The cicadas are coming, but not for me. The emergence we’ve been reading about for the past year is upon those who live in the areas with dots. I am being smug because none of my family members are in those areas. We will not be among those who can’t sleep because of the noise or cannot walk anywhere without stepping on bug bodies.
My sympathies go out to those who do live in affected states, but not to the point where I am willing to contribute to rescue efforts for the inhabitants. It doesn’t require much imagination to see that the states affected are also red politically, and I think that they deserve a mild calamity as a wake-up.
Mend your wicked ways is my advice to them, and maybe the insect landscape will be different the next time around.
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On Sunday, about noon, our internet went out. Only ours. Nothing was getting through. The person answering the tech line at our ISP was nonchalant and informed me that help would be coming “the next working day.” When I asked if that meant tomorrow (Monday) she was noncommittal, only repeating “the next working day.”
So Robin and I settled back, confident that we had the survival skills necessary to deal with perhaps 24-36 hours of internet deprivation. And we were wrong.
Here is a partial list of what we found ourselves unable to use to cope with a difficult and occasionally hostile world:
- checking the weather
- checking the news, especially to see if we were at war with anybody new
- no streaming movies to watch that evening, nor could we go online to see what was showing downtown at the local cinema
- no access to any cloud-based programs, which meant that our time-wasting game apps were unavailable for the duration
- couldn’t fact-check anything on Google
- none of our devices could sync with any of the others, meaning that each was now an island unto itself
One of us remembered that there used to be something called the Yellow Pages, and that we might have such a directory stashed somewhere. Once that resource was located, we called the cinema and found that one of the three movies showing was worth the trip down the hill. But then we opted instead to watch one of the handful of DVDs we actually own, choosing Grapes of Wrath, a classic. Robin and I sat on the loveseat for two hours to watch the film on the 13 inch screen of a portable computer that was resting on my lap and angled just so that both of us could watch the movie.
On Monday a serviceman arrived as promised, and he found that the line bearing our internet service entered the building, wasps had nested and chewed through the covering on the wire, causing a short. Within thirty minutes all of the problems mentioned above ceased to exist and we were back on the road to complacency once again.
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It doesn’t take a lot to interest my particular form of ADD, but here’s an item that did.
The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet
7,572,792 views Jul 12, 2019This song was recorded from a German radio station called NDR between 1982 and 1984. Search (online) has been active since the early 2000s, when the song was made available online, and to this day no one has been able to give any accurate and correct information about the origin of the song. Facts like the band’s nationality and exact year of recording are unknown, and to this day, we have not gotten any information about the whereabouts of the authors, or even the correct title of the song. Apparently there is no alternative online register/archive of this song, since the only source we have of this song is from the cassette tape that Darius recorded from the radio. Recently, a Reddit user found that in the chorus of this song, a synth called Yamaha DX7 was used, there’s a preset called Syn-Lead 5, and it’s exactly the same sound they used in the song, the Yamaha DX7 was released in 1983, so we may have a basis that the song was probably recorded in 1984, or late 1983.
Wikipedia
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Little Home In The Valley 