Letters to the Editor
Amerigo
Published Letters: 955 Editor's Choice: 60
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Marriage proposal
[Read the article: I'm sexy and available! Chat me up!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]re: " I thought I was doing them a favor by expressing some interest in their second-hand selves."
ack
self-appointed god's gift to women...
NOT!
My sense of amour propre usually prohibits me from responding to such crass ripostes, but today I will make an exception, because I received a proposal of marriage an hour ago, and the story may have some relevance to the LW's situation.
I live in a small Grishamesque southern town, the county seat, and my house is one block from downtown on a highway that divides the black section from the rest of town--for real.
This morning I stepped out to the Mexican tienda to buy a neckbone of beef to make soup. On my return I noted an African American woman sitting on my kitchen porch smoking a cigarette. I recognized her as the mother of a friend who does a few jobs for me.
"I am S.'s Mom", she says.
"I know that. What's up?
"Can you give me a ride home, it's a long way cross town and S. is not here."
"O.K. Give me a few minutes to put some shoes on".
Now I am ready I notice that she is wearing a very short skirt. She has nice legs for a gap-toothed, alcoholic woman of maybe 50, and over the smell of the cigarette smoke I note that she reeks of perfume.
En route she asks me how my fiancee is doing, and I say fine, but don't give her too much of my personal business. She says if I have any cleaning work or anything she can do for me, to just let her know.
We cross the quartier noir and eventually come to her home.
"I'm looking for a husband", she says.
"Well if I run into anyone who is looking for one, I will tell them you are available," sez I.
"I mean you" she says, getting to the point.
"Sorry, I'm not available."
"Well, I guess we will just have to be friends then".
"Aaaargh!" (Pulls out hair.)
Now the point here is not that I am an irresistible ladykiller par excellence, but that she forced me into a corner and made me make a decision. She made me consider for a moment whether she might be a sexual partner, what form such a relationship might take, and why it was impossible. The thinking was brief, but it had to be done.
And now, having told me that we will be friends, there is no guarantee that she won't make further overtures.
In this particular case, the fact that I am friends with her son, that she is ugly, an alcoholic, and that I have a beautiful fiancee who is with child, and that feeding a cat even once makes it hard to get rid of have conspired against her, but I am sure that she will be using her stormtrooper tactics against any man she is able to encounter, and who knows, she may well succeed, perhaps not in finding marriage, but at least in getting some of the perks of marriage.
The moral here, I think, is that lots of people will never consider you as a sexual partner unless you put the idea in their head. I would never have considered her as a sexual partner until I was forced to make that decision, and though it was a negative one that did not require a lot of thought, I was still made to act.
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You journalists...
[Read the article: Zune 2.0: Microsoft's new line of music players]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... crack me up wondering what colors the thing is available in.
For a user a more relevant question is are the controls easy to use, and can I read the screen and operate it when I am driving on the freeway without crashing?
I have a Toshiba Gigabeat, which I believe is somewhat similar to the old Zune in terms of hardware.
In terms of hardware what you want is a durable unit with a screen that can be read in daylight. You want enough memory to store all the music that you want, and then some. My player has this.
In terms of software, what you really want is the open source software operating system Rockbox, which lets YOU organize your music, photos etc. any way you want. The operating systems that come with the players are improving a bit, but they still make life difficult.
My Gigabeat as currently set up meets all my needs for playing music and carries several hundred hours of music, drama, and radio programing that I have downloaded and stored.
By the way, I don't know why anyone would pay A DOLLAR A SONG for any kind of music when there is an almost infinite amount of free downloadable music all over the place. The BBC radio Web sites are a good place to start.
Of course neither Apple nor Microsoft are really concerned about making a great music player. Their business operation is more akin to oil companies selling you cars, because once they get you in a car you are bound to buy the really profitable stuff--gasoline.
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@bukk63
[Read the article: Zune 2.0: Microsoft's new line of music players]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Point taken and actually I do buy CDs on a pretty regular basis, but $1 per song is pretty extortionate. At that rate it would cost many thousands of dollars to stock an mp3 player with an adequate selection of music. I don't mind paying up to $20 for a good triple CD set, but then you get a permanent good quality hard copy, possible some liner notes to provide context,and something that you can sell on again to someone else if you wish.
Downloading an inferior version of a single song for $1 is ridiculous.