Something about the apple, the proverbial forbidden fruit.
This morning I am reading about some guy in Colorado who invited a woman he met online to his home. Everything seemed to be going just fine and then pow, the girlfriend shows up! This of course is not good for either love or money. So he rushes across the room and picks up the telephone to call the police and report the online visitor as a burglar in his home.
Police on the other hand were not amused, they charged him with making a false reporting to authorities.
No word yet on what the girlfriend was to do about it.
A 24 year old in Austria has used a European law to compel Facebook to send him a record of all the personal data it had on him. He received a CD with “1,222 pages information” including chats and “pokes” dating back to 2008. Remember that, the next time you are chatting on Facebook.
I cannot help it, but I am really amused by this commercial.
Yesterday’s segment of 60 Minutes had a piece about a kid who finished grades six thru 12 in just one year, was a freshman in college, and hoped to have his PHD by age 14. All of it with good old book learning, no computers.
Computers and kids have come a long ways. Now what about a kid who never had access to a computer, a poor inner city youth or underprivileged kid. What about them? You are what you learn, if all you know is how to be a gang-banger the odd’s are pretty good that is all that you will ever be.
When I am in town, I look at the huge concrete monolith at the High School and the stands built for the parental fans. A monument to football, a blood sport of the young. It makes me wonder, how many computers could have been bought and disturbed with that kind of money?
How many kids could have learned from the experience and gone on to become a doctor, chemist, engineer.
How we could as a society surely could have benefited from the tax dollars spent this way instead of the other. Instead of seeing the world as a competition (football) you see it as a world that needs some tweaking (engineer).
What is left after high school football … Not much.
But on the other hand, if you are into learning, I mean really into it, then the entire world changes for you. No longer a jail of ignorance, and endless five day weeks at some dead in job. But an open door, that knowledge will unlock, and then you find all you have to do is lean on it, and it will swing wide open.
Here is one or two more, and then I will leave you to your discretions this morning.
A Massachusetts couple called 911 after getting lost in an apple orchard while picking apples. They had not noticed that the evening was waning and the sun was going down, soon they found themselves in total darkness and could not locate their car.
Having no other choice available to them, they utilized their cellphones to inform the local authorities of their rather dire predicament and the police called the owner of the orchard.
He drove out into the apple orchard to collect the poor lost souls and at that time, one of them inquired of the farmer, “So how many rescues a year?”
The old farmer looked at them a little puzzled and then replied, “Well, in eighty-five years of business, none.”
Kind of like the guy I met last year in Nevada.
He pointed at the cowbell hanging on the back bumper of my bus and said, “What’s that?” and I looked at him and said, “It is a cowbell.”
He then again says. “What is it used for?”
Finding all this really hard to believe I say, “You tie it around the neck of a cow who wanders and gets out quite a lot. If she goes down in the creek you can hear her because when she grazes the bell rings.”
He then looks at me and says …. “How do you ring it?”
I asked him, “What do you do for a living anyway?”
He said … “I am a Lawyer, why?”
That is Monday, just 4.5 miles souith of Route Sixty-Six on the Old El Reno Trail.
OOO
