass the tests. Consequently, schools across the country have dropped shop courses like machine shop, electricians, welding, and other trades. Typically, a graduate with a liberal arts education earns $30,000 a year, yet a welder can make $100,000. If you hired a plumber, you paid $60 an hour. There’s a shortage of skills tradesmen.

Lured by the prospect of private companies running prisons, states hand over felons to  private enterprise. Then the prison corporations lobby for stiffer sentencing to keep their “customers.” Mandatory sentencing provides the privately owned prisons with steady income. In Michigan the penal system costs the state more than public education. It costs upwards of $30,000 a year to keep someone in prison, more than the cost of a college education.

To pay for the prison system, states reduced financing for colleges, thereby dumping the costs on the students in the form of higher tuition. The universities, to save money, shifted more and more course work to part time adjunct professors without tenure or benefits, destroying professorships as a profession. The students were encouraged to take out crippling student loans.

The consequence? Shortages of skilled labor. Colleges staffed by itinerant adjuncts and debt-ridden graduates who will never afford to buy a house or a car. Who wins? 

Video games now an esport

The New E-sport

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

A recent episode of South Park satirized kids addicted to computer games. The little gang of squeaky animated figures were playing an addictive computer war game, sort of a third generation of Dungeons and Dragons, but with digital animated swords, spells, magic, etc. They were so addicted that they hardly slept or ate. But the kids’ avatars, their chosen action figures, were being wiped out by a mysterious super player somewhere out there in cyber space. Their opponent was so good, that he threatened to put the game makers out of business by discouraging all other players from buying their extra weapons, etc. This was meant to be a satire, but  video games, now called e-sport are a huge business that financially overshadows the music business and is almost equal to the movie industry in billions..

Computer games have become a bone fide e-sport. With tournaments played all over the world (recently in Poland) the State Department now issues sports visas for contestants to enter the country. Now teams playing on line computer games like Dota 2 (check out the free download) and League of Legends take part in tournaments for prize money in the millions. At a recent championship tournament before a crowd of 17000 people in Seattle, the  Newbees,  a Chinese team, won first place and over five million in prize money playing Dota 2.  The League of Legends finals drew 18,000 fans at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

The tournaments are played by teams of five in sound proof booths while the game is shown on a huge screen everyone can watch.

Visit the Dota 2 web site for a glimpse into this strange world of e-sport. .

Imagine, a sport anyone can play for free, as 40% do, a sport requiring no physical contact, no uniforms, no special shoes or helmets, and  no sports injuries (except possibly carpal tunnel for the mouse clicks,), and played in your bedroom in your PJs or even naked up against other players from all over the entire world. You can play if you are a shut-in paraplegic. The playing field is level. All it takes is a fast computer and tremendous concentration and speed of thought.

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, one such e-gamer reported that one year it cost him $1000 for hotel, meals, and travel to attend a tournament where he collected only $800 in prizes, but this year he expects to take in $200,000.  His father, at first dismayed that his twenty-year old son was spending so much time playing computer games, begged him to finish college. He may yet, but first he wants to buy a condo and move out of his childhood bedroom.

Declaring video games a sport has reached colleges. A Chicago college, Robert Morris, has offered scholarships up to $50,000 for champion video gamers. E-sports have reached beyond the bedrooms of boys playing video games with their pals.

.What about the commercial aspects?  The participants are mainly males under age 30, a hard audience to reach for advertising until companies realized that the channel that streams the games, Twitch Video, is so popular with that age group that advertising placed there costs much more than on regular video channels. That’s why Amazon has bought Twitch video for millions. .

This e-sport phenomenon is a remarkable development not only in e-commerce,  but in international relations, for  when you log on you may be teamed up with anyone from around he world. And you can do it from your own room at home. Talk about revenge of the nerds! 

