What is a keyword?  Is it a word that unlocks some magical treasure chest or door to some forbidden room--maybe like "friend" in elvish?  Maybe a keyword is something you stick in something else that keeps it in place.  It is possible that keywords are the only things you have to remember from an otherwise dull and sleep-inducing university or college lecture--or maybe a similar type of sermon.

What do search engine keywords do?  Well, first of all, they make the Internet an uneven playing field because if you have enough money you can place or generate keywords that will give you a higher search rating.  That is totally mean and unfair.  Secondly, you can spend so much time trying to come up with important keywords that the final content of your web pages stink.  Who wants that?  Finally, the results of the searches are totally biased.  Not only is that mean and unfair, as mentioned, but it also makes searching almost useless or at best a total distraction.

Let me explain. The other evening, I wanted to look up information on the shelf-life of semi-cooked meat, if unrefrigerated.  I put in words or phrases like "meat," "beef," "cooked chicken," "shelf," "life," "refrigerator," and "cooked" (without the quotes)  My results were links to alternative rock bands; complaints about fraudulent, on-line work-at-home businesses; very nasty pornography; carpentry; a bunch of poetry and religions; history of football; methamphetamine's; and how-to edit audio files.  Don't get me wrong; these are all interesting topics.  In fact, I spent the entire evening surfing from link to link.  Finally, I had to take a break.  I went to the kitchen and cut me a big hunk of old steak that had been sitting on the counter for that past few days.  Shortly after eating it, I got very ill.  I had to seek medical attention.  I thought I might have to take a bunch of prescription drugs.  What I'm saying is that I never got the information I was looking for in the first place--not from the Internet.  However, I did get some emperical experience on the matter.  I came to the conclusion that maybe a person shouldn't eat that stuff.

~ Bob Zaboo

The soda can, or pop can, if you’re from anywhere west of the Mississippi River or Hudson’s Bay, in Canada, is the symbol of our ecological heritage.  A bar was erected in its honor and more than one computer program was written to decipher the cryptic musings on the aluminum container.  Nobody cared what was on the inside.  Nobody ever does.  That noxious liquid could bubble, fizz, spurt or go flat for all the Association of Janitorial Theorists cared.   At any rate, in the grand scheme of the universe, there was not just one soda but an infinite variety of sodas, all of which tended to be sweet, sticky and make most humanoids, and even other creatures, burp when they imbibed it.  However, we were talking about a special computer program.  This program was designed to make the humanoid to machine interface something more than empty air—or the burp between the chair and the monitor. Thousands of coding hours, and then days upon days of algorithm testing, went into the perfection of this application.  Unfortunately, in the end the computer’s application was denied on the grounds that it had already used up way to many code hours just trying to get itself started.  No ultimate being, great or small, had told it that a humanoid could push a button to start it without the requirement of too much artificial intelligence or of any kind of intelligence, for that matter.  It remains to be seen whether or not the computer will appeal the applications denial or whether it will simply deny access without the proper password.  More on the twenty-eight o’clock news!

~ Bob Zaboo

Looking for computer assistance?  How about some advice on buying a new computer?Maybe you'd like John Bell to visit your home or business to provide coaching on a specific software application or just your PC in general.  What you want to do is visit Southern Maine Computing.  John has been involved in personal computers, for fun and fiscal rewards, for more than 20 years.

I love the fact that spiders freeze in the winter and they don’t come back until the next spring.  I love the leaves that fall in the fall.  I love them even more when someone else has to rake them even though I’d rather just leave them on the ground.  I love the lake in the summer but I don’t like big boats.  In the fall, the big boats all get hauled away.  I love that.  I really don’t love ski mobiles but I love it when I see them on the lake and know that I can imagine the ice breaking and them falling in along with their riders.  I don’t think I want the riders to seriously injure themselves but I love thinking of them getting totally wet and freezing their various body parts off.  I love white snow, except when I have to shovel it off the roof or scrape it off my car.

