August 20, 2001

Oh good, the techie has arrived!
I'm not any such thing, of course, but that's the role that's been thrust upon me in the course of an extended stay with my mother here in Tucson, Arizona. My siblings will not be surprised to hear that I have been asked to do everything from fixing a drawerful of dead flashlights to repairing a broken hydrator shelf in the refrigerator. The former required replacing batteries, the latter explaining why it just could not be done -- a bad move, given that my family never met a half-- um, a du--, er, a cheap solution it didn't like (whew). Be that as it may, something much more critical turned up the other night.

After being the good son and installing Norton Systemworks plus TechTool Lite on the old lady's original Rev. A iMac, I noticed that the iMac's mouse would freeze every time the computer started up. I didn't think the utilities and the mouse failures were related, but you never know. The problem had shown up before, though not often. Now, however, the mouse was useless. Sometimes it never did move, sometimes it would work for 30 seconds and then freeze. Most aggravating. In one evening of troubleshooting, I never used a straightened paper clip so much. Finally it occurred to me to try the Apple Pro mouse we had brought along with the iBook: SHAZAM!!! It worked perfectly, of course. Geez.

Before this obvious diagnostic procedure occurred to me, I had thought that perhaps the hockey-puck was all jammed up with dirt and crud, so I took a look. My nearly 80-year-old mother likes her computer for email and some Web surfing, but she isn't what you'd call a heavy user: the inside of that mouse was nearly pristine! Anyway, I guess we need a new one.

Razing Arizona
We now begin a parable, as it were, during the reading of which you are gently urged to think of Microsoft's latest scorched-earth "innovation." By that I mean the fact that those cagey codeslingers in Redmond have decided that the new Internet Explorer browser for Windows shall not support QuickTime and a whole host of other plug-ins, thus compelling Apple to crank out a bastard version that works with Hacker Heaven, otherwise known as ActiveX. I may have some of the details wrong, but you get the drift. This is more of the "Our way or the highway!" treatment only the newborn or psychiatrically hospitalized don't expect from Microsoft these days. What this means for future Macintosh versions of this "take it you moron, it's free" software, only those of average intelligence and above can tell.

OK. First we have Exhibit A, below, a lovely slice of Sonoran desert. You will note that it is not the least bit empty or in need of attention. Everything is in harmony and works fine, as God intended. By the way, those saguaros are usually no more than 3 inches tall even after ten years, so those big ones are truly ancient.

This landscape is in reality even more beautiful in person, having an astonishing variety of plant and animal life. It can also be quite mystical and psychedelic, especially in the evening when the thick cholla spines are backlit by the setting sun and give off an eerie glow. Many of the bushes and cacti send roots down 40, 50, 60 feet or more. You want permanent, we got permanent. Unfortunately, more and more people want to live in Tucson, for reasons obviously not related to the stifling heat. These people need places to live. The desert being what it is, though (rough, spiny, uneven, and hard to get to), the easiest way to build houses for desert-lovers is to get rid of it, i.e. scrape it clean, level it, and dump in a cluster of homes.

Exhibit B shows one such result. Probably two dozen new houses will be crammed cheek-to-jowl on the terraced lots inside this naked patch, and most of them will be sold before they are finished. I realize that many will argue that this clustering is a better way to build houses in such places, rather than defacing the landscape with more roads leading to individual homes scattered hither and yon. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps it is better to pick a certain area and obliterate it completely rather than carve intrusive roads throughout the region. There are in any event already plenty of roads, only now they are lined with clear-cut walled cluster developments instead of individual houses sited in the surrounding landscape. It just offends me, that's all, as I prefer variety.

Memory refreshment and replacing the irreplaceable
For those of you lucky enough to have grown up without the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, the neutron bomb is a Cold War concept that for all I know was actually produced and may yet be in the arsenal. The basic idea was to produce a nuclear blast high overhead that was short on destructive power but long on radiation. The resulting bombardment of neutrons would instantly kill every living thing within a certain radius but leave infrastructure, weaponry, and other useable resources intact. This was thought to be highly useful for, say, dealing with Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, since collateral damage would be limited only to hundreds of thousands of nearby residents. The quiet houses, factories, railroads, tanks, and water closets could then be used by anyone who was left, after what would have been the Mother of All Cleanup Jobs. I leave it to you to imagine how such weaponry would be employed today in places like the Balkans if small, shoulder-launched versions were available, and I humbly suggest that one of Bill Gates' fondest dreams is to code a software version of the same thing. From what I read, Microsoft is getting pretty close!

But to continue the Tale of the Desert:...

Exhibit B, above, is very close in general appearance to the way a huge swath of desert will soon look like very near the location shown in Exhbit A. A large golf course, resort, and condominium complex has been approved for an area adjacent to Tucson Mountain Park, very close to where my mother lives. God knows how many acres will be scraped completely bare in the process, but this is to be a "desert resort," right? So here is the saddest part: after the sprinkler systems, roads, foundations, golf courses and clubhouses have been laid in, the developers will reconstitute small islands of "natural" surroundings by bringing in and planting what you see in Exhibit C, below.

Deserts R us
That this sucks is a matter of gospel with me and I hope for you also. You will note that the items in the picture are the "pretty" flora. Whatever desert is recreated for the benefit of golfers and heat-loving condo dwellers will be purified, of course, and no one will have to risk an ankle full of thorns to hit one back out of the rough. (More's the pity, because the local terrain easily lends itself to "extreme" varities of any sort of sport you could name.)

Where there once was a thriving interrelated desert community of living things, there will now be a homogeneous order, a corporate-designed way of life, no doubt much more vulnerable to the vagaries of nature than that which preceded it. Hmmm. At this point my vague allegory begins to fizzle out, but there you have it. Still, I think there is relevance here, and at least I got to wax sardonic and talk about neutron bombs -- for those of you who may be wondering why such things were not employed in the Persian Gulf war, I have three words for you: fuel-air explosives,* our current more politically-correct alternative. Lots messier, but radiation is so 60's, you know?

Arachnids to the rescue?
My mother lives in a longstanding mobile home development for retired people. Over the years virtually every lot has been sold, and the winding streets are packed solidly with aluminum boxes bearing signs like "Caution: Granddad and small boys at play" or "I never promised you a rose garden." [Seriously!] It is all in all a fairly pleasant place, aside from too many ceramic Mexican peasants taking siestas and yowling coyote silhouettes. It is also almost completely deserted during the summer months. The fact that I am here and they are not will someday lead me to more charitably evaluate the intelligence quotient of my elders, but for now I walk the streets at night and wonder.

Last night my wife and I were strolling through an empty neighborhood when all at once she asked, "Is that a tarantula?" and by God it was, the biggest one I have ever seen, ambling slowly across the still-hot pavement. They live here, after all, as do plenty of scorpions and other relatives.

"Leave it alone and it won't hurt you," I said, but I sure wasn't about to pick it up and put it in my pocket. Wouldn't have fit (!) anyway, and I'm sure a bite would have been painful. But I was heartened to see it there in the middle of the road, calmly heading for some nice old lady's carport, no doubt. No matter how much we rip, replace, and remake, the "bugs" are still here, and I love it! (Oh. So THIS is the end of the allegory, after all.)

Bye now!

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr pledges that no software has been harmed in the production of this column, all his Microsoft apps having long ago been zeroed out.

* Not the exact jargon, but it will do.

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