Guest Commentary
The beast 666 computer
Mack Hall

In the 1970s there were many whispered rumors about The Beast 666 Computer that Satan was supposedly constructing in Belgium. Our social security numbers were the Mark of the Beast (I used to date her, by the way), and these would be fed into the 666 Computer and then fluoridated or something, and then Satan would rule the world, mwahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa!

The founders of this rumor went on to invent Y2K, and urged us all to buy drums of water and sacks of dried peas because when the End Times come and Captain Kirk beams us up to his space ship as the planet explodes we'll all need drums of water and sacks of dried peas.

We now know that the whole bit about Satan and his magic laptop was always quite impossible, since within minutes of its completion the computer would have whimsically shut down and refused to do anything but light up.

Satan would have had to call out a Volkswagen-driving 30-something with thick glasses at $60 an hour to sneer at Satan's outdated hard-drive ("this is sooooooooo last week") and his dial-up connection.

Satan would also have learned that all the dossiers saved on his previous (hardly old) computer in Micro-Blop X-PMS are not compatible with the newer-thannew Micro-Snort Z-Xtreem bundled into his new computer, and would have to sacrifice his first-born, Vladimir Putin, to the computer gods to pay for a patch, which would take three hours to work through each time he wanted to look at, say, his MeMeMeSpace downloads.

Imagine if you will, buying a new bookshelf, and as you transfer those favorite volumes from the old shelf to the new shelf your books simply disappear.

Imagine if you will, transferring file folders from an old cabinet to a new, and they simply won't fit into either file cabinet.

Imagine if you will, writing a letter to a friend, and the old pen won't work and the new pen comes with a lengthy instruction manual and then won't work anyway.

Imagine if you will, mailing a letter to a friend, and finding that the postal service no longer accepts envelopes but instead requires a complex new packaging and you must spend a day at a seminar learning this new method.

Yes, I bought a new computer this week. Satan's in the computer business, all right. Mack Hall is a resident of Kirbyville