In the spring, I love seeing the trees growing new leaves and buds even though I know it means that the wood ticks will not be far behind.  I can always stay indoors with my cats.  That reminds me, I love my cats.  They are very funny and I think they love me.  They purr a lot when I’m petting them.  This could be just an instinct but I like to think of it as love.  I also love my computer, but I know it has very few feeling for me, one way or another.

~ Bob Zaboo  

I rode my bicycle as fast as I could.  I was desperate and terribly afraid.  When I left the scene of the accident, the young woman was bleeding profusely.  I didn’t want to think about how long she might have to live.  I pumped and pumped on the pedals to get up one hill.  I continued pedaling even when I was going downhill.  At one point, I nearly missed making a sharp curve in the road.  At another, I had to cut a curve sharply because I was going too fast and nearly ran into an oncoming car.  How bad it would have been if I was in an accident.  Who, then, would get into town in time to alert the emergency crews?  That poor woman was lying there, dying.  I didn’t know any other way to help her except to pedal, faster, and faster until I could hardly breathe.   At last I saw the fire station.  I didn’t slow down when I approached it and had to skid to a stop.  I nearly fell of the bicycle but managed to stay upright and uninjured.
The fire men immediately radioed the police and then they jumped into several emergency vehicles.  They told me to get in and come with them so that I could show them where the accident had occurred.  This seemed unusual.  "Would I be covered by insurance," I thought.  I mean, I wasn't a town employee or anything.   When we got to the accident location, there was nobody there.  There was no blood on the road.  The woman had vanished along with her car. For a few moments, I was stunned. I kept looking and pointing to the spot where the woman had lain even though there was no trace of her now.  When I turned around to plead with the firemen to believe me, they had vanished too.  I got on my bicycle and pedaled as fast as I could in the opposite direction from town.  I didn’t stop until I reached the railway track.  It was the beginning of the visions, which later became an obsession with me.  I have never been back to the little town of Bigger since that day.

~ Bob Zaboo

I saw the ape man coming from over the hill to stand beside the river and drink his fill.  It was a night when the sky was dark and cloudy and filled with the ominous sense of doom.  Ape men never worry about frightful things.  Everything, for them, is both an opportunity and a challenge and many things represent tomorrow’s dinner.  “It’s what’s for dinner,” they may often say as they’re scraping the last hairs off their ill fashioned stone utensils.  The ape man hangs from a tree and doesn’t think about cars, or computers, or fashion, or who will be the next president, or whether some country half of a world away is going to do something nasty.  They are only concerned about whether they can jump from where they are hanging to the ground without breaking something in their own body.  Once in a while, one ape man will fight another ape man.  These altercations are usually over an ape woman or two.  Ape men like bananas and other fruit, and bugs, and grasshoppers, and anything else that is edible and not poisonous.  Ape men are not vegetarians, although plant life makes up most of their diet due to the fact that they would rather sit around the campfire and play music and whistle tunes they remember from their childhoods rather than get up to go out and kill something to eat.  They are known to pick bugs out of each other’s hair, out of trees, and out of water pools.  Sometimes they eat these bugs, but, more often than not, they just play with them or put them on a string and wear them.  No one reading this should try to equate ape men with any other form of human or animal that they have encountered in the past.  They are nothing like either of these.

~ Bob Zaboo

I pat my cat with a cotton bat till he purrs with all his might.  He quacks like a duck, he is such a suck but he won’t let me tuck him in at night.  All things considered, he is not like a bird, nor a car, nor a train, nor a truck.  He likes flying things but with flapping wings, so he’s not very fond of aero planes but he likes to sit for a bit on the sill and look about the window panes.  He’s an indoor cat; it’s a very large cage.  I stay with him there and play with him there unless I’ve got something better to do.  Come to think of it, and I’m sure my cat would agree, that there is not very much that is better than sitting and playing with a cat all day.  All the things of this life, the toil and the strife, the books and the bars and the fascination with cars don’t amount to too much when it comes to that according to the world view of my cat.  I actually have two cats and they are both of the opinion that their needs come first and most of the time I cannot but agree.  Sometimes I think that my needs come first and don’t know what to do.  Sometimes my cats’ needs and mine are one and the same or at least they convince me that this is true.  They make me laugh and smile with joy.  They like to play with a string or a toy.  They fight each other but only pretend and finally sleep tight and close to each other at the of the night.

