Something old. Something new.

We've recently purchased appliances at Sears, so Sears is now sending us love letters of all sorts. Yesterday we received a packet of coupons for discounts on various products, including jewelry. Thanks, but I have all the jewelry that I need. Sandra and I bought our wedding rings at Sears and they're working just fine.

When I bought this laptop last year, I also bought a 64MB USB drive. For those of you who haven't seen one, a USB drive is a little gadget that plugs into your computer and lets you store and transfer files and programs. You used to need a floppy disk to carry files to and from your work and home computers, for example. Well, the drive that I got yesterday holds 16 times the stuff that my year-old USB drive holds and costs less. I paid just over $60 for a 1GB drive.

As one technology columnist often observes, the future of technology is coming at us so quickly that we can't afford to blink.

I used to visit my aunt and uncle in St. Albans, Vermont. St. Albans in the upper-left corner, on Lake Champlain, and one town from Canada. Up there I could watch the Red Sox games broadcast in French from Montréal. (The Expos hadn't come and gone yet.) One day I turned on the radio and found a station from Plattsburg, New York, across the lake. They broadcasting a baseball game, but it was the Yankees game and they were playing someone like Cleveland. I was shocked. It was as though I had picked up Radio Moscow. Did people really listen to baseball games where the Red Sox were not playing? Was it legal for stations to do only Yankees games? I've calmed down since then, but it still doesn't feel quite right.

As I stood in the check-out line at Wal-Mart this past weekend, I noticed that White Owl is selling flavored cigars. Grape. Peach. Chocolate. Mocho Mint. All of that is just so wrong at so many levels.

The hamster will see you now.

Let me see if I've got this right. Come to Me, ye who are weary and heavy-laden and making more than $25,000 a year.

According to a story on NPR, McDonald's is sending Ronald McDonald on an mission to try to encourage kids to exercise more. Ronald wasn't available for comment, so they went to the next best, Richard Simmons. About Ronald, Simmons said, "He stole my Afro!"