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Light of my life
It was just another Saturday in Taos, New Mexico, but I was on my way to a place no one should be that day of the week. My fate was sealed, however. The night before, I'd attended a concert featuring my wife on piano and a host of local opera singers. We'd driven in separate vehicles. Ater the show, she hopped into the Nissan and immediately noticed that I hadn't replaced the bum left-side headlight. Responding in manly fashion to whatever she yelled as she roared off, I called out: "Just BANG on it!" A sympathetic friend was standing nearby. "Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," I explained.

"Yeah, no reason to replace it until it stops working for good!" he added.

"Women have a hard time understanding these things," I concluded, turning to climb into my pickup to follow her home. I knew the headlight had to be fixed now, of course (this was the third time she'd noticed it). I also knew what I'd be doing on Saturday: WAL-MART!

[WARNING: possibly incongruous images ahead. They seem to fit, but I really can't say how. It's been that kind of week.]

Fake Ferarri fandango
Wal-Mart is something of a paradox to me. A few years back when this one opened, it gradually exterminated most of the independent retailers in town. In my book, Wal-Mart is the Microsoft of merchandising, although they're considerably more genteel. The end result is about the same though, something like "MY WAY or the highway!" but Wal-Mart does it with indisputably cheaper merchandise and nice old men waving hello. Bottom line: when you really need something, like a headlight, you know where to go.

Of course, it's the only place to go. You couldn't go anywhere else if your life depended on it. (Oh, there's nothing like a monopoly.) At least I knew where it was, and I knew no other store, assuming for argument's sake there was one, would have anything cheaper, so off I went. I took the Nissan, of course. All us manly auto parts buyers know to drive the vehicle in question to the store, in case you get confused and find yourself mumbling, "Aw geez, I guess I'd better go out and see what's on it..."

As a drove along Salazar Street, I came to an area of vacant lots off to my right. It was warm and sunny, and I was happy to have the window down on this early spring day so I could hear the vaguely expensive sound of the Nissan's DOHC four-cylinder engine. I 'd noticed a long time ago that if I brought the revs up slowly to 5,000 rpm and then shifted, the gear whine and exhaust burble always brought a few heads around. I liked that. This time, however, the heads belonged to short little brown rodents standing upright beside the road: prairie dogs! (Tuzas, in local Spanish.)

Read on, but it'll cost ya
There weren't all that many, maybe a dozen or so, but I rarely see them in town, and these were standing up right beside the curb, watching the traffic roll by.Usually they run away, you see, or jump down inside their burrows, but these guys just stood there. It was the darnedest thing, and the image stuck in my head all day long. It was as if they were waiting for us to do the burrow-diving. I thought about that a bunch.

It's been a very strange week, anyway. Who would have guessed, for example, that the most publicized news to come out of a Macworld Expo would be higher prices? The more I think about this, the more bizarre it seems. HIGHER PRICES?!? This isn't gasoline. Why doesn't Apple just absorb the higher production costs and make a note to be more careful next time? I've been buying Macs for almost twenty years and the price has never gone up.

Anyway, Wal-Mart was almost fun and I bought the headlights. That's right, two of them, high-output halogen sealed-beams in a discounted twin-pack. On the way back home I passed by the vacant lots again and this time the tuzas were gone. After gulping down a great home-cooked buffalo burger, I went outside and put the new lights on the Nissan (that's 8 screws for each side, too). My wife and I had planned to take a drive later that afternoon and so we did. By the time we left the whole county was being raked by 45mph winds and my warm sunny day had turned into a gray, cold dust storm.

Every word is true
Naturally we weren't afraid of a little dust, though we should have been afraid of me. Even before we'd driven to the top of Bobcat Pass (9,820 feet), I was bummed. No elk! No deer! Not even a stupid coyote. I saw something I thought was a big white bird, but it turned out to be a flapping piece of aerial trash blowing over the tops of the ponderosa pines in the southwest gale. I sank so far down inside myself, it's a wonder I could even see to drive.

On the other side of the pass, a rich Texas landowner had gouged an ugly drainage ditch into the fragile valley bottomland, probably to keep his cows from getting their feet muddy. I considered denouncing him as a terrorist to have a nuclear strike called in on the ranch but thought better of it. The sky stayed gray all the way home, something that really freaks people out in this part of the world, so I joined in. The dust and clouds had lots of folks driving with their lights on. I turned on the "80% brighter" high-output halogens to give them a test:, but there was still too much light outside and we couldn't see any difference. Phooey!

Back at the apartment, we decided not to go out to a movie and finished off our leftover Frito pie fixings from two nights before. I sat down in front of the whirring 8600 to check my email and found nothing but ever-more-ingenious sex spam from strange eastern hemisphere domains. At least the "Britney with three guys" video offers had stopped. Hey, Frito pie and no more Spears! Things were looking up, or rather down. I kept thinking about those prairie dogs standing by the curb. Were they waiting for someone? What did they want? MORE EXPENSIVE iMacs?

Just bang on me, and maybe I'll find out!

("Grack!")

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr wants everyone to visit the Zoozone, Fotofeed, and JHFarr.com after reading Applelinks, of course. Beyond that, he has few demands this week.

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Mar. 18: "Holy Ghostbeak" Mar. 11: "Lord of the Turkeys" Mar. 4: "The Heart of the Matter" Feb. 25: "New Stuff: Browsers, Servers, etc." Feb. 18: "Mascot Lore & More" Feb. 11: "Killer Email & Wiccan PotLuck" Feb. 4: "Meanies, Guerillas, & Subscription Copycats" Jan. 28: "Full Moon Frenzy, w/ PowerMacs" Jan. 21: "iMacs & Webmaster Schadenfreude" Jan. 14: "Was It Only a Week Ago?" Jan. 7: "Useless Column" Dec. 31, '01: "I Want a Refund"

AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

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