[ExI] What would you do if you won the billion dollar plus MegaMillions Lottery, and are lotteries a bad thing?

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Tue Oct 23 17:34:38 UTC 2018


 

 

From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 



 

>…Call em, talk, listen, write down what they tell you.  If you are not interested now, or are busy, call, talk, listen, write it down, file it away where you can find it 30 yrs from now.  I did.  The stuff I found out in my 20s is priceless and irreplaceable…spike

 

 

Fun aside on that: I have a relative back in the old family seat, lived his whole life there.  He isn’t old: 70  (ain’t it cool how we don’t consider 70 a bit old anymore? (As recently as 30 yrs ago, they made such a big deal about Reagan being in his 70s (but now most politicians are that old or older (that’s progress!))))

 

This relative lived right there the whole time, became a history teacher for high school, did that for over 40 yrs, retired at 65 and continues as a substitute.  This guy, who knew so much… had no computer.  Didn’t know how to use one.  I talked to him on the phone and we could text each other, but I kept getting on him, telling him it is too hard to communicate using that silly texting on a phone.  We have ten digits.  It just seems so wrong to use eight of them, really the best ones, to support the keyboard.  So wrong is this!

 

I didn’t even resort to the shaming part: this guy was teaching history… without an internet connection.  How the hell does one keep up without the internet?  Reading books?  Paper ones?  I think not!

 

So I kept on him thru voice phone calls, I kept up the old: Pal ya just gotta get at least email, you really do.  I can’t send you photos without it, you have no access to the family archives I set up, you can’t keep up with advances in your own field because people don’t write for paper magazines much, your grandchildren may not use email but your children probably do and we email users aren’t going to text you photos because you can’t see anything on a damn phone!  You need a computer and youuuuu neeeeed iiiinterneeeet, etc and so on and on I nagged my own beleaguered cousin for three years or more.

 

He offered this flimsy excuse he didn’t know how, so I convinced him to get his grandchildren to teach him, and he’s a smart guy, so last month he did it.  Got a computer and a minimal internet connection, I coached him into a free gmail account.

 

Well now.  Remember when the internet was coming alive in the early 90s and that heady feeling of gaining 20 IQ points?  Imagine coming into that world now, when it is sooooo much more advanced with waaaaay more bods to ogle and the other stuff that is available now, and that guy who was until last month TEACHING HISTORY WITHOUT INTERNET is now realizing how much he passed up in the last 25 years.  Now I can imagine what he is doing right now: the National Geographic magazines went into the trash (even that sizzling Sept 1957 issue) and now I can’t get his attention at all.

 

spike

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