Credit Where Due...

REDIT WHERE IT IS DUE: I have my PC back to life, and my drive, without loss, all thanks to the Windows XP "System Restore" tool, which actually worked as advertised. Who'd have thought?

It was hairy for a while, I admit. This machine, its pretty much a games machine nowadays - I don't really work from it any more - and reinstalling games, though tedious, would have been nothing more than inconvenient. But it still has some toolkits that are occasionally useful for work that I'd have to reconstruct; and I'd have lost a lot of passwords, too, buried somewhere in the rubble, and that would have been a bummer. But worse than all of that, this drive holds iTunes, and reinstalling iTunes is an evil bitch, a guarentee of hypertension. Our music libraries themselves - mine, the manifold kids' - those live on a different disk. But whenever you reinstall iTunes, and attempt to incorporate your existing music libraries, its snotbubble DRM smegware counts the transaction as One against the number of "copies" it permits you to make. Even though nothing is ever, you know, copied. I've already been through two drives, and I think the "copy" limit is five.

Have I mentioned how much I detest Apple?

There is, apparently, a cheat; a workaround. But why, when I have paid real money for every last byte of music in my library; why should I be forced to act like some criminal by my own damned computer?

All of which brings me, in roundabout way, to that video: the ripped "1984" commercial starring Hillary in the role of Big Sister - ooooh!.

Now: I am by no means any kind of fan, and I'd be the first to agree that the video captures the otherness and chill of the Senator perfectly, yada-yada; but... come On! In these days of permanent war, of torture and kangaroo courts, of King George and his unitary executive, of NSA and FBI spying on citizens, of loyalite play-or-pay Departments of Justice; in such days as these the face on the screen should be Hillary Clinton?

Somewhere a ceiling is missing a beam.

That it should be Clinton cast in that role is at least historically fitting. In the original commercial, remember, mighty Apple of the Bouncing Breasts threw her hammer at the dread face of IBM, and never even noticed Big Brother Bill, who subsequently broke her back and threw her out the ring for many, many years.

Wrong target then; wrong target now.