First encounter.....

.....with the vaunted Associated Press news feed.
I don’t know how accurate this is, since it’s based on a dream.
I walk into a room full of computers.
It reminds of the De Land Public Library, where we went long ago when we visited my wife’s 94-year-old mother in a retirement center in De Land, FL.
To fulfill our ‘pyooter-jones. It’s hard to break free of the Internet.
Computers are in small booths along a wall. You drive ‘em from tall barstools.
They’re PCs, not MACs, like I’m driving now.
But I certainly have driven enough PCs in my time, although they can be irksome.
“All I need is a Windoze PC with Internet-Explorer,” I say, even though my Internet browser is FireFox®, and Internet-Explorer mucks things up.
In most cases a Windoze PC with Internet-Explorer is adequate to check e-mail, or print off airline boarding passes.
You frequently find such rigs in libraries.
Ask it to post pictures to a blog, and Internet-Explorer makes a mess. —Often it won’t even do it.
I take a seat.
It’s the Associated Press news feed.
I navigate through Windoze, and am presented with a ‘pyooter-menu of various AP new feeds.
I pick sports — that’s about as far as my dream went.
I got inundated with a surfeit of copy: Bills defunct, Tiger Woods scandalized, tennis hissy-fits, blood on the ice-hockey rink, the Tour de France. (“Peddle-peddle-peddle-peddle. Are they done yet?”)
Memories of production at the mighty Mezz.
A surfeit of news would tumble over the “wires.”
Weed though it, and whatever fits, prints.
As if we had time for furtive meetings to advance our so-called “liberal agenda.”

• “‘Pyooter” is computer.
• “Windoze” is Microsoft Windows®. Apple Macintosh users badmouth it as inferior; but I don’t think it is. A Macintosh superiority gig.
• The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over four years ago. Best job I ever had. (“Canandaigua” [“cannon-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 15 miles away.)