~ Bob Zaboo

Someone asked me once, “What do computers think?”  I didn’t have a readily available answer for them.  I know my own computer has a lot of thoughts.  It wonders whether or not I like it, for one thing.  My computer also lets me know if I’m pushing it too hard or expecting more out of it than it is prepared to provide.  For instance, sometimes, when I have a whole bunch of windows open at the same time, my computer purposely reacts slowly to everything.  Sometimes, my computer gets so annoyed at me that it fails to even acknowledge that I’ve clicked the mouse button.  It especially dislikes this when I click multiple times while waiting for it to respond to my first clicks.

This still doesn’t answer the question about what computers think.  Like us, they have electrical impulses that help them think.  Even though they can only think in zeros and ones, it doesn’t mean that the end result of their thinking is so narrowly defined.  For instance, my computer, or at least the software that my computer uses to do things, can tell me what time an appointment is and whether or not I am late for it.  Since I’m not able to readily read zeros and ones (I’m not that strange), the computer has to interpret this for me.  So, the end results are a lot more than just zeros and ones.

The only answer available, given human limitations, is that computers think in ways that humans are not yet, and may not ever, be able to understand.  I do not know if thinking about this too much will make humans reluctant to use computers.  What if the computers do not like being used?

~ Bob Zaboo

My spellchecker doesn’t like the word slitherers and this was supposed to be a scary story about them so I’ll have to write it using some other word that my spellchecker does like; although, I don’t know why I should be constricted to the words my spellchecker knows except that I have this unrelenting desire to spell things correctly even when they mean less to me than the conspicuous lack of lenience when it comes to spelling.  Hey, but that is what this story is about: disturbingly dark and sinister creatures slithered out from under pajamas thrown on the floor after a man and woman initiated a scintillatingly romantic encounter only to end in slumber and snoring.

So, out from under crumpled up garments, hastily tossed in the passion of foreplay, came these hideously demented and demonic creature resembling rats but with no legs and tails that were twice as long as regular rats.  It did not immediately register with the sleeping couple that these horrifically devious devils reeked of blood and urine and all sorts of other noxious smells.  It was too late.  One of the creatures crawled up the overhanging bedspread, slithered for a while under the blankets up alongside the woman’s naked leg, and then climbed up onto her belly.  It smiled as it approached her navel and penetrated her abdomen just as she awoke with a silent scream.  Here eyes opened wide with the excruciating pain.  She had a horrifying realization that she was no longer human but had been invaded by the notorious slather.  The second creature did the same thing to the man.  This, of course, was the genesis of the slathering changelings.

~ Bob Zaboo

There are a few different ways to approach the subject, or reality, of death and dying.  Most of us consider death to be tragic and yet most of us would also agree that it is inevitable.  As much as anyone has tried to defy their or other’s physical deaths, the outcome is always the same.  This has been going on since man first came into being and, undoubtedly, many, many millennium before that.

So to write something to people to help them deal with their or a loved one’s eminent demise is not an easy thing to do.  Denial of bad things is good if it helps in a cure or remission.  It is useless in trying to avoid the unavoidable.  Acceptance seems like just giving up and who, except a suicidal person, wants to just give up? We can be as angry as we want about it.  We can throw things around and curse Bob (thee or not thee Bob), our friends, family and anyone else who can hear us.  None of this outrage will exempt us from what must happen.

I have revolted against death all of my life even while some of my habits or lack of them taunt death to my very doorstep.   Still, I do these rebellious things out of defiance to the fate that awaits us all. People die and, whether we like it or not, we must get over it—or not.  Personally, I refuse to submit to the inevitable.   It is a useless stance to take, of course, but I take it anyway.   Somewhere, I keep hoping, there is mercy or tenderness enough to stop death from happening.  However, I do admit that despite my yearnings life and death will continue on ad infinitum.

~ Bob Zaboo