Although spring arrived in an official calendar sense three weeks ago, that doesn’t mean much in the mountains. Salida got about 5 feet of snow on the first weekend of May in 2001, and when we lived in Kremmling in 1976, we found 8 inches of snow on the ground when we rose on Flag Day.
But other signs of spring are manifesting themselves. Last week, I saw the first triple-vehicle lash-up of the year on U.S. 50 – a motor home towing a spewt towing a boat. Also in the past week, I’ve seen three rafts put into the Arkansas River, which still has some ice in its shaded calm spots.
Just yesterday, there was the first tent camper of the year along the back road east of Cleora where we often walk our dog Bodie. We knew we’d have to find another strolling spot when the weather warmed and the campers arrived, since Bodie loves to run over and pester them. But we didn’t think the need would arise so soon.
With all those indicators, it must be time for some spring cleaning. The urge was so strong that I even went to a barber, and now I’ll work on the collection of “items that couldn’t be made into full columns.”
The most recent item is my astonishment at the publicity machine operated by Apple Computer Inc. Last week, it was hard to flip a page without running into a glowing account of Apple’s Boot Camp program, which allows a new Apple machine to start up in either of two operating systems: Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X.
This is about as novel as a steam locomotive. For years, Linux has come with LILO and GRUB, both of which let you chose among operating systems when booting your computer. There have also been commercial products, like System Commander, which have been on the market since before this millennium started.
So why all the gushing, as if Apple had actually done something innovative?
And nowhere, in all that fulsome prose, could I find out whether such a machine, when running OS X, could access the files on its Windows disk partition. Windows is too stupid to read other file systems. Linux, a variety of Unix, does so quite easily on a dual-boot machine. Apple’s OS X should, since it’s based on BSD Unix, but no article I saw mentioned it one way or the other.
This is not some topic relevant only to geeks, but a feature that would matter to millions of computer users. Can’t the mainstream computer columnists do something besides regurgitate Apple press releases?
Speaking of press releases, I received one the other day for a “Cinco de Mayo” celebration scheduled for April 23. Since “Cinco de Mayo” means “the Fifth of May,” how can you celebrate it in April? In the fall I see announcements of Oktoberfest celebrations in September. Doesn’t an Oktoberfest, by definition, have to happen in October?
What comes next? A “Fourth of July” fireworks show in June, or maybe November? A New Year’s Eve party in August? Any excuse to eat Mexican food, drink German beer or shoot off fireworks is a good one, so why do people insist on giving their events names that don’t fit the dates?
And finally, a plea to magazine publishers. When a magazine arrives, I like to thumb through it. Anymore, this is nearly impossible, thanks to the blow-in cards, gatefolds, bound-in inserts, heavy-paper announcements and sundry other impediments to mere browsing and reading.
I rip them all out, and I should compile a list of the offending advertisers, so I can boycott their goods and services.
Their messages are the print version of being in a room full of 2-year-old kids, all jumping up and down and shouting, “Look at me! Look at me!” That is not what I want when I sit down to read a magazine. And I certainly don’t want the resulting pile of ripped-out trash that accumulates next to my favorite reading chair and forces me to practice some cleaning, even when it’s not spring.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
