Liberace

I am sitting here trying to solve the mystery of the erratic dialup -- four or five minutes of blissful 56 Kbps browsing, and then *poof*! There is no more incoming traffic. I blame the iBook, because the cube in the other room stays online for long langorous hours.

iBook? Cube? No, this is not some ultra-hip chromed Architectural Digest fantasyland I inhabit. It is an ultra-hip rural paradise, with an employer who has a fondness for macs and a surplus of cubes, and lets busy programmers take them home. But all the cubes in the world won't get you broadband in Brandon.

On the subject of cubes - have you noticed how the Apple design mafia has taken over? I was thinking about this when we went to see About a Boy -- a truly excellent movie -- where the main character has a cube tucked away in his swank apartment. It seems like every onscreen computer these days is a mac, if the character is hip enough. Sex and the City, natch. There is a website out there somewhere with a wonderful theory about how you can tell who will be a secret villain on the X-Files based on whether they use a PC or Macintosh, but I have lost it and can't seem to get it back.

I loook at these onscreen computers, and flat titaniums and Vaios in the soft-focus backgrounds of so many print ads, and can't help but wonder if a few years from now they won't look as silly as the picture I saw in the front of a 1988 issue of National Geographic, which had a stylish young yuppie stepping out of a doorway, talking nonchalantly into a cell phone the size of a toaster.

The process whereby technology becomes part of the culture - the way cars or railroads did - is a clever mystery. We have a whole set of cultural images and myths wrapped around those two inventions: Casey Jones, railroad hoboes, the ballad of the long-distance trucker, drag racing, motel culture - when will computers ever get their own folk heroes?

And for the computer folk ballads, what will they find to rhyme with 'Maciej'?