July 22, 2010 by Clair Button.

I recently found myself studying grocery ads like I was reading an incisive book. “Beef rump roast at $1.99 per pound,” I remarked to my wife, “not bad if you are willing to chew on a cow’s butt.” For some unknown reason, perhaps consumer psychology related to the Gulf oil spill, fish is no longer within our normal budgetary allowance.

“I’ll write that down,” she replied. “Which store?”

So it goes. This is a small town. You cannot visit a grocery store without seeing people you know, so we stopped to speak with an old friend who was reading the small print on the tags posted on the shelves. “Being retired means you shop more and buy less,” he said.

I guess that is true. Given the age demographics in our town, you would think the grocery stores would pay a bit more attention to scaling down the prices on the basic, unprocessed food items, while charging the profligate more for their potato chips and beer. Unfortunately, we live in a cold climate, and growing peppers is an act of faith. When green peppers went from 50 cents apiece to 2 bucks, and red peppers approached 4 bucks, we declined the offer. The problem with age is that you don’t always develop dementia. We can still remember sweet corn at 10 cents an ear.

We just returned from visiting my wife’s father in Boulder, Colorado. There, among the privileged generation of Lady Gaga, we found strawberries at a buck a pound, red peppers so cheap we bought a dozen, and fresh Washington cherries cheaper than in Oregon. We binged so completely that the gastric distress could have powered my truck on the way home, if only we had a flex-fuel hose to the cab.

However, after a week in the frantic flow of traffic in Boulder, cheaper gas prices notwithstanding, we were quite happy to return to our little town at the end of the earth. Quality of life means a lot. You pay for what you get.

Clair Button makes irregular contributions of (ill-?) reputed humor to this column from time to time.

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June 9, 2010 by Clair Button.

Mark Hulburt must be important. He has his own financial digest and is a “senior columnist” for Marketwatch, a financial news source I see on the internet a lot.  That means something, doesn’t it?

Here are some samplings of Hulbert’s insight.
June 9, 2010 - “The stock market is now at more or less where it stood at the bottom of the January-February correction. …Contrarian analysts consider this discrepancy to be a bullish omen…”

June 8 - “Monday’s stock market action was particularly discouraging, with the Dow closing below its May 6 intra-day low of 9,870 — the day of the infamous Flash Crash. With that level now broken, investors face the prospect of the stock market decline picking up steam. …within shouting distance of becoming an official bear market…”

On June 4 - “Corporate insiders are betting that recent market weakness is only a correction within a longer-term uptrend.  That’s good news for the stock market, since historically they’ve been right more often than wrong.”

You get the idea, right?  OK, I’m not Ben Bernanke, but Hulbert is obviously all over the map and doesn’t have a clue.  Of course the DOW is going to peak above 14000 in the next two months! Hulbert has no guts. That is his problem. Why the heck would Marketwatch pay that sucker money when they could hire me?

Likewise, there is another great financial blog called “Dripping Oil” which now predicts the imminent demise of British Petroleum (BP) in bankruptcy court.  This, of course, presumes that somebody assassinates the entire team of BP lawyers and catches BP exec Tony Hayward in “flagrante delicto” with the head of the Minerals Management Service at a Bermuda bordello. This is a company reported to make 30 BILLION bucks every year. The chorus of U.S. congresspersons clamoring for a suspension of the BP quarterly stock dividend shows they are getting worried about the security of their regular infusions of oil company cash into campaign chests.  Obviously, the media campaign against BP is starting to take hold in a world of Chicken Little investors and (dare we say?) “self-serving” congressmen.

The premise of the Dripping Oil prediction is so preposterous, that commentors on the blog are offering thousands for the secret to getting such meaningless drivel posted on Google (Goog) financial news.  I propose to show them how, thereby earning huge sums of cash, which I will then gamble and lose in the impending stock market crash just like all these other idiots.    And, I make those predictions on one day, not even wasting three days to write pointless columns of drivel for you to waste your time reading.

Clair Button has regularly shouted out financial advice to the British Exchequer (from a considerable distance,) but clearly, no one is listening.  I suggest you consult with someone more knowledgeable before investing millions.

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June 2, 2010 by Clair Button.

