Was it fate or just the path of least resistance? It’s been 20 years and I still don’t know.
In the autumn of 2004 circumstances too long and boring to explain gave me the opportunity to live pretty much anywhere I wanted. There was no particular reason, no special interest, leading me to one place over another.
The internet and phone went out Halloween night. There was a light rain, and with Frontier Communications that’s all it takes. The rain doesn’t need to be local. As long as it is raining, or someone sneezes, anywhere in the world, Frontier Communications internet and phone service is likely to fail.
If you look around or listen, you’ll hear the newly minted cliché that the Democratic Party is now engaged in soul searching after it got hammered yesterday, top to bottom, by voters who did not like what it was selling.
If all goes well, we’ll awaken a week from today to the ghastly thought that we’ll be listening to that voice for the next four years. I say if all goes well, because if the election is as close as the predictors say it will be — sooner or later, just by chance, they will be right — this thing could drag on for months, or it could result in instant rioting. I say that voice because no one who should be allowed to run free can stand the sound of either of the presidential candidates.
There was a time, longer ago than most of us who remember it would like to admit, when most people in the country could identify the three national television news anchors. Well, except for ABC; at the time it seemed as if ABC could not identify its own anchor.
Halloween approaches. Children who persuaded their parents to buy them costumes right when they appeared in stores have had time to outgrow them. If candy was purchased at that time it has been consumed or gone bad. Evenings are beginning to get a crispness suggesting summer might be going if it’s not quite gone.
So it’s been, what, six months since I concocted my homemade television sets. Since then I’ve missed nothing that I would have liked to watch, and have watched much that was not available via the usual, um, channels. And I have maintained my privacy.
Every muscle was tight and trembling, like a thoroughbred in the starting gate, steaming and snorting and eager to unleash its immense pent-up power.
A few weeks ago I mentioned my intention to switch from the now-sketchy Ubuntu distribution of Linux, which I’ve used for 20 years, to the uber-reliable Debian. This was in lieu of buying a new machine. Well, actually, the parts to build a new machine; the last time I ran a store-bought computer was in the previous millennium.
There was a time, children, when a presidential election involved a choice between serious people who offered plans, policy proposals, and philosophies.