Saturday on Tri-Met

Saturday  on Tri-Met 

Riding public transportation in Portland is great fun, for there are always surprises. Take Saturday, for instance. I was waiting for the #15 bus to take me up to 23rd and Lovejoy when I noticed behind me a derelict, old man in shabby clothes, a beard, and worn out shoes that did not match. His right shoe was coming apart and he shuffled along, stopped, and sat down on the sidewalk.

He was approached by a young man with a big back pack which he opened up and took out a new pair of sneakers which he gave to the homeless man along with a pair of new, white socks. Amazingly, the shoes fit and the old guy walked away, leaving the old shoes behind.

I asked the benefactor, “Do you do this often?”

He said only, “Önly occasionally” and was gone.

Two more passengers came up to wait for the #15, a young couple. She was carrying a picnic cooler and he was laden with three packs and a huge, rolled up foam mattress. They’d been camping near Bend. I did a lot of camping in my day and asked,  “Whatever happened to sleeping on the rocks?”

The bus arrived and they struggled to get aboard with all their stuff. He works in a hospital and soon engaged with the woman sitting beside me who exchanged experiences of that kind of work. She’s a care giver who prefers not to work in hospitals because of all the administrative conflicts. So we learn about other people’s lives.

I suspect that the two campers’ relationship would not be lasting as long as she carries only the cooler and he has not only his pack, but hers plus the huge mattress.

That was the ride to 23^rd and Lovejoy.

The ride back on the streetcar was equally remarkable. I broke my streetcar journey to stop at Safeway for a loaf of bread and when I crossed back to the streetcar stop to catch the next tram, I started talking with a dark-skinned man wearing something around his neck that looked like a greasy talisman or a charm. It was leather, the size and shape of a bull’s testicles, and I asked him what it was for. “Ït’s for religious purposes,” he explained, without further detail. I joked that maybe it was to ward of vampires. I soon learned that he was of Haitian descent, a practitioner of the religion practiced there, which recalled voodoo and zombies. He said there are two congregations of that religion in Portland but because he has been a practitioner for 34 years, he qualifies as a priest and can practice alone.

The next tram arrived. Seeing that I was struggling with a cane, a young woman gave me a senior seat and we were soon talking about destinations. Since I’m a Ride-Wise volunteer I always ask people who may be tourists where they’re headed.  The woman and friends were going to Powell’s and weren’t sure where to get off. The discussion turned to books and, always hoping to plug my own books, I said I was an author. I gave her one of my book marks.

Across from us, another passenger announced, Ï’m an author, too,” and told of his books translated into eight languages. His expose of Microsoft got him interrogated by the FBI and the Secret Service. He’d been asked, “What was he doing at the White House?” If was journalism, he said, and he added that he thought Hillary Clinton was much better looking than her photos.

Well;;, the word got back to Mrs. Clinton and he soon got a personal, hand written letter from Hillary Clinton saying, “Thank you for saying I look better than my photos. We have to keep a sense of humor,” etc. He’d had the letter laminated and proudly read it out for us.

I got off at Fifth and Market to wait for the #8 bus and ran into three other residents of Terwilliger Plaza. It was a short ride right to our door.

All that excitement, all those interesting people! I just love traveling with Tri-Met.

Red Suspenders

Red Suspenders

The old joke asks, “Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?” and the answer is “To hold up his pants.” The secret reason is “to meet women.”

I didn’t realize this until my waistline hit 40 and I couldn’t hold up my pants with a belt. I had several colors and styles to choose from: black, tan, something that looked like a distorted American flag, and red. I bought several pairs. It turned out that there was a special power in red suspenders.

Just as a peacock displays a gorgeous tail to attract the peahens, red suspender are a magnet for women. They say that blondes have more fun, but men with red suspenders trump that.

To add special allure to the suspenders, wear one with an  “accidental” twist.  Women who grew up dressing their dolls graduate to dressing their guys. What man hasn’t heard his wife say, “You aren’t going to wear that, are you?” So when a woman sees that your suspenders have a little careless twist in them, she can’t resist fixing it.

