For Thursday, April 30, 1998 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 704 words

Intention deficit

Here's what I've been up to…

I watched Merlin on NBC. It had the best gag line I've heard in years. It came while King Arthur's mortally wounded evil son lay in his Auntie Mab's arms. She pleaded, "Mordrid, don't die."

Mordrid laughed and said, "Auntie Mab, dying is the last thing I intend to do." Then he died.

I laughed and laughed.

I read a good book lately. It's characters tended to die as well, though it wasn't funny dying; it was serious dying. Perhaps that's because the book is non-fiction. It's not a new book, either. Maybe you've read it.

It's called Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. It's the story of Chris McCandless, a young man who wanted badly to strip away all materialism and become one with Mother Earth. He changed his name after college in 1990. He gave away all his savings and drove around the western states. Then he abandoned his car and traveled on foot, hitchhiking and taking odd jobs. Each adventure seemed to toughen his survival skills. His last adventure was an April trek into the Alaskan wilderness with skimpy winter wear and a 25-lb bag of rice. He refused to take a compass or a map. He wanted an absolutely pure experience. Moose hunters found his decomposing body in August.

The glum irony -- after all Chris's fuss and feathers over having a pure experience, he spent his final months deep in the outback living and dying in an abandoned bus. That was the last thing he intended to do.

Other wanderers' stories were mixed into the narrative, making the book primarily about the wanderlust and derring-do of youth. The positive message, as an irony: it's a big, beautiful world out there, even if it kills you.

On a related note, I liked that book so well I ran out and bought Krakauer's new #1 bestseller Into Thin Air. It's another true story. This time the author climbs Mt. Everest with a professional tour group and 12 people die near the summit. Krakauer recreates the fateful trip and brings us along. Reaching the top of Mt. Everest was the one thing these people wanted to do. It was also the last.

Krakauer's writing is crisp and visual. The scenes unfold without tangents into figurative language and cheap motifs.

IMAX was filming their mega-million-dollar monster-screen movie Everest at the same time, though as a different group. IMAX donated oxygen bottles to the survivors. Good for IMAX.

This week, I paid the paperboy. He said he's quitting. That's the last thing I intended to hear out of him. To the new person, I will say what I always say: "If it's on the porch, I tip bigger."

I had intended to write more on Mexico this week. Then I figured, "Hey, why not show slides."

Actually, I started to write about removable storage drives. I figured other people's hard drives must be overflowing like mine. I'd muster some research and advice. I went on the Internet to scour and found over 22 models described.

So, I'm researching, when I come across a link to the Merlin website at NBC. That reminds me of Mordrid's dying gag line and I laugh and laugh. I feel I have to share it. So I open with it, figuring to somehow later segue into computer storage drives. Instead, I'm reminded of Krakauer's books. Oh, geez. I have to share these. They fit the surprised-by-dying theme.

By then the only segue to removable media was the truth. So here it is: my exciting storage advice: To share big files, consider the Zip; over 11,000,000 sold. To back up a hard drive, consider tape or a mirrored hard drive. To archive programs pick something cool, big, fast, and cheap. There are too many good ones to name. Consider Sony's new HiFD; it replaces your A drive, running both 1.4MB and 200MB disks. A CD writer is economical and excellent for sharing -- the 650MB blank disks are less that $2, and almost every computer has a CD player. It can also duplicate audio CDs. That's a big plus.

This is the last way I intended to end this column.