Today my four-year-old Mac G4 laptop began acting its age.
Groups of pixels jittered chaotically in horizontal regiments, sometimes covering the screen. Then, without anodyne application, the problem would disappear. And just as unpredictably, reappear. Further investigation revealed that these video measles increased or decreased as a function of manual pressure exerted on the case.
What I had was a screw loose…an intermittent error…notoriously hard to put right.
When I was in my 20s, I worked with an engineer who had a method for fixing such problems.
For any electronic device with an intermittent problem…
1) Measure the length, height, and width.
2) Add them together and multiply by two.
3) Hold the device that distance above a hard surface.
4) Drop.
5) Now the problem will no longer be intermittent.
Laptop, heal thyself!
Or else.
When 
In 1960, I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, my feet thrust out, listening to Caltech’s 
The odor of skunk is very different up close than it is far away. A wee bit-o-skunk is sharp and somewhat lemony…stinky, definitely apprehendable, but not outrageously offensive. Full-skunk, however, clouding thickly outward from the furry hotness of a thoroughly swacked pet dog, is an altogether different experience. It holds back for an instant, then slashes across your senses, hitting much further back, more on the reptilian neurons, with a cutting edge that noses in like the sound “chank-chank” composted with hot lye. There’s no meat to this stench. Nothing rotted. It is knife-edge, bluish-green, maybe bluish-gray, and you cannot stay with it long before gakking.
Today is Leap Day. We add this extra day in February if the year is evenly divisible by four. That’s once every four years. Right?
Hidden behind a fishing boat, a strange craft is silently lowered into the water. The inventor, David Bushnell, has named it “Turtle” because of its shape…and because it is a submarine. It carries a single bomb and its mission is sabotage.