It’s astonishing how strange women will be unable to resist adjusting my red suspenders. This doesn’t happen with any other color.

So, guys, want to meet women? Get yourself a pair of bright red suspenders. They will change your life.

Hamas Tunnels: why Israel fought back

The right hand edge of the paste-in is lost, but you'll ge the idea.

Stories From The Battlefield: Hamas Tunnels Used To Target Israel’s Kindergartens

9:16 AM 07/27/20144

By Mordechai Ben-Menachem

Multiple media outlets report that Hamas’s offensive tunnel network – now known to have been composed of over forty attack tunnels dug underneath Israel’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip – was set to be activated during the Jewish High Holidays (September 24^th) as a mass terror attack.

The attack was meant to generate as many as ten thousand casualties, men, women and particularly children and hundreds of captives. Explosives were particularly placed underneath kindergartens to make certain that these “institutions” would be the first struck, even before any thing else.

The IDF recently published the below map showing that tunnels were created in pairs, to empty out on both sides of nearby communities. The known cost of the infrastructure – each tunnel costs upward of some $1 million – clearly shows that Hamas was planning a coordinated mega-attack. It must be understood that use of even one tunnel would inevitably trigger Israeli retaliation against the entire network.

A map of a small portion of the tunnels meant to be used 9 weeks from now.

Revelations regarding the planned tunnel attack magnitude played a decisive role in the Israeli government’s rejection of a ceasefire proposed late Friday by Secretary of State John Kerry.

Unbelievably, Kerry actually proposed in his latest “cease-fire proposal” – none of which have been honored by Hamas so far – that Israel refrains from degrading remaining attack tunnels. This mind-boggling concept would necessarily be rejected by any sane government, of any country.

Israeli security sources, citing information acquired in interrogations of captured brigands, described a scenario under which hundreds of heavily armed Hamas fighters would have spilled out into Israel in the dead of night and within 10 minutes been positioned to infiltrate essentially all Israeli communities surrounding the Gaza Strip. Waiting then in hiding until schools and kindergartens were occupied, the terrorists would then attempt to kill the children first, and then kill and kidnap as many Israelis as possible. The plot was set to take place during Jewish New Year, on September 24.by Taboola

“It’s like the Underground, the Metro or the Subway,” Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said. “These tunnels are all connected. I would describe it as Lower Gaza.”

Israeli Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said, “A whole city of terror tunnels has been found. Without the ground operation, we would have woken up one day to an Israeli 9/11.”

Except, the actual objective was to be five times 9/11.

This picture shows clearly the width of one of the tunnels, sufficient for wheeled vehicles to transverse it. Hamas did not build a “subway” system for Gaza residents. They built an infrastructure for one purpose, and one only, an industry of death.

Israeli military officials reported that the tunnels are stocked with tranquilizers, handcuffs, syringes, ropes and other materials used for subduing abductees, civilians and soldiers. The tunnels also had fantastic quantities of explosives and additional military materiel meant to be used in the up-coming mega attack. Much of these explosives had already been placed underneath Israeli kindergartens. Some of these tunnels were as deep as 30 meters underground.

Fantastic quantities of explosives were stored in every tunnel, meant to be used in a mega-attack on civilian communities and infrastructure.

Sources say the Gaza Strip war, Operation Protective Edge, could serve as a prelude for a more extensive underground war with the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah. Perhaps, not ‘just’ in the Middle East.

The tunnels inside Gaza and under the Israeli border are not a secret project Hamas ran under the noses of Israel and the Palestinian public. Everyone in Gaza, knew that beneath Gaza, the City and all of its environs, a network of tunnels was being dug over the past five years, with an investment of tens of millions of dollars. Yet no one in Israel, public or military, was prepared for the scope of the tunnels – the danger that became clear in the past week or two.

Senior Hamas operatives show off their offensive tunnels to their spouses. Unbelievably, this is actually a picture of a Marriage taking place in the ‘place of death’.

