Progress...

At this past Friday's amateur radio breakfast, I was informed that the post office downtown no longer has a separate "local" slot to collect mail destined for, typically, a box or cluster box sorting rack located within 20 yards of said slot.

There is now just one common mail drop.

So now, all mail—local and out-of-town—gets sent to Alamosa, where it is sorted and then returned, the next day, to Pagosa. Why? I was told the official explanation was that Alamosa had been equipped with a shiny new mail sorting machine, and that consequently any mail sorted locally represents an inefficient use of labor.

Of course, once the mail returns from Alamosa, it pretty much represents a pile of Pagosa-only mail that still has to be sorted into post office boxes and for distribution into cluster boxes.

The major improvement to the system appears to be that it now takes an additional day for local mail to arrive, except when Alamosa gets socked in with snow, in which case it takes longer.

Believe it or not, this post was prompted by yet another ignorant (in my opinion) rant against the existence of pennies. It's bad enough the post office spends money it barely has on "improvements" like this when it hikes rates by one or two cents every couple of years.

Imagine if the minimum increment in the price of postage were a nickel? Just think of all the shiny new toys and programs that would buy!

Cheers...

Rereading for writing...

I started rereading some old favorites, with an eye toward how they were written. Among the volumes on my list is John D. MacDonald's A Tan and Sandy Silence.

However, just because I've got a somewhat different outlook doesn't stop me from picking up on some nice passages. For example:

The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. News has always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grubworms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So devote wire-service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everybody in constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it ever more horrendous to capture our attention. Second, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope, the motto is semper fidelis, which means in translation, "Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife, too, if he's out of town."

That was written wa-a-ay back in 1971, during the stone age of news reporting. I wonder what MacD would have to say about, say, CNN?

Cheers...