Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Ralph Nader, the man who brought us George W. Bush in the 2000 Presidential election, has once again decided he doesn't have enough to do. That's the only generous reason I can come up with as to why he's decided to run --for the fourth time-- for President. There are plenty of less generous assessments out there. Mike Huckabee has sagely observed to CNN, "Republicans would welcome his entry into the race." No duh. After a long and fairly distinguished career as a consumer advocate, he's working hard to turn himself into Ross Perot: a cranky spoiler who revels in his outsider status, where he doesn't have to actually work within the system to get anything accomplished. All he has to do is stand on the sidelines and bitch sanctimoniously. I simultaneously feel sorry for Ralph and want to kick him in his bony old self-absorbed ass.

Back in 1980, after much deliberation and research, I went to the Radio Shack flagship store on the ground floor of the now largely defunct "Tandy Towers" in downtown Ft Worth and bought my first computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo). TechRepublic got me thinking about his bit of my past with their article Cracking open the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo) . Like many Radio Shack products it was a curious mix of clever engineering and low-rent execution. The first generation of these beasts were an ugly silver gray (same as their big brother, the Model I) and had a god-awful "chiclet" keyboard. It was relatively cheap (compared to Apple) and the fact that it was locally designed and engineered appealed to my sense of civic pride. I had a lot of fun with this ugly duckling and spend what seems in hindsight to be stupid amounts of money on it (I badgered a salesman that same flagship store into selling me their demo single density 5.25 inch f...