In order to create this monstrosity, Hamas needed significant professional help; and this help had to have come from a large organization or state entity. This is not just the monetary aid it received from Qatar, America’s ally. This is professional guidance for the performance of such an underground feat. Perhaps Hamas could have used experts from the tunnels dug at Rafah under the Gaza-Egypt border, but those were significantly simpler, and did not demand any extraordinary investment or effort.

A Hamas operative climbing upward in a pier of one of the major tunnels. Notice the work on the sides of the tunnel.

Who supplied these quantities of material? Who planned what would be needed? How did Hamas acquire thousands of ampoules of tranquilizer, syringes and other, additional drugs to be used? These are far beyond the quantities and variety of what is needed by any civilian medical service.

How was all this brought in to the Gaza Strip? The logistics of this planned attack are the work of a well-organised military, not that of a militia or club. This was no amateur plan.

Observers note that attack scenarios lined up with recently revealed data about the sophistication, scope and nature of the offensive tunnel network. As previously reported here, this sophistication and know-how is being copied right now by Mexico-based Hezbollah agents along the Southern US border. Tunnels in Southern Lebanon, as in South US, are significantly more difficult to detect than those in the sandy terrain of the Gaza Strip.

“Hamas planned these tunnels for years, and planned to use them to kidnap soldiers,” Israeli military spokesman Brig. Gen. Mordechai Almoz said. “[Now] they see the tunnels collapsing one after the other.” For the last two years, the Israeli army has sought to develop skills and equipment to fight in enemy tunnels and bunkers. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have used tunnels to operate command and control, to infiltrate Israel and abduct soldiers, to fire rockets and to conceal fighters amid invasion of the Gaza Strip.

———-

Mordechai Ben-Menachem is a former researcher/lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and an author of 30 book ranging from engineering to poetry. He is also an ordained clergyman and a former soldier.

Israel cf Gaza

Israel cf Gaza

a letter by

Harley L. Sachs

If you built a house in Israel you must build a shelter of 1.5 ft thick reinforced concrete.   Hamas in Gaza, however, builds tunnels for assassins to infiltrate Israel, not air raid shelters. Hamas fires rockets indiscriminately at civilian targets in Israel; Israel is after the tunnels and the rocket launchers and stockpiles. When there are warnings of an impending strike Hamas tells the children to get up on the rooftop as human shields, then exploits the pictures of dead and dying children.

Hamas has only one agenda: to destroy Israel and kill the Jews.

After WW II there were an estimated forty million refugees, but in a couple of years they were all resettled or repatriated. In the years since the 1948 Israeli war, the Palestinians have remained in refugee camps fed by a permanent UNRA United Nations Relief Organization, your tax dollars at work. The UNRA employees have lifetime employment providing handouts to the Palestinians.

Forty percent of Gazans are unemployed, yet before the Intefada and Hamas, many had jobs in Israel. No more. Now Israel imports foreign guest workers, but not Palestinians. Hamas is the Gazans’ worst enemy, not Israel. . 

I am a time traveler

Here I am, a time traveler out of the 1940's and 50's, so the 21'st century is Buck Rogers stuff for me. I come from a time when all telephones are black and licensed by Ma Bell. There is no FM radio, no jet planes, no television, no cell phones, no computers, and postage costs three cents (seven for overseas). There are also no freeways and the Pennsylvania turn pike is an innovation. The very idea of a space satellite in stationary orbit above the earth is pure, speculative science fiction,  Beebee has gone down in a diving bell and a helium balloon went to 100,000 feet. Radar is a top secret Ww II weapon, but not used for microwave cooking. The fastest army plane does about 300 mph and are propellor driven.  Breaking the sound barrier is considered speculative and dangerous.Most trains run on coal. People heat their homes with coal and the only air conditioning is in some movie theaters. People cross the ocean on ships, six days to England. Movies cost a quarter and for that you can sit all day and warch the double feature over and over, including Flash Gordon. Auto tires are bias play and last about 15000 miles. No seat belts. A cup of coffee costs a dime and chicken is 20 cents a pound.  Phonograph records are on breakable wax. The only plastics are nylon,  bakelite, and cellophane. Frying pans are iron, not non-stick.

