The Coronation

My youngest sister likes the Internet. And when I say "the Internet," I mean "Facebook." And when I say "likes," I mean "cannot live without."

The only thing, really, that's been holding her back from slaying Mark Zuckerberg and assuming her rightful place as ruler of his - her - company, has been the family computer.

It's not terrible. I don't want to overstate the case. It doesn't have a mini-fridge-monitor with a Game Gear screen. It doesn't sound like a microwave when you turn it on. It doesn't erase random files every few weeks or so, just for kicks. That was the old family computer.

The current one is just blah. It's a three-year-old Dell that's kinda clunky and kinda slow and kinda ugly. It gets the job done, if the job is sending an email or typing a paper or playing solitaire.

It does not - repeat, does not - get the job done, however, if the job is chatting with eighteen people at the same time while examining several hundred photos from last week's "Tacky Tea Party" while pretending not to be scoping out potential homecoming dates while dispensing an impossibly frenetic stream of posts and tags and pokes and shares and status updates.

A few days ago, I finally grasped the injustice of the situation.

No one would ask Usain Bolt to race in a pair of hand-me-down work boots. Or Alicia Keys to play a concert with a garage sale keyboard. Luminous talents deserve illuminating equipment.

I placed a call to the Butler, who's been operating as a sort of estate administrator / short-term storage manager the last several months, as all of my earthy possessions are currently stashed at his place in Minnesota.

With my own personal computing needs more than met, and with my dear, dear friend thus surplus to requirements, the resolution seemed clear enough.

It arrived via UPS this morning, and the transplant was made early this afternoon, while the little prodigy was still loathing her way through the school day. When she finally returned home, and caught a glimpse of its giant, glossy magnificence, and mentally calculated how many (dozens) of chat windows it would fit, in parallel, at the same time, she fainted dead away.

In the fifteen minutes that passed before her glorious visions of the future jolted her back to consciousness, I was able to frantically create and apply the following (tiled) desktop background.

The King is dead. Long live the Queen.