Friday, February 08, 2008

Poll Results

Larry's Latest Poll is completed. The question was: How Do You Hold Your Pen? The possible answers were:
  • Between index & third fingers
  • Between third & fourth fingers
  • In my fist like a stabbing knife
  • What's a pen?
The results were overwhelmingly (76%) in favour of the first choice, just as I suspected. 7% chose each of the next three. Now, if you add that up, it's 76% + 21% which, in my simple arithmetical head = 97%.

Maybe this should be the next poll question: What happened to the other 3%?

Maybe they abstained? Maybe they chose "None of the Above"? Maybe they voted in some other poll? It's a mystery to me.

Digg! diigo it

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe they are illiterate? Maybe they do not write? Maybe they have no functioning hands? Maybe they write with their toes? Or their mouth?

Afterall exceptions confirm the rule.

Larry Keiler said...

Maybe they joined the Hell's Angels...

Anonymous said...

Or maybe they stepped off the world and are watching us go by. Using mental telepathy. Who needs fingers? Talking about writing. A friend of mine went to live somewhere in nowhere. She sent me some of her experiencings in writing, a collection she wants to call "Modern Day Homesteading". I want to see if I can fit part of it in here.
****

PENCILS & ELECTRICAL GRIDS

My toes are cold this morning. I’ll stick them in the oven as my good old cook stove - Betty’s her name - heats up. Twice now my pen’s quit writing. I thought myself smart and stuck it in the oven to warm, and at first it did write better ... and then quit on me again. Sou enough with the ornery pen; a good old fashioned pencil won’t give me that kind of attitude. Well, not so old fashioned. I don’t suppose my grandmother used a mechanical pencil like the one I’ve reached for. I prefer the reliably fine tip over the real old fashioned models that slowly get dull and require a whole other machine to keep sharp.

Day 2, I reach for my good old new-fashioned pencil. It’s in my coat pocket because I had it out with me yesterday. Only somehow the tip’s come unscrewed and is missing. It doesn’t take me long to find it and re-install it, but long enough to get me thinking ... about modern day inventions and conveniences.

It seems clear enough that new ideas and inventions get put to popular use when they look to make life more efficient, convenient and/or comfortable. What we don’t give much thought to is the pickle they leave us in when they fail.

The pickle I might have been left in when I found my pencil missing a critical component might well be trivial. But what about the pickle that thousands found themselves in 10 years ago in eastern Ontario and Quebec during those days of the great ice storm. A few people died. And many more were in a panic when their homes were without electricity for more than a week. The premier of Quebec declared it a state of emergency and the military were called in to help.

In the summer of ____, when the power went out across much of Ontario, into Quebec and the eastern US, it was described as an ‘emergency’ and a ‘crisis’ situation. A few people died then too, in the height of summer.

Now sit back and consider this: is that not just a little interesting to you. Communities that were plunged into the dark, into a ‘state of emergency’ were, from a different perspective, plunged into the state of regular life of our grandparents, or great-grandparents, but a couple or three generations ago in our families.
It’s surely had me wondering who, in a survival of the fittest showdown, between my grandmother and me, would be the likeliest to survive hard times. Whose community would fare better?
It’s also had me asking myself whether it really makes sense to have whole communities, indeed almost our entire nation ... and continent so almost completely - and vulnerably reliant on modern day technology?

It’s not that I’m growing to love gloating ... but days went by once before a neighbour reported that our entire neighbourhood had been without power for hours one day. Ahhhh .... not just the joys, but the convenience of old fashioned homesteading.

I haven't asked her between which fingers she hold her pencil.

Help! I've written and I can't get up!