So no wonder I feel a bit bewildered here in the 21st century!!

Result of free promotion

What a thrill! The posting of "Wounded Warrior"for five days as a free download reached readers in seven countries including Japan and India A one time exposure won't make much of an impression, so I am doing this again,this time with the prize-winning story "Two old Men,"work I am proud of.. When that promotion is over I'll do a countdown deal with one of the novels.  Incredible that sixty people got "Wounded Warrior." Reminds me of an old WW II movie, "Tomorrow the world!""

Revised short story now offered for 99 cents

The story posted with an invitation for comments has been revised. The finished version was set up as a five day free promotion under the title Ä Wounded Warrior from the memoir of Dr. Nate Solomon

Time for women to organize and fight back.

Time for Women to Organize Against Rape and Abuse

African Americans have the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Jews have the Anti-Defamation League. So where is the national organization of women who proactively stand up against rape and abuse? That’s the thesis behind my latest book, StopRape.com which shows how a raped marine recruit employs social media to give all rape victims, female and male, a platform not only to tell their stories, but to post the pictures and addresses of the men who attacked them. That social media site is then used to guide the Women Warriors Against Rape and Abuse to go after the perpetrators.

The story is told through the eyes of a young TV reporter at a small, remote station, Kerstin Mikkola, who hopes the report will lead to a bigger and better job with the network, but she is soon part of the story herself, and in danger.

The moral, if a novel can risk that, is when law and order fail, the last resort for justice is revenge. The Women Warriors are out to avenge the victims, and the result can be tragic. For an example, consider Afghanistan and Pakistan where there is no justice for the victims of drone strikes, so plans are for revenge against the United States. Those folks have long memories and hold perpetual grudges.

It’s pitiful that American women can’t even get equal pay for equal work. The Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified. So when are women going to, if you’ll pardon the analogy, stand up like men and fight back?

Sonja Sotomayor

We attended Sotomayor's talk as part of the overflow flow at the Portland Art Museum. She was wonderful, well spoken,  brilliant, and sincere. I wish my daughter Belinda had been there, for the advice was apt. My only objection was that Sotomayor kept referring to her book. That made it sound like a book tour sales pitch. In reality, what is important is that it is her story. Everyone has a story, and hers is remarkable and noteworthy. But though her name is the only one on the title page, the book itself is not only her own product. It's the product of pages and pages of the people who helped her bring it to fruition. Reading it I cannot help but be reminded that every sentence has been gone over by collaborators, editors, and the publisher many times. So naturally it's a best seller.
Margolin, a local mystery writer of renown, published a children;'s book, but they had to hold his hand through the entire process so the vocabulary of the children's book was appropriate to the audience. They had his name and his idea as selling points.

When an author is published by a major publisher she is part of a stable of authors, just like a horse in a stable of race horses. Illustrators of children's books are also part of a stable. The books produced are properties that belong to the publishers. The author' name becomes a product like Coca Cola. The books are not the sole product of the author, for there are cover designers, book designers, layout people, copy editors, a literary agent etc. who all contribute to the final product. That's not the case of an ebook author. An ebook doesn't need special design and can stand on its content alone. That's the author's own words. I have thirty-five books published. With minor exceptions (at Wing Press) they were done without an editor, designer, and in most cases without an artist. I've done my own illustrations. When I look at the result I can proudly say, "This is my book. I did it by myself." No agent, no editor, no book designer, no middle man, no commissions to pay.

