Exactly a year ago, close to 30 area students and faculty members were boarding a plane for Miami, the first leg of a trip to Spain.

The eight-hour-plus flight to Madrid was by far the longest trip most of them had made, and for some it was their first flight of any kind.

Sadly, dreams of making the trip an annual affair have been interrupted. Last year’s tour was conducted by members of the business and education schools. It involved travel within Spain and considerable coursework. Participants still talk of it longingly, some wishing there’d been an opportunity to take the trip again, or to persuade others to attempt it. Whether for lack of enrollment, a budget shortfall, lack of planning, or any number of reasons, there will be no return trip this year.

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It’s decision time. It’s a question of whether to attempt an expensive upgrade of my home computer system—at the urging of my three sons.

Any thought of acquiring new equipment makes one hark back to the days when a manual typewriter sufficed.

My I-Mac is a quantum leap from the Mac Plus model of the mid-eighties, which could hold as much as two megabytes. This was in the era when Bill Gates himself decreed that nobody would ever need more than two megabytes. Today’s personal computers hold dozens of gigabytes. How much is a gigabyte? Go ask your computer literate 14-year-old.

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    Sharon Vander Meer, the Optic’s genial general manager managed to gift the staff in the newsroom and composing room with new Macintosh computers.
    But before we bring out the champagne and dancing girls, let’s make it clear that we part-timers received only hand-me-downs. The handed-down computer beats the pre-Civil War version it replaces, but it still lacks the style, capacity and features of the new machines.

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    In about 1954, when gas sold for 30 cents a gallon and a pack of cigarettes went for a quarter, I was riding around with two friends named Fred, a Leroy, and a Paul.

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    About 12 years after the fact, a student ascribed to me an honor I would give my eye-teeth for. In introducing me to his parents, the then-30-ish young man told his parents, natives of Santa Rosa, that I had co-written “Bless Me, Ultima.”

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    When it became clear that a young reporter with the New York Times had fabricated stories, made up quotations and sources, heads started to roll. So great was the public’s interest in the downfall of reporter Jayson Blair that the story even made the cover of a national magazine. The Times, a powerful, 165-year-old paper, whose 200 reporters don’t know the meaning of “quit,” did a lot of face-saving. They simply used the phrase—anathema to them—which politicians have used for years: “no comment.”

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    Julian Vigil, an instructor in English at Luna Community College, said the other day, “You NEED proofreaders at the Optic.”

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     What may have started out as a game of “Let’s see what happens if. . .” could have had catastrophic consequences.

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