The Daily Grill

My Kindle Ate My Homework

I've been a huge proponent of personal computers and all other gadgetry in general. Bought Radio Shack's TRS-80 back in 1980-when-it-came-out. The first 128K-no-hard-drive Mac. The original Palm Pilot. No tech too glitchy, no adoption too early.

The commonality about it all? I've been in ultimate control of what content was in it. Big Brother might be watching, but it was strictly hands off. Amazon slapped my sense of ownership and control across the face yesterday when I learned they reached right into the Kindles of an unspecified number of customers and deleted — irony of ironies — copies of George Orwell's “1984”. Also his "Animal Farm".

Acccording to the NYTimes, some owners got to bear witness to the digital zap as they were in the midst of reading the book. Including one student who had been making digital notes on the work for a summer class — since his annotations were part of the digital files they, too, vanished. (I guess he can try telling his teacher, "My Kindle ate my homework.")

Amazon's reasons were sound enough: the company that had originally uploaded the books to be sold were not the legal holders of the copyright so they were not entitled to profit from them. and the customers with the vanishing literature were refunded their purchase price. But the "no excuse" part was Amazon reaching out its digital tentacle into owners' personal Kindle devices and wiping out the files.

It seems an accidental glimpse of what could be construed as censorship on a massive scale. Amazon, in retrospect, realized they screwed up as a spokeman said, “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.” Gotta love the conditional nature of "in these circumstances."

What happens a couple of more generations down the road when printed text is nothing more than a quaint reminder of the way people used to read? When some government decides that certain material is deemed illegal and is able to wipe it out from millions of digital memories, Hitler's book burnings will seem a drop in the bucket.

Guess I better start stocking up on printer paper.

Mom' Sci-Fi Fantasy

My mother isn't a big fan of the science fiction genre. Oh, she'll go for gothic horror. Nothing better than a crafty vampire to grab her attention. But she's never really connected to sci-fi, one of my favorite subjects of film and literature.

And yet she owns a freezer.

I'm not talking about the bottom compartment of the fridge in her kitchen. This is a separate unit. All freezer, tucked away in a utility room downstairs where no one goes. And it has a lock on it.

Occasionally, when I'm over and she's preparing dinner for several people, she'll mysteriously announce: "I've got to get something from The Freezer." You can practically hear the capital letters. And she will vanish, only to reappear minutes later with a heavily wrapped cut of meat. Weirdly, sometimes it's a box of supermarket cupcakes. A dozen, still packed in a open-topped cardboard tray, shrink-wrapped in plastic. and then there are the Items That Time Forgot.

Thick-cut bacon from a brand I've never heard of.

Cans of Birds' Eye frozen orange juice concentrate.

Otter Pops.

They have no discernible expiration dates, these products summoned from the Deep Freeze of Mystery. And that's where my mom's recessive sci-fi gene comes into play. Clearly, she think The Freezer is some kind of suspended animation chamber. As if the foodstuffs packed inside are immune to the ravages of time. And that what was delicious and nutritious a generation ago has somehow retained its vibrancy these many years later.

When these things are resuscitated from the Ice Age that lives in my mom's freezer, she seems to be unaware of the strange changes that have befallen the items. Meat that has the barest trace of flavor. Frozen desserts that are nothing more now than colored chunks of ice. Bizarre discolorations that no amount of gravy or whipped cream can quite hide.

No one in the family has the heart to mention anything. I think because the amount of comestibles in the freezer represents such an investment in time and money on her part. I just hope that someone invents a time machine one of these days — I'd use it to go back to the 80's and tell her not to bother putting that stuff in the damned freezer.