Earplugs might help

Tuesday finds me once again sitting with my laptop (this is how John and I "spend time together" these days, and it's very nice) at another of our local coffeeshop hotspots. They've got great banana bread here at Has Beans, but the eavesdropping might just kill me.

One of the fellows behind me was asking his friend if it would work to take pictures of things he was looking at on his laptop with his cell phone so that he would have a copy of them. The friend was all for it, even telling him he could then send the pictures from his cell to his email and then he'd have copies on his laptop. Ever heard of right clicking and saving to your laptop? I'm assuming, of course, that the cellphone even has a camera.

In between coming up with cutting edge IT solutions, they've been discussing "moral values". This includes, apparently, dressing up before you leave your house. "Like, in Sacramento, where there are 2.5 million people, everyone dresses up. Have you been there lately? It's not like here." Huh? Another winner: "I've been convinced that the Bible is a great guide to living since my father left me and my mother when I was a little kid." Care to explain that one?

And awful as all of this is, the women to my left are far worse. They are not only misquoting Napoleon Dynamite, they really did not get the movie. Somehow the fellows behind me get pulled into that conversation, and since neither has seen the movie, one very loud woman explains: "It's set in rural Idaho in like the 80s--you'd totally dig the moonboots and the haircuts and the shirts with pictures of unicorns--I watch it all the time." Oh, then how did you miss the part about chatting online with hot chicks? There wasn't too much of that going on in the 80s.

My ears, my ears!