A pitch for "StopRape.com" my new book

Can a young country girl find fame as a network television broadcaster? StopRape.com is a novel set in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. A third of the population is Finnish-American and people “talk like dat dere, hey.”  This is country with snow six months of the year. The protagonist, native Yooper Kerstin Mikkola, is a TV broadcaster at KDUP with offices at an old airport terminal.  She works for Queen Annie, her mentor and widow of the original station owner. What Kerstin would like is to move up to a network job but she is unknown.

A surprise arrival at the station is Imogene Michener who, as a marine recruit, was raped by her training sergeant Carlos Wayne Sauvenier. Imogene’s traumatic case was blown off by her commander. Suffering from extreme PTSD and discharged, Imogene set up the StopRape.com web site, inviting other victims to post their stories for the world to read. As a result of the web posting, Sauvenier has been castrated by a gang of violent California Women Warrior bikers.

Interviewed on KDUP television without showing her own face, Imogene persuades Kerstin to give her a copy of the recorded but unedited interview, and places the revised pitch for her web site on You-Tube. Now Kerstin is identified, and hate mail follows. Kerstin wanted to be noticed, but not to be vilified by alleged rapists.

Identified as a friend to rape victims, Kerstin helps Heather Rasmussen, who claims she was raped by her boy friend Joe Pascoe and, with Kerstin’s advice, puts his picture up on the StopRape site. All this begins to come together, enmeshing Kerstin Mikkola as a figure in international news. As a reporter, she knows she should not be other than an observer. Out of her depth, she still hopes for network notice. 

How to Save Social Security

One benefit of being a Swedish  and a Danish pensioner is I get to see how different the income taxes are paid there and here in the USA. For instance, in Denmark the income tax includes a 5% health tax which pays for the National Health. That might be the approach we could take in the United States.

This year the Swedes have made a change in the Social Security benefit. Instead of a COLA as we Americans sometimes get, the Swedes adjust the social security pensions according to how much is paid into the system. In 2013 less was paid into the Swedish pension system than was paid out, so they are reducing the pensions by 2,7%. No deficit spending there!

Our government would be more fiscally responsible if it followed the practice of the Scandinavians: an annual health tax to fund Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare and a floating social security benefit. That could save Social Security from eventual bankruptcy.  The Cost of Living Adjustment can go both ways, you know. If the cost of living goes down, so goes the pension plan. Makes sense.

But then, since when did our government’s fiscal policies make any sense?

What about contests?

Normally I avoid literary contests. At the worst, they are a scam, like the national poetry contest that invites wannabe poets. The result of the submission is likely to be a notice that your poem is to be published (copies available for you and your family members, relatives, friends, etc, of course) for only xxx dollars per copy, and you are invited to the national meeting at a fancy hotel (expensive registration, etc.) which turned out to be a way to lure people to a meeting and cash in on he fees. This play on the egos of the gullible and, perhaps, desperate for publication is unethical.

Other contests typically charge an entry fee,  ostensibly to provide an honorarium for the judges who spend their time screening the submissions.  Some of the entry fees are pretty steep, like for the book awards, several hundred dollars. One reason for he steep fees is to weed out those who are too cheap or poor to pay, but also to limit the inevitable flood of submissions. As one reviewer pointed out, some people who are bad writers have money, so a price gate doesn't keep them out.

Publication is like a game, especially academic publishing where one collects brownie points, titles on the resume, like tokens to be used to cash in for raises or promotions. The so-called "little" magazines are like the long dead one, "Tailings,"  that had a very brief life at Michigan Technological University. Being the editor of a campus literary magazine can provide an element of prestige with the department head. Academic authors who write for such endeavors can trade, "I publish your piece and you publish mine." I did a satire of this in a short story in my collection "Misplaced Persons" where the professor, hungry for tenure but not capable of doing great writing himself, decided to edit a book of poetry, set up a contest with a fee, sold copies of the published booklet,  and was doing great until it turned out the winning poem was stolen lyrics from an obscure musical number. He got sued for plagiarism and fired.

