In the old days, car experts used to advise consumers never to buy a new model in its first year of production. (Maybe they still say this, but in a hype-driven market I no longer hear it.) The best course, they said, is to let the poor suckers who buy the car in year one test it out and find all the design flaws. Then, the manufacturer fixes the problems in year two, and in the third year the product is finally good to go.

Technology should be handled the same way. Wait 2 years for the bugs to be worked out, and on top of that, you can usually buy a better product for less. Just last week I bought an 80GB iPod for $100 less than I paid for my old 30 GB model four years ago. Good things come to those who wait.

If you buy into the hype people like Jobs dish out, you just end up getting less for more. I know that in 6 years my son will buy a phone that does everything the iPhone does plus doubles as a garage door opener, a camera, and a GPS navigator for $75.

My God, what website is worth reading? I spend 95% of my online time on no more than 5 or 6 websites. Because there is nothing but junk out there. Self-important, snotty, mean-spirited, iconoclastic, pornographic, voyeuristic, gothic, nasty, tacky, crude, ungrammatical junk. I should know. I've written some of it.

The least you can say for a newspaper is that the editors know their grammar.

Newspapers are stylish. The more outmoded they are the more I want one. Knowing the mind of the mob that runs the internet, anything they would stoop to scorn has got to be of incalculable value.

The terrible thing about the internet is that it is so trendy and savvy that it has lost the ability to be casual. As GK points out, you can be casual about the newspaper. Newspapers are to be riffled through and tossed aside. Nothing is more stale than yesterday's newspaper. That is what makes it great. It has a casual timeliness that the internet has corrupted into a sense of arrogant immediacy.

The woman is asking two questions. First, how can she handle this situation in the future? Second, should she tell her friend what her husband did?

Analysing the past is a sterile Freudian exercise. It will not help her out one bit.

For the first question: Don't go back there. Just drop the friendship. I know there is the "I value her as a friend" B.S., but she already lied once to get out of there. Next time the invite comes, what will she say? Sure, I'll come, but tell your husband he can't get in my panties? This doesn't sound like more than a causal relationship anyway. Sometimes it is just better to stay out of trouble and find new friends. She can just drift away. Stop returning phone calls.

Second, under no circumstances should she tell her friend about her husband's behavior. There are two sides to every story, and believe me, he will have his. She can't win in this argument, and the biggest mistake a person can make is to get in between a husband and wife. If he is really a philanderer she probably already knows.

But the "maybe I was sending the wrong signals" argument is hogwash. Who cares if she was? Sending the right signals is not going to make him a better person. She needs to stay away from him. There are to many friends to be had in the world to risk another incident like this. And it will happen again.

I have a blog, and try hard to write fewer, more thoughtful and well-crafted pieces, rather than a large amount of spontaneous drivel. (I said try.) And I have had readers on occasion tear my writing apart.

It is painful. My average posting takes 3 days and 4-6 hours to write. I work to produce a quality product. I think of my blog not as a rant-and-rave podium but as an art exhibition. And every once in a while a "patron" comes by and urinates on one of my works.

Most web posters are not truly writers. Some even have their grammar down, but they are not writers at heart. Writers-at-heart know that each crafted sentence is a small trace of one's self.

Even I have been tempted to be brutish at times. The internet is simply too immediate a temptation; you can reach through the bandwidth and prick an ego with a bare bodkin and with impunity. Hard to resist, especially because the writer is not present in flesh and blood. It reminds me of that old ethical vignette in which a person is placed in a room with a red button. The person knows if he presses that red button he will get a million dollars. He also knows if he presses it a person in China will die. The conundrum is that the money is immediate and palpable. The person in China is distant and anonymous. Of course the tempation is great.

This whole debate is about decency. It is about realizing that writing is hard, that it is a craft, and that a person who chooses to write something on the net may have put a lot of time into it. That person deserves to be corrected, but also to be treated as a something very valuble -- as someone trying to create beautiful things and release them into the world.