Multitudes

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself; (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I was about to start this blog with a lament about my computer, in that it seems to contain multitudes. I vaguely remembered the latter part of the Walt Whitman quote above, and even more vaguely remembered it as one of those portentous biblical quotes, such as "There were giants upon the earth in those days." I made the mistake, against the policy of this blog, of researching the quote* and found it was just a bit of poetry, and hardly portentous at all. Which sort of vitiates my aim selecting this blog title. Even so, I think I got away with it.

So Who Are These Multitudes, already?

I don't know! But, like Chickenman, they're everywhere. They disguise themselves behind a generic "We" and they are perpetually doing things to my software.

• We have updated your program
• We have detected malware and your computer is insecure
• We notice that you haven't entered your credit card in...
• We need you to...
• We want you to...

OK, maybe I don't remember that many examples, but we (which is to say I, an actual typing human) can't help wondering how many each We subsumes, and how many of them are different groups of We, and how or why they got in the computer to begin with. (The telephone is different. It seems to contain a Heather (not the good, real one) and, unaccountably, a Melissa, who pretends to know that I'm NOT having any credit problems, but wants to tell me something nonetheless, even though she isn't really Melissa (or Heather) but a recording of someone who may have been Heather (or Melissa). The "I" pronoun, transmitted with abandon, is so inappropriate that I sometimes hang up the phone without even saying "Good bye."

I Am a Magnet

So Am I Just Being Picky Picky Picky?

Yes, I suppose so. Even so, I suffer from ranklage by all the irritating claims to existence of inanimate objects, recordings, and exhortations to which I am subject daily.

Fraudulent Dating

Five years from now it won't matter. (Nor will it five minutes from now.) But I stopped writing this blog sometime in September and just finished it on Christmas Day 2017. Normally one doesn't start getting Christmas greetings until after the end of the "Halloween Season," so the following "Merry Christmas" will seem as temporally displaced as my "tomorrow" photo when I run out of blog. Nonetheless,

Merry Christmas

Did you know that, at least on the iPad, autocorrect turns "xmas" into "Xmas"? Try it for yourself.

* OK, "research" may be excessively falutin'.