There are also reviewers playing their own sort of game. For several years I actually did review children's books on my radio show and gave three books a plug with each broadcast. Over ten years of broadcasting, I acquired a collection of 800 delightful children's books my daughters picked out of the publishers' catalogs. Other reviewers only want books they can sell and might not review at all. Authors review each other's books, too, a variation of "I'll publish your story and you publish mine." My daughter, who used to work for Coffee House Press,won't read anything if it isn't reviewed in the NY Times. I'm not reviewed there, so it's only because I'm her dad that she'll read mine.

The upshot of all this is I don't give much credence to any contest that charges an entry fee.  I do review books I've read on my Kindle. I think if you've posted enough reviews you begin to get some notice as someone with a reliable opinion. Maybe.
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The Death of E-Readers

The Death of E-Readers

Back in May of 2004 Northern Express ran my column “Electric Ink” about a new development in technology. In the time since we have seen the Kindle, Nook and other e-readers have come out using that energy-saving technology. The charge on a plain vanilla Kindle can last a month! Now the e-readers are already on the brink of extinction.

The development of new technology seems to be progressing more and more quickly. Hardly anyone any more remembers eight track tape. That was replaced by cassettes, but now those are hard to find. You can’t find a cassette player now unless it is bundled with a CD player. Want one? Try the Goodwill store.

Beta video recorders disappeared with the advent of VHS. Then VHS was replaced by DVD, and now Blue ray is taking over as the next step. Blockbuster video has gone out of business, thanks to Netflix and streaming video on demand. There’s 3d TV and even 4d, whatever that is.

Amazon.com, Kindle maker of the first truly mass marketed electronic book reader after numerous others like the Hamilton Bookman and Rocket Reader failed, is trying to compete with the Apple I-pad. Amazon has progressed from the basic Kindle, to the Kindle white which is lit for reading in the dark, and the Kindle Fire which incorporates some of the features of the I-pad.

Tablets are fast overtaking tower PCs and can do almost as much as laptops. The I-pad is pricy, though, at around $400. I just bought a marked down Prestige tablet the same size as my  3g Kindle for $50, free shipping.

This is made possible by the ever more compact memory storage.

When computers first were developed there was no memory storage. Shut off, those big main frames forgot everything that wasn’t hard wired into the system. Then we got tape storage of data. Early computers came with little tape cassettes to store memory. Major office computers used spooled tape. Then we got disks. Spell check software for my first computer, a 64k CMP system, was purchased on an 8 inch floppy disk and had to be converted to the then standard 5 inch floppy. Those were replaced by the 1.2 megabyte 3 ½ in disks, and now PCs no longer come with drives to read those, either.

I paid $300 to have a 40 meg hard drive installed on my Compaq luggable PC. Imagine.

The advent of the flash drive changed that, too. You can now buy a 64 gigabyte flash drive that simply plus into a USB port. That’s more memory than my replacement 40 gig hard drive! It’s that kind of memory storage that made the Prestige baby tablet possible. It is a flash drive system, no spinning mechanical hard drive to slow down data access. Tablets today come with 8 or16 gigabytes of storage.

Survival depends on versatility. When I upload a text for an Amason.com ebook I can preview how it will look on the screen of a Kindle, on an I-pad, and even a phone! Thanks goodness the books can be read on all those platforms. Otherwise my books would be as accessible as the Rosetta stone which took twenty-four years to decipher. I joke that I have the secret of eternal life on my 8 track tape player.

Does anyone remember the Linier dedicated word processor? It was quickly replaced by the PC with its variety of off the shelf software.

Like the cassette player, it seems obvious that e-readers like the Kindle and Nook, surpassed by the more versatile tablets, will soon be obsolete. My Kindle cost nearly $200. My tablet cost $50. Now all I have to do with my obsolete brain is figure out how to use it (ambiguity intended). You have to keep running faster and faster just to keep up. Wish me luck.