The Bedbugs, Technology, Information

Dear World,

It’s us, the bedbugs at UFM. It’s another round of construction projects, both redoing the worship room and finally building the large building near RantWoman’s Meeting.

It’s another dang leap year and our missive is way overdue. It’s time to hold our noses for another Presidential election year. Most of all there was another worldwide Quaker gathering. Considering all that, we the bedbugs feel both called and entitled to weigh in!

 We bedbugs feel so strongly called to offer our testimony that we tried technology ourselves. Someone got hold of this thing called Siri. We are told if we say it, Siri is supposed to write it. We do not see any problem about how we talk, but Siri keeps writing “direct unmitigated connections with the Divine.” We mean unmediated and we do not understand why Siri does not realize this! We do not think our accent is THAT strange.

After we tried Siri we wondered whether enough of us could jump up and down on the touch screen keyboard at once to write that way. Maybe if we had RantWoman’s favorite majorette coach / choreographer /high school English teacher to help us keep in time that MIGHT have worked. Also, autocorrect is just brutal and we cannot possibly jump up and down fast enough sometimes to fight its effects, but we definitely do not like this path to “unity.”

Technology is having an uneven impact for RantWoman. RantWoman’s  Smartphone allows her whole new communications frontiers even if trying to type via touch screen has cut down a little bit on the output from the Still Didn’t Get the Memo Committee on Email Immoderation.

As far as ways to make people settle down so we can have lunch, we definitely appreciate all the Quaker communications channels now providing videos, blog posts, podcasts, emailed articles and other paths for inspiration besides dusty pamphlets and out-of-print books.

RantWoman really is inspired that modern publishers of Truth are finally being electronically present, but she told us bedbugs to wash our mouths out about the dusty pamphlets because the library at RantWoman’s Meeting is a really important resource even if there is not very much there that RantWoman can read herself. RantWoman is kind of looking for a couple books of the Bible in Braille to donate, and RantWoman means it about books: Psalms in 3” thick in Braille. RantWoman is also thinking about some large print options but as long as things are going all digital, RantWoman points out that there are some publications she reads in the library, not only on paper saving ecological grounds, but also on money-saving ones. Subscription / access realities in the digital age have not quite caught up with this preference, and RantWoman’s Light is spluttering in too many other directions to labor with Friends about this just now, but one of these days…and then maybe RantWoman will also throw in lending concepts for other electronic content…

 

If RantWoman gets really carried away, we the bedbugs are afraid she is also goingto start babbling about “corpus of Quaker language” and Quakerism in many language, being theologically multilingual and getting to Truth bypassing Google translate.

At this point, we the bedbugs are just trying to help RantWoman clean out her notebooks and we are not too worried about tidy totality. Please hold such efforts in the Light.