I spent a few days in May with some old Army buddies. I learned more about them and myself. We weren’t thinking about Memorial Day, but the conversation turned to our history, and the memories fit in to a Memorial Day theme for me.

What do veterans think about at those times? Friends lost. Things we did right. Things we did wrong. A misstep that caused a tragedy. Intravenous kits that failed to work. Bravery, loyalty, and sorrow. Brave foes. Hapless, innocent people caught up between warring forces. Fate. We wonder what happened to someone, perhaps someone you would not expect us to worry about. We discover we are not alone in those thoughts.  This is a piece I started writing last year, about a man we knew, who became important in our lives and memories.

 ”The World”

“The World” is what we called our homeland, the United States. What we meant was “The Real World” as opposed to the “unreal” world of our nightmare existence. Our lives seemed unreal at all times, whether we were fighting for our survival, taking risks we had never imagined we could, or playing like uncontrollable children to release tensions we did not comprehend.

And of course, we complained about being there in Vietnam. It was a year, an interminable year. We longed to get out, to go home.  We could welcome a “million-dollar wound” that, even if partly disabling, meant our internment in that strange, unreal world would end. Like grazing beasts, we lived in a wandering herd, doing what was necessary to survive, and gratefully moved beyond the scene when one of our number was pulled down in combat.

When we did go home, most withdrew and left the past behind. But not really.  A moment when you failed to save a friend is never forgotten. Some were rejected by the people they came home to.  Some managed to slip back into their old lives. Most adjusted to daily life and moved on.

We have the luxury of time and peace to look back. It did not really matter to my friends why our government went to war. Oh, sure, some volunteered out of patriotism. Some believed they were fighting would-be dictators who wanted to oppress a weak nation.  Most simply felt it was their duty to serve rather than run away to Canada. But the truth is that we were young, with only half-formed beliefs and even less understanding.

There was a man, more of a pawn and prisoner of fate than I, who put my year into a perspective I will always remember.  His name was Ni. A peasant farmer, he had been forced to work with the Viet Cong until we captured him.  He was  “re-educated” by his government, and released into our custody again as a “Kit Carson” scout.

“You Americans,” he said, “always complain. But you have only a year.” He told me that in his country, he had to fight from the age of seventeen, and could not quit until he was thirty-five. If he was lucky. If he survived. If he was not again captured by the enemy and forced to join their ranks. Forever. His war was forever. His chance of survival was best with us, and he was glad to be with us, to share our gruesome chore and our risk. Because it was the best he had experienced.

He had a family and twelve living children we never saw. That is all I know of him. That and his simple statement that both complained and accepted the reality of what he must do to survive.

We left him behind when we came home. I think of him and hope that he too found a “real” world to come home to; that he could live out the rest of his time in peace with his family.

Clair Button

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April 4, 2010 by Clair Button.

This is the monster we have created.

Ten people who entered the country illegally were busted in North Carolina for running a tax preparation business that claimed 22 million dollars in phony tax refunds for their clients between 2006 and November 2009. One tax credit improperly claimed on a majority of the false returns was for child care expenses, prosecutors said. The credit can result in a refund even if no taxes were paid. About 13 million in refunds were paid before the IRS discovered the fraud. A number of the guilty parties would “assist” their clients in cashing the refund checks, presumably pocketing a healthy cut of the refund.

Ask yourself why international criminal gangs would come here to target our tax system as a means to make a living.  The number one reason you should already know is that the tax code is so complex that even the IRS can’t figure out who owes what.

The second thing you should think about is whether it is really worth it to you to go through so much work and agony to get each tax break or credit the law allows.

While my retirement income is pretty straight-forward, I spent sixty bucks on a tax program to help me organize my records and calculate profit and loss on a pitiful publishing business and a significantly more successful bit of stock market gambling. In both cases, the software left me in the lurch to read multiple volumes of tax rules and instructions from the IRS. I had to file three different forms on a 75 dollar capital gains reduction that saved me close to 20 bucks. But I spent six hours scratching my head while reading the instructions in four different IRS publications. In other words, H&R Block either didn’t know what I should do, or their paid software engineers could not write software that could calculate it.  I would gladly have paid the 20 bucks just to avoid reading all that legalese garbage, but I didn’t want the IRS to throw me in jail for not filing three pages of forms which each had a single line item saying the form they required the oil company to submit did not apply to me or mean a damn thing.

