I was back in the States last week to visit friends and family. We
generally travel the week before the US Thanksgiving, just to avoid
huge delays at the border. Anyway, while there I was able to grab
some boxes of books that have been in storage for a while - not all
of them but just the ones I'm likely to re-read or that have some
sentimental significance. Most of the others I'll be giving away,
but I have the fantasy and scifi classics I've collected over the
years, including Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov and Clarke.
To start, I picked out one I haven't read in very a long time,
'Expanded Universe' (Heinlein). That is a collection of related
stories with brief snippets by the author of what he was doing and
thinking when he wrote each one. I've always enjoyed seeing the
context around an author's work. Ray Bradbury's 'Zen and the Art of
Writing' is similar, although it has no stories in it he talks about
what he was doing and how he wrote some of his earlier
works. Fahrenheit 451, for example, was written on a pay-to-use
typewriter in the basement of a library.
Speaking of retro-tech, I hooked up an old VCR/DVD player yesterday
and was pleased to see that it still worked. We only have a few VCR
tapes left at this point (mainly holiday classics like Rudolph and
The Year Without a Santa Claus, but also the "Han shoots first"
original Star Wars trilogy), and they still play after 20 years. I
also purchased a 'dumb' phone, you know the kind - it plugs into a
wall and makes calls without the need for batteries and without
annoying screens or digital answering machines. It also sports the
attached phone cord and lighted handset (AT&T model 210). I had one
for years when we lived in the US, primarily because they draw power
from the phone jack, and so work even in power outages. It's always
a crap-shoot just how long the phone will work in those
circumstances, it can be from a week (copper lines with a decent
backup at the CO) to a few hours (VOIP with a battery backup
on-premises). Still, it is better than nothing, and these model of
phones are built to last.
