My daughter received a letter from a girl in China who asked this question near the end of her last paragraph.

I think it’s delightfully awkward phraseology and I will never refer to it as pen pal again. But the most notable thing about Pan’s letter to Evelyn is the exceptional penmanship (or as I called it lovingly, penfriendmanship.)

I’ll be finished with it soon enough and will be posting the finished 1.0 version to 1001freefonts.com as well as here.

This is a song I wrote (poorly) and sang (less poorly) with our temporary band General chang for the 1994 Stairway to Stardom at Skip’s Music in Sacramento.

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Here are some photos I took at the “Greenhaven on the Lake” apartment complex in the pocket area of Sacramento. The place is now called “Portofino on the Lake” and the rent went up while the amenities remained the same. Oh no, wait – that’s not true. They upgraded the rental office quite a bit in order to impress new renters, they just left the property rotting.

But nothing I could say about the not-so-fantastic management team would change the fact that I loved my time there for the following reasons:

I used a Canon PowerShot G5 for all of these. You can probably pick one of these up for 150.00 on Craigslist, easily one of the best 5mp digitals I’ve ever used.

I don’t know what that means, and you have no capacity to tell me since your definition keeps changing to fit your agenda.
The defining thing about a definition is that every recognizes it as such.

With our modern, supposed racism you can never quite tell who’s been there, been called one, suffered through it, down for the struggle, cared enough, fought enough, paid enough, slave enough, black enough. All we can know for certain is that at any given moment it’s certainly not you. I mean, I know you’re not like that.
Unless you aren’t in the conversation, then you’re them.
Tell me you are honestly unfazed by this logic: Everyone you speak with about race is absolved of the sins of their race for the duration of the conversation. No really, thanks.

What do you mean by black? Tanzanian? Jamaican? African, Mali, Nigerian? Ethiopian, Eritrean, Tigrinya, Zimbabwean?
By white do you mean Nordic, Danish, French, Italian, American, Finnish? Australian? Russian, Ukrainian… perhaps you mean Austrian.

I have no idea of my heritage and I am grateful to be free of the weight of it.
Who I am is the only matter of importance. It is unimportant what I am.
I can answer that by the simple act of observation, no history or family tree required: I am Ken. A human being, if you must be so base though I do not see the purpose of it.

Cans of Coca-Cola announce boldly to you that they are Coca-Cola. This is useful, as you want your Coke to look and taste the same each time you open one. You want them to be easily identified and located.
Do you wish this of people as well? Do you call people Black or White because you have a general notion how White people speak? Whether Black people would like certain music. Whether Latinos are likely to prefer certain food?

(Fun side exercise: if you think that those questions were placed in a relevant order, read again. They make as much sense in any order and were, in fact, placed randomly. If you read them as having meaning, this article applies especially to you.)

For descriptive convenience we are adult enough that the black guy from Who’s Line is it Anyway? means Wayne Brady. It doesn’t mean Wayne Brady is black people, it means Wayne Brady is a black person. Trepidation about the usage of this descriptive term is, itself, racism. Who gives a damn? He’s Mexican means as much as He drives a green car.

I’m not going to continue playing along. No one you know ever enslaved anyone I know. No, I don’t know what you mean about them. I owe you nothing and I am owed nothing. I don’t care what sound your alarm clock makes, what brand your television is or what race you think you are. Each holds the same value for me, which is zero.

If you read my prior review of the dated but still fantastic RT7D50 Dell SpaceSaver keyboard then by now you must presume that, when not having sex with a keyboard, I am typing away lovingly about the details of whichever happens to be in front of me. Well, you’d be wrong and you’d be extra wrong about the terrible keybopard included with the otherwise fantastic Logitech Alto Cordless. (Typos will remain in place so that you may see how frequently they occur on this messy slate)
The ultra-soft can’t-feel-it-under-my-fingers touch of this thing is a half step from the membrane keyboard on your microwave. No tactiloe feedback, causdiing the two-finger typists to lean in closer than ever while trying to ensure the correct keys are struck. This is not helped by the terrible font employed to label the keys.

The key spacing is also… unique, in that the tops of keys are quite flat and larger than other boards resulting in a scenario where it is quite a simple thing to hit 4 keys while reaching for one. That said the stand is nice and the wireless functionality is great, naturally, while the included multimedia buttons leave much to be desired and do not work correctly with Microsoft’s Intellitype customization. As you can see I was forced to finish this article on a freshly unwrapped RT7D50 and so my fingers are happier once again.

I love this Dell SpaceSaver keyboard.
I’ve had several now and I find that they are each unique with significant variations in build quality and performance which is at worst tolerable but, for me, enchanting enough that I’m tempted to give them each women’s names.
Before you call the police, were you also to slavishly manufacture words you would understand the importance of media implements and input devices of every kind.
I could do worse… There is no end of mice or pens whose virtues I could extol or decry, be grateful I limit myself today to the RT7D50:

Let’s name the dark grey one I use in the warehouse: Della Brown

The keys press effortlessly but not without tactile feedback. I know that I’ve pressed them, I feel the click yet it takes little pressure and makes little noise.
Laptop keys (becoming increasingly popular as desktop keyboards for reasons known only to those alien body-snatchers who are buying them while disguised as humans, apparently) do not provide enough tactile response and make no noticeable sound. This lack of feedback is already off-putting, but the key spacing is much too close as well. Not so on the SpaceSaver where key shape and spacing is IBM-era standard issue: Tall keys with recessed, concave scoops and mildly rounded corners. Striking a key at an extreme angle will still press that key smoothly, without slippage and without incidental strikes to other nearby keys. The space bar is too fat to miss which allows for soft pauses between sentences or large slapbass strokes.
The overall shape is sexy and sleek but with a larger, more conventional footprint than one might consider space saving. Walk through an electronics store these days, however, and you might notice that the majority of the keyboards remain boxed while only 4 or 5 are on display. For this we can thank the manufacturers (undoubtedly drug-induced) research sessions which have morphed the utilitarian office keyboard with an occasional clip-on wrist-rest into huge plastic tables with 2 cup holders and universal TV remote built-in near the multimedia keys. (Some models also have the QWERTY keys on there somewhere, I believe.) The only remaining innovation would be to add legs and a monitor stand.

From that perspective this keyboard is a step backward, which is the right direction.

No one, he is himself and so are you. Not only is he not dressing up for Halloween, but the thought did not cross his mind. The thing he wears already is not his costume but his station.
If you wore it, that would be a costume. That’s the difference between you and the pope. But the similarity between you and the Pope is that you are both similarly incapable of lying about who you are, though you might try (and he will, of course, never.)

If you were to take a Volkswagen beetle and strip all the sheet metal off, rework the frame into the shape of a Pontiac Fiero, weld on the Fiero bodywork and as much of the Fiero interior as could be found in a salvage yard somewhere – that would be in impressive transformation and one which I would say is beyond the scope of human intimation. But were a person even able to temporarily emulate… let’s say 80% of another person’s characteristics for a length of time: like the Fiero example, there is still so much left for us to easily identify the beetle inside. Even the untrained can plainly determine that the engine does not sound right, that the trunk lid does not fit, that the interior is mismatched. They will not know what is wrong, only that something is wrong. Those with more experience will know what is wrong as well.

Even in the case of a person who has been brainwashed, the brainwashing "application" has to run over the top of a suitable operating system. That operating system is the person’s existing programming – their personality, experiences and memories. The brainwashing disguise is, at best, a thin film cover through which we can still plainly see the original.