If we re-write the tax code to cut out the wrangling over what we can deduct or whether the government ought to give us money for taking care of our own kids, I could have saved the 60 bucks on software, a net savings of 40 bucks without the reduced taxes. Imagine what I could have saved if I had hired a tax consultant to figure out I didn’t owe twenty bucks.

The IRS could have saved us 13 million bucks in fraudulent refunds, and we would have a few less illegals who come here to steal from us because our tax system is insane. Now, why in the world am I paying you to take care of your kids?

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January 18, 2010 by Clair Button.

“Leaves Blown Apart” was read by Baker County Library Director Perry Stokes for the WGEO Second Friday Literary Night event in January 2010.  Though accepted for the Libraries of Eastern Oregon anthology, “A Sense of Place,” it was inadvertently omitted from the first printing of the anthology.  Some of the audience asked if I would publish it elsewhere to make it available, so here it is.

Leaves Blown Apart

by C. F. Button

Empty quiet filled hours between delayed flights in Chicago O’Hare airport. Leaves with faces swept by, rattling, skittering voices caught in droning conveyor winds that failed to stir me. Some were brightly colored, some drab. Some briefly lodged against walls or benches and others raced past to meaningless destinations. They were nothing to me until one bit of color dropped from an eddy of swirling forms and paused tentatively, as though seeking refuge in my quiet, still pocket of space.

I glanced up. “U. S. Marines” was emblazoned in a yellow band across a young man’s tee shirt. Judging by his short-cropped hair and muscular chest and shoulders, I concluded the shirt was probably authentic and belonged to him. There was something in the shy way he glanced at me that faintly tugged on my invisible shroud of isolation. I nodded and silently resumed eating my portable dinner. Without speaking, he settled next to me on the two-seater bench at the side of the hall, folded his arms across his chest, and self-consciously tried to find a balance between somnolent patience and expectant attentiveness to the other travelers busily hustling between flights.

It was the patience that got me thinking, the patience that had to be learned. Memories tumbled like leaves in wind, memories of young men always moving, being transported, and learning to sleep, to rest, to relax, and to tolerate uncertainty. Trucks, planes, helicopters, long marches in single file, it didn’t matter which, you always had to learn to wait, to gather each precious moment of rest and luxuriate in it, never to hoard what could not be saved. Patience does not come quickly or naturally to young men. I, too, had been attentive to each passing figure and feature in my landscapes once. Each bit of motion might lead to adventure, or danger, or nothing at all – it took a while to learn that patience. The young or inexperienced dislike waiting. The old and experienced learn to live with it.

At the beginning of my trip this time, I had met two friends, brothers-in-arms, from a never-ending yesterday 37 years long. Winds of time and fate had blown my friends and me away, each on a separate path, and made us strangers for so many years.  Yet we will always be twenty years old, those brothers and I, no matter what our bodies and faces look like now, no matter if some of the details of yesterday have started to slip from our memories. We learned patience together. We shared a fierce bond of loyalty that endured all those years apart.

Glancing sideways, I thought I could see the light of idealism in the marine’s face, and perhaps anticipation of challenge and glory. Clean-scrubbed innocence, the kind you only see in the young. My friends and I knew the brief exultation of living through the danger this young man could only imagine in his future, wondering how, when the moment came, he would face the challenge. It was such a silly conceit, that self-doubt and concern for living up to a romanticized notion of heroism. I had known it, too.

A single year can teach patience beyond measure, a willingness to wait forever for another adventure like the one this young man anticipated so eagerly now. I thought of my friends’ shared grief, the kind that made the exultation of your own survival so brief. Would this young man feel it someday? Would he and his friends grow old with forty years of never-ending nightmares filled by horror?

I could sense him taking my measure as well. Curiosity showed, and perhaps a desire to speak – yet he hesitated. Could he see the brittle old armor that still separates and protects me from the innocent pain of green, young soldiers like him? I wondered, should I say anything to him?  Is there anything I could say that he wouldn’t take as criticism or as the emotional wandering of an old fool?

