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Subject:Confirmation -- Life in the City -Reply From:Bill Sullivan <bsullivan -at- SMTPLINK -dot- DELTECPOWER -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 12 Apr 1996 14:03:34 -0700
Beautiful, Arlen! Bravo. Small wonder you are one of my favorite
characters in this virtual city of ours.
Bill Sullivan
bsullivan -at- deltecpower -dot- com
>>> <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM> - 4/12/96 2:11 PM >>>
This thread on confirmation of messages brought something to mind:
I come from rural Wisconsin (no surprise to those who've been on the
list for a while). When I first moved to the city, I was surprised at
what I found there. Car alarms going off at all hours of the night,
kids yelling, radios blaring; the decibel level was significantly
higher than what I was used to (where, after midnight, crickets were
the loudest noise this side of a disaster). I learned that many of
these sounds were the urban equivalent of a cricket, just as
uncontrollable, and from the perspective of your life, just as
irrelevant.
A more difficult sound to get used to was the constant banging of
garbage cans at unpredictable hours of the night. Brought on by
children of advanced age, these sounds were just as uncontrollable
and irrelevant as the cricket, but since they were of human origin,
harder for me to learn to ignore. But I did. I had to; it was part of
the price of living in the city.
And that's the bottom line. A few useless, irrelevent, even stupid
messages have shown up on techwr-l. Some juveniles with nothing to do
and fewer brains with which to do it have run through the alley of our
virtual city, kicking over our electronic trash cans before fleeing
into the night. So what? Do we form neighborhood vigilante societies
to check the papers of all who travel through our alleys? Or do we
simply ignore them, refuse to pay them the tribute of our attention
which is their unspoken demand upon us? I'd say instead we should
simply accept the urban noise level, and pay them as much attention
as their display of intelligence deserves. None whatsoever.
OK. I'm off the soapbox again. But it was just something I thought
needed saying. This whole thing reminds me of a characterization
drawn by Abraham
Lincoln. It reminds me of "a steamboat with a five-foot boiler and a
nine- foot whistle. Every time it whistles, it stops."
Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy
Department
DNRC 124
Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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In God we trust; all others must provide data.
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Opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.
If JCI had an opinion on this, they'd hire someone else to deliver
it.
