Guest post by Mary Beckwith

Isn’t it fantastic how quickly technology is advancing in our lifetime? Every now and then I stop and look around and take a few minutes to be grateful for all of the modern conveniences of today’s life. My kids laugh when I tell them about how difficult it used to be do do things long-distance when I was younger. And by “younger” I mean back in the ’70s, which to me seems like last year!

I can still remember the telephone call that came into the house late one night to my parents that my oldest brother had been arrested for a prank that he and a couple of friends pulled when they were in college. Seems that the police didn’t have much of a sense of humor back then and charged them with grand larceny theft. Seems that they had relocated a friend’s stereo out of his dorm room, and by the time the friend realized that it was just a prank the court system had a very firm hold on the perpetrators.

Finding a california criminal lawyer was not a simple task back then; there was no internet to be able to just go to the computer and “Google” los angeles criminal defense lawyer in the search bar. Having been a teenager back then, my parents tried their best to keep all of the details from me, and the rest of the kids, but I know that they spent a lot of time on the phone behind closed doors and that somehow they ended up hiring a criminal defense attorney los angeles to represent my brother.

To be perfectly honest, if something like that happened to our family and there was no Internet to turn to, I don’t have a clue where I would go for information like that. Maybe call a local lawyer and ask him for a referral? All I can say at this point in time is, I’m really glad that we have the Internet – it is a fantastic source of information. One drawback, though, it does not help us learn to delay gratification! Everything is right there immediately!

A friend of mine sent me a link to a blog that was talking about how someone has found a way to burn salt water, and that the possibility was there to further develop that to actually be able to run cars with that technology.

So I was just googling “fuel from salt water” and was reading the different links about it.

From what I can tell, right now it takes more energy to create the fuel than the fuel itself would generate, which makes it impractical.  Perhaps someone can refine the process, but I also read that when the salt water DOES burn, it releases a deadly form of chlorine gas, which probably would not be a good thing!

So, I think that quite a bit of “tweaking” needs to be done for that technology to hit the mainstream use of running our cars on saltwater!

I know I’ve told you that I have an aunt that lives in London. She sent me an email yesterday with a link to a local newspaper (to her) that was running a story with pictures about a leopard that attacked a large crocodile. It was quite a battle; the leopard won the battle and hauled the crocodile off to eat. All I can say is that the leopard must have been pretty hungry to take on a crock! The article was on the Earth news section of the website of the London Telegraph paper at Telegraph.co.uk if you want to check it out.
Absolutely amazing!

For all of the television commercials that I see on television about how great Verizon Wireless is, and for all of our neighbors insisting that Verizon is the company with the best cell phone reception is around here, I have to say that I’m quite disappointed in the dead zone problems that I have with my Verizon cell phone.  I cannot use my Verizon cell phone in my house at all – the entire house is a dead zone.  And whenever I drive from the house to “town” to run errands, the vast majority of the trip to “town” is a dead zone – even if I pull off the road and stand on top of my car.  So, I have to say that I am quite disappointed in the Verizon cell phone service.

I’ve been hearing and reading more cases of families giving up their hard-wired landline in their homes in favor of simply using cell phones.  I can understand the logic, the cell phones are small and they carry them with them at all times, the landline phone is usually larger and more cumbersome.  Yet I question the wisdom of this strategy.  I like having a landline phone, one that is completely hardwired, and corded.  Yes, we have cordless phones, but if and when the electricity goes out (and it DOES go out!) and the cell phones are useless because our house is a dead zone, we depend on the hardwired, corded landline to call the electric company to report the power outage!  And we use it to keep in touch with friends and family during the power outage!  In 1998 we had a huge ice storm that knocked the electricity out for nineteen days, but we had the telephone service every minute!  We could not have maintained cell phones in that case because we could not have kept them charged!

So, in OUR house, anyway, I expect the landline is here to stay.  What about you?