An announcement of my impending flight, changed to another gate farther down the hall, broke through my whirlwind of thoughts, brought me to earth and present tense.

I looked at him directly. “Are you active in the Marines now?”

“Yes, Sir. I was just at officer training camp. Headed home to Kansas now.”

The “Sir” provoked me like the buzz of a mosquito. I had once been a sergeant. Sergeants don’t easily accept being addressed as “Sir,” but he meant it politely, as respect due an old man. I repressed an urge to laugh at the irony.

“Is that like ROTC in college?” I asked hopefully.

“No, Sir, no college. The Marines don’t have that program.”

No, I thought, the Marines would want them young and unpolluted. Another thought came unbidden. Oh, hell! A first lieutenant! He’s going to be a first lieutenant. My platoon had lost two of them in less than a year. He’s going to want to lead the charge into battle or take risks for his men, thinking that is his duty, to risk himself before his men. I thought of booby-traps and body parts flying through the air, images which still wake another of my old friends in his 37^th year of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Suddenly the sense of loss was heavy on my chest and I already feared for this eager young man’s life. Was there was anything I could say that he would understand, anything that would make a difference?

I stood to go. I held out my hand and he shook it.

“Good luck, then. Take care of yourself and your men. It’s an important job.”

“Yes, Sir, I’ll try my best.”

I hauled my bag down the corridor. There are some things which can never be explained or understood unless you have seen the sunlight glance off the wing of a butterfly, or a mote of dust in the air turned to gold, or a drop of ruby-red blood suspended against an ice-blue sky – a moment before fate grasps all life in its rending jaws and leaves consciousness forever marked. No, he couldn’t have understood if I said more. Not then. Give him time. Give him time.

I give special thanks to Perry Stokes for reading in my place, because I had found this piece too difficult to read aloud once it was written, and to my friends from Recon Platoon, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Division, 196th Brigade, who have helped me face those buried memories and become more whole.
Clair Button

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December 24, 2009 by Clair Button.

I read in the news that Americans bought 12 BILLION rounds of ammunition this year, about 38 bullets per man, woman and child in this country. You might be surprised by that figure, but not if you live in my neck of the woods. The surge in bullet and gun purchases actually started during the 2008 elections. My neighbors got swept up in the right wing hysteria of internet rumors intended to get them out to vote.  The Republicans lost the election, but the media campaign generated record profits for gun and bullet manufacturing companies. TARP funds didn’t keep the economy from going to hell, it was us.

I doubt liberal easterners paid much attention.  A lot of them are asleep at the switch, anyway. But here in the west, most of us got weekly reminders – recycled email forwarded umpteen times.  While not exactly asleep at the switch, my friends forget who they mailed the message to the previous week.  Bob was not bright enough to check the list of names that Dave and Bubba used when they both sent the email to him. I was on their lists, too. Also, Mrs. Bob, Mrs. Dave, and Mrs. Bubba included me on their mail lists.  Everybody figured “what the heck, he’ll want to know this anyway, and if he got it before, he can just delete it.” Most of us didn’t even read it. We knew what it was about, anyway, and went right out and bought more bullets – each time.

Those damn Democrats were going to take our guns and make us get a criminal background check just to buy bullets. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the bullets after the Democrats had taken my guns, but I figured, what the heck, it can’t hurt to have a few more rounds.  Plus, I sure did not want to have anybody check into my background the next time I ran out of bullets, so I pulled out my wallet and beat them to the punch.

With all the reminders, I went out and bought 3 new pistols, 2 shotguns, an M-60 machine gun (slightly used) and a couple extra grenade launchers, too.  I already had enough automatic rifles and night-vision scopes. Don’t ask how many bullets I bought.  Somebody had to bring the national average up to 38. Those dumb-ass liberals back east didn’t do it.

Well, it looks like the rumors fizzled.  Nobody came to take my guns or ammo. So now, like most of my neighbors, I am sitting on an ammunition dump that will take out two square blocks of homes if we have a fire. The chain reaction that would set off in this town would probably make the Iraq war look like a picnic.

In other words, what we have out here in the west is a glut of stockpiled munitions. When my friends die, the estate sales alone will flood the market with guns, bullets, armored personnel carriers, and grenades.  I might pick up another machine gun or two if my neighbors die first, but eventually, even my guns will get back into the supply chain.

