Thoughts upon reading the Palo Alto Weekly's personal ads: people should be required to list their favorite tv shows and the last book they bought. It would be far more revealing than "strong, sensitive, soulful," or "slim, caring, attractive" which really only tells us what someone thinks we want to hear. On the other hand, I worry just a little about people who share too much, such as the female who is willing to become codependent with the right person or the SWF with a great mind and soft skin. I think one fellow is on the right track by listing his Ferrari as one of his attractions. You gotta figure he's going to be spending a fair amount of time and money on his car so it's only fair to mention it up front before you get all excited by the notion of long walks on the beach and romantic candlelit dinners. Pshaw. You'll be eating a Swanson's frozen dinner while he waxes his first love in the garage.
I love the Palo Alto Daily, not related to the Weekly. The Daily is your basic Nephew Art newspaper. The gossip column is deplorably bad (mostly plugs for local stores), the reporting is generally summations of general releases (AP Lite), and the copy editor apparently works only three days a week. When the paper decided to get its own web page it made a big deal about how they employed a high school student to create the web site "...because someone told us students work cheap!" said the editor. They then triumphantly informed their readers they would not be posting any articles from their paper on the web site because they wanted to encourage people to read the paper, not the Internet. Uh huh. That'll make researching archival material just a tad difficult. One wonders why they bothered going online at all.
And speaking of unlikely users of the Internet, my father (who is coming home from the hospital tomorrow) has decided email sounds like it's going to be more than just a passing fad. He wants me to tell him what kind of computer to buy. He was very impressed in January when I told him I regularly exchange email with random Huntzingers in search of geneological information. That is the first thing I've ever mentioned about the 'net that caught his interest, apparently, and he's ready to be part of the information age. I think this is kind of keen but I have zero information on laptops which I know is what he'll want. I'm betting he'll be a PC man, too, whereas my heart is given to Macintosh. So this ought to be an amusing research project.
Aw, hell. That means he'll be able to read this diary.
