Lazy Sunday

I'm feeling relaxed and lazy this Sunday so I thought I'd ditch the political writing and instead offer you a couple of alternative ways to waste spend your time.

For political junkies: Try fooling around with the presidential delegate calculator, courtesy of Forbes.com. Delegates already won by Obama and Clinton are built into the calculation, and the tool allows you to punch in the results you predict in outstanding primaries and caucuses to get revised delegate counts and a myriad of permutations. What combination of wins will propel your candidate (or the opponent) to victory in the delegate count?

For aging tech enthusiasts: Check out this detailed wiki of obsolete skills related to computers, electronics and other things that require some degree of technical acumen. You can edit the entries or add your own. How many obsolete practices can your overloaded, deteriorating brain remember? Be honest. For starters, I confess that I remember changing the ribbon on a typewriter, dialing a rotary phone and operating a ditto machine.

I also clearly remember the aroma of ditto ink permeating a classroom that had wooden floors and large windows that were opened and closed by a human using a long pole with a hook on the end. This same classroom of a certain era often had what was called a "cloak room" for hanging coats and jackets. Its door panels pulled down and had dusty blackboards on the classroom side. There was usually the sound of a pendulum clock ticking in the background. The library down the hall featured an index card catalogue to help you locate books and a microfiche for scanning old newspaper articles.

For dog lovers: That's Boz up top. He's my friend John's new black lab puppy, and a master at spending his own time and that of his "master's" romping and relaxing. He's a bit more than three months old and is reportedly exploring life on planet Earth with zest. When he's not napping.