This is the beginning of the third dip in the economy, bigger than the commercial real estate bubble.  We are going to put a lot of national defense contractors out of business when we go. Be smart. Get out of the stock market now.

Disclaimer: Clair Button is not an investment adviser.  If you are dumb enough to take this as investment advice, you ought to check in to buying a burial plot instead of stocks. The odds are you probably don’t have long to live.

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October 28, 2009 by Clair Button.

Oh, unkind fates! Oh, Evil spirits!
While plotting my own corporate raiding and pilfering strategies the other day, and while reading various and sundry economic predictions and pithy stock market blogs, I stumbled upon this incredible revelation, to wit:
“Apparently in light of recent developments, Cramer has shifted his perspective on Lockheed as of Monday night’s show.  Although Lockheed beat estimates, Cramer referred to it as a bad quarter and said that Lockheed is suffering from a priority shift at the Pentagon.”

That evil spirit, the contentious and either beloved or much reviled James “Jim” Cramer, the “Rill O’Beilly” of the CNBC network stock market show, “Mad Money,” dared to abandon the favored military industrial complex stock of the Ockham “Razor’s Edge” anonymous “staff” who wrote the article to which I had been lead by titillating internet linkages. These all-knowing lords of economic wisdom were quite justifiably outraged by Cramer’s callous abandonment of Lockheed’s military and economic prowess in favor of the less well endowed Northrop Grumman corporation, whose missiles were presumably fully extended already and not capable of further growth such as those of Lockheed. – Scumbag! How dare he? they raged.

“This is a clear reversal from his opinion of just two weeks prior, and it is his purgative to change his opinion as more evidence is made available.  While he may be right about the shifting priorities from the Pentagon, we are sure that Lockheed will not be caught unaware with no alternative course of action.  They will continue to compete for contracts same as they always have, and for now we are not overcome with concern for future sales.  From our perspective, he seems to have written off LMT for dead rather quickly (especially considering his bullishness two weeks ago).”

Fickle bullishness indeed! Scoundrel, I say!
Yet, despite being a stock market hobbyist and enthusiast, I find my literary leanings difficult to overcome when reading this kind of stuff.  I found myself compelled to sign in to the blog commentary with a short riposte:

“While it may be Cramer’s prerogative to take a purgative, it is a crappy choice. I just thought I would share that.”

Those scoundrels! Without even acknowledging or allowing my spontaneous quip to post, edited their own words. Oh, to be deprived of my one glorious moment of fame in the economic world. My visions of being cited and revered as a great sage like Warren Buffet were dashed once again.

As Monsieur Poirot was noted to say (on the famously literate Public Broadcasting show) “They have not the humbility.”

Clair Button occasionally posts a bit of questionable humor here.  Hope you have fun with it.

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August 8, 2009 by Clair Button.

East-side Oregonians have many traditions. Last week, we went out to participate in a local tradition, picking huckleberries. The following Tuesday, we intended to set off for the Oregon coast to escape the hundred degree heat of early August. This is also a tradition among the town-folk of eastern Oregon.

It did occur to me that it was my civic duty to wash the dust off of my eastern Oregon pickup truck before heading west. Huckleberry picking necessarily means going long distances on dusty gravel roads through the forest. No need to make those big city tourists think we east-siders are all slovenly low-lifers. So, I went to the local car wash, which luckily, happened to have a 50 gallon drum of “pre-wash” detergent and long-handled brushes to loosen up the dried bugs and what not before entering the high-tech automated spraying barn.

It was the “what not” part of the dried material on my east-side truck that turned out to be more of a problem than I had anticipated. You see, my east-side Oregon neighbors have other traditions. Like, at the end of July, the lowland range pastures are totally dried out, and it is time to either take the cattle to higher elevations, or put them on irrigated pasture for the rest of the summer. Over time, this has created the tradition of the “cattle drive.” For you non-east-siders, this does not mean you put old Bossy in the back seat of your car and take her out for a Sunday drive. Actually it means you do a round-up of four hundred or so nameless cows and push them out onto the highway on foot, or on hooves. You then trail behind them down the highway on horses (or more likely 4-wheelers now) for several miles with the help of a few border collie cowdogs while bewildered town-folk and smiling, pointing tourists try to figure out how to get through the whole mess and resume their high speed adventures into the forest without bumping number 432 in the butt or running over her frightened calf who witlessly dodges in front of their bumper every two minutes.

