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Highlands Today

You just can't fold a laptop

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By Norm Cukras | Highlands Today

Published: May 15, 2009

I get a little frustrated when people tell me they are doing something for me when it actually only benefits them.

This Sunday the Tampa Tribune informed me of how fortunate I was to receive a reformatted TV magazine that had "Larger, easier to read typeface" and among other things provided, "A fresh look, filled with complete TV listings so you won't miss your favorites." Wow.

However what they forgot to mention is that the new guide was more cumbersome than the handy one it was replacing. Also overlooked in the "New" news was the fact all of the old reviews, articles, tidbits and past and coming events were dropped, as were the prime-time suggestions. So how did it "just get better?"

Why not just tell us, "Hey things are tough here in printed-news land and we have to cut back?" Why try to convince us that we're better off with something that is less than we are accustomed to? After all I am doing my part to make the paper more efficient. If you noticed we columnists only get a partial picture printed. No wonder no one stops me to talk, there isn't enough of me printed for people to recognize. Why else would I be photographically squenched like that? Public opinion? A focus group?

Some years back I wrote in a column about my conversation with someone at the corporate offices of Kmart about their misuse of the word "Mens." I pointed out that the possessive plural of man was men's. His response: they had run it through a focus group that preferred "mens." The fact it was wrong was irrelevant to the company.

While the practice has been dropped, I could never understand at the time why the English teachers of the country didn't unite and boycott the stores.

Not as impersonal

I like my morning paper. I like to sit back prop up my feet, sip on a cup of hot coffee and read about what's going on in the world. The fact that the news I'm reading might be a few hours old doesn't really disturb me in the least. The same news on the Internet seems cold and impersonal. Besides, if a fly happens to alight within striking distance I can nail the pest in a blink of an eye. Let me see you do that with a laptop. Have you ever noticed that laptops and computers are kinda uniusaged where newspapers are multi-taskable?

And with newspapers people are more inclined on identifying you as the writer. In fact I once had a reader who referred to me as 2A, because I appeared on that page every Saturday. Of course that's when the whole of the upper me was visible.

Another institution going?

I can't help but wonder if we've seen the last of those Xmas letters? Yeah, I guess people can send those purveyors of all things good by email, but it's just not the same. Besides with things like Facebook and twittering we are now right there when whatever someone wants us to know happens. "See there's our handsome grandson emerging from our beautiful daughter, Kim, who has a doctorate in microbiology and next week will be presenting a paper at Harvard where her husband, Tom, is a tenured professor."

This one is gone

Well I don't have to wonder too much about where my stimulus check will end up. Mine, as well as any others I might get for years to come, has been endorsed over to members of the healing profession.

The other day I was happily munching away on an Egg McMuffin when one of my three-tooth caps came off. Sadly, when I washed the remnants of the fast-food breakfast off, I discovered that pieces of my teeth were still secured to the cap. That was not a good sign. My dentist, David Willey, agreed that there was more involved than a restick-the-bridge-back-on job. So he referred me over to Dr. Michael Kirsch, who presented a strong case for the need of another implant operation.

You may recall that I wrote a three-part article on the procedure two years ago.

At least when this implant is finished I'll end up having matching three-tooth bridges on both sides of my upper jaw. Smile.

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