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01/23/2004 Entry: "Thank God for the Computer Revolution" I saw this link, and it made me grateful. Sometimes, abused kids fantasize about going back in time and fixing whatever they thought was wrong. "If I knew then what I know now..." No. And the Internet/Computer revolution is one big reason I never want to go back. I think about all the stuff I did, and how I had to make do without computers. Word processing, communication, and reference was all done with pen, typewriter, the phone, and visits to the library. I didn't have time for all that! My stuff was full of misspellings because I had no spellcheckers. Want to find out how to spell something? "Look it up in the dictionary!" But if I don't know how to spell it in the first place... oh, forget it. Like today, a coworker came into my office to show off his new Stingray boots. I had never heard of them before, but I was able to go on the Internet and look them up. Now I know about them. I was also able to call him on some BS that Elephant leather boots come from farmed elephants from the US, and they are not from elephants in the wild. Farmed elephants? How do you farm an elephant? They are huge, incredibly intelligent mammals that require a lot of space and food to keep alive. I can't imagine you could farm an elephant like you can goats or chickens. They'd pick up anything in their tusks and bash it around. Heck, people in Africa CAN'T keep elephant from their farms (elephants knock down all the fences, then go into the cornfields, and pig out), so how would you keep one in a farm? Having a game preserve or sanctuary, yes, but a farm? I told him I wanted proof. He hasn't gotten back to me yet, but I looked it up on the Internet all the same. Nope. No elephant farms to be seen. Sure, there are places where they are raised for work (but only in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Africa, it seems), or for orphaned elephants, but I wouldn't call that a farm, because a farm is technically... well, the Oxford Dictionary says, "an area of land and its buildings used for growing crops and rearing animals, typically under the control of one owner or manager, for purposes of mass-production to market." Thanks to the Internet and computers, I was about to cut and paste that from a website, and put it in my blog. It makes it harder to make stuff up if anyone can look it up. Of course, secretly, I'd want an elephant farm... but only if I bred mini-elephants as pets.