A cattle drive, while appearing somewhat haphazard and disorganized, is really not a mess. Given the difficulty of convincing the cows not to climb into the cars passing through their midst, it is a fairly well organized process. The mess is what the townfolk and tourists drive on, other than the actual pavement or gravel. It has a tendency to be semi-liquid at the time, loathsome olive-green in color, and fulsome in fresh, organic odor, if you know what I mean.

So, bring the tradition of huckleberry picking and cattle drives back to the car wash. I find that one long handled brush is insufficient to remove the dust and the mess, which together, have dried to an indistinguishable splattering of lumps on the side and underframe of my pickup truck. I take a second brush, and using both at once, discover that the lumpy dust on the side of my pickup becomes a slimy, green-brown mud that no amount of brushing will ever remove. The frame beneath the doors of the truck had significantly larger lumps of stuff, which when knocked apart, turn out to be only partially dried. The wheel-wells of my truck turn out to be indescribable – lucky for you.

Another customer pulls up behind me, waiting patiently for me to finish. Returning to the drum of ice-blue detergent pre-wash for the sixth time, I find it has turned a dark, muddy, green-brown, and smells more like a barn than detergent. Rinsing the brushes, I make one more attempt to wipe the smears of green from the side of my truck, but notice the detergent water now leaves an equally dubious film on the door panel, and it smells, well, rather bad.

Returning the brushes to the drum, I wave at the lady behind me and pray that she does not get out to use one of the brushes on her own car. I drive in to the automatic wash, thinking it was very smart of me to have paid extra for the “ultimate” wash. I knew it was going to take some serious spraying on the underbody to get my truck clean.

The soak-down cycle with more pre-wash detergent was understandably dingy as it dripped down the outside of my windows. The flashing light sign let me know the regular high-power wash cycle was going to help, and it did. But the rinse cycle still had a distinct olive tinge to it as it drained down off the roof. When the “clear protective coating” light came on, I had second thoughts about spending the extra money. I was thinking that might mean something like a coat of shellac that would permanently attach any remaining green residue to my nice truck. Not a happy thought at all.  However, the final rinse cycle did not obscure the outdoor sunlight with a fog of green, so I figured everything was going to be OK.

The blow-dry cycle did about as much good as a short popcorn fart. I hardly know why they bother. When I got out to use the old chamois skin to dry the truck, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it did not come away stained green, and the truck did have a nice burgundy gleam to it, fairly similar to the original paint-job. However, I did notice the seams around the wheel wells still had some dark green material packed into them. I avoided those.

It was on the trip over the Cascades when we finally found some real rain. I mean, it rained hard for a little while, nothing like that 20 percent chance rain that they keep promising us out in the eastern hinterlands. We happened to stop at a little rest area on the west side of the mountains as we headed down toward the coast, and walking back to the truck, I noticed some very distinct dark olive green racing stripes on the side of my truck. All that west-side rain had loosened up some of that indescribable stuff from the inside of my wheel wells.

Oddly, the olive color didn’t look that bad against the burgundy paint, as long as you didn’t look close enough to see the fibrous nature of the basic material, now welded to the side of my truck with green slime infused with shellac. “Wow, that is a cool paint job with those dark racing stripes,” an escapee from a Salem nuthouse said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I paid extra for that.”  Funny how those old traditional things are still so popular that even the city folk like them.

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April 12, 2009 by Clair Button.

Being antiquated isn’t all that bad.
Everyone says the economy is terrible, but if you are already retired and learned early how to live within your means, it might be an opportunity to invest or buy something you couldn’t have afforded a year ago. On the other hand, why change your habits and spend money you wouldn’t have spent before the economy turned terrible? What do you need that badly anyway? When you are retired, the odds of amortizing out a major purchase over the long-term aren’t that good.

If you amuse yourself by writing and running a publishing business, you probably find it is a struggle to balance the costs of maintaining the business and the limited income of book sales. But to keep going, you may have to stuff a little more money in Bill Gates’ pockets when your ancient computer (running on Windows 95 or 98) doesn’t seem to work well anymore. The problem is, current versions of software won’t work on our technological artifacts. There is no such thing as Viagra for old computers.

But wait! There is hope for old technology (and old cheapskates) after all! The techno-geeks of the world are out there creating new magic. If you pay attention to computer geeks at all, you may have heard of the Windows alternatives, Unix and Linux. Sounds like a foreign language with good reason. They have a reputation of being obscure, difficult, and arcane command-line-driven software packages. Who has enough time and energy left to learn a foreign language at my age? Not many of us. The geeks know this. But there are some kind and charitable geeks out there, because they have worked hard to show mercy toward us simpletons.

I just cleaned the dust out of a computer so ancient that I expected to find a mummy when I scraped the dirt off the fan blades of the power unit. I inserted an extra memory chip from a second ancient pile of techno-rubble, put the Ubuntu Linux CD into the CD reader, and voila! I walked away and twenty minutes later, the operating system software had completely installed itself, along with free office software, internet browser, photo editing software, and a number of other things.

What shocked me was how simple and easy this was compared to the number of times I’ve had to repair my old Windows system and software. I didn’t have to search for drivers for each part. I didn’t have to re-boot the computer twenty times and re-install each piece of program software. The result is an old computer raised from the dead, operating just as effectively as my brand-new laptop. Want to save money to keep yourself in business? Try this! Linux has arrived at the point where it can literally threaten the evil empire of Microsoft! (Stock market traders had better look to their investments.)

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December 26, 2008 by Clair Button.

I left alone at quarter to nine, the road dusted with icy crystals over black frozen dew from the night before. Fog from the river filled the valley below low-hanging clouds, and black Angus cattle drifted through shrouded pastures, their backs striped with white, looking like giant skunks. The smell of sodden leaves, hay, and fresh manure hung in the valley like fog, to reassure me that it was just my imagination.

The sun, only a pale imitation of the moon, briefly tried to lift the clouds, before giving in to gravity and the weight of snow-laden masses descending from the mountains where I headed. Wet snow began to stick to the windshield. As the road lifted above the valley fog, every living thing wore a top-dressing of white, black alders dripping cones even before the snow could begin to melt, red dogwood, yellow willows, and conifers painted with shades of blue and green over stark black trunks, all limned in white as though the artist had first painted in oils, then cut through edges of white on scratchboard. Mysterious realm, where even the rocks could be seen to have form and life. And there above the fog, the sun tricked the wind into complicity, revealing more here, less over there, shadows and light, magic of artist’s skill.

Hissing splash of melting snow beneath my tires gave way to muted crunch and whisper of dry powder settling deeper. Alone on the road for so long, it was easy to let reality slip and imagine myself a pioneer tracking through wilderness, but the blowing white had not completely obscured the evidence of some other brave soul who had gone before me into the mountain stronghold. I longed to see his tracks turn off and leave me to my wilderness alone, and when a truck passed going the other way, fleeing down to the valley, I hoped it was him.

White curtains swept across the landscape, and pulling close, confused my path, forcing me to slow and guide the wheels only by the distance to the nearest obscure dark shapes that lined the trail. Deeper still, I floated in silence broken only by gusting winds that pushed me toward the edge of … I knew not what, perhaps a flight into the void where only white winds ruled.

Wind stopped and dark trees reappeared, marching back to the edge of the trail, looming and drooping over, forlornly observing my passage.  A gray ghost of an owl turned the round disk of its face toward me as though it resented my presence in her silent realm, as I had resented the fool driver who had gone before me earlier.

Sun emerged, and patches of bright blue sky, putting an end to the rule of monochrome. Revived, trees shook off clouds of snow that drifted gently in my passage.

Then over the crest, emerging into another universe, where the next range of mountains and forests can be seen swathed in white, lit in gold, and surrounded by wild platinum and silver clouds, and in between, golden valleys streaked with green and black rivers and dotted with white farmstead homes, whose chimneys hint of warmth and life within. Beauty to fill the darkest soul that revels in isolation. We are never truly alone, for the artist has been there before us.

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