McHuston Booksellers

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Tag: used (Page 23 of 47)

An iCure for iSick iPads.

August 6, 2013 /

Somebody in my impressionable youth told me, “If you can’t fix it with a hammer, get a bigger hammer.” Amazingly enough, I’ve had that work for me on occasion.

Usually doesn’t have anything to do with delicate computer technology though. I’m not sure a bigger hammer would have brought my waterlogged cellphone back to life.

Imagine my surprise then, when I did a search on iPad troubleshooting. The symptoms? Where the screen should be displaying white, was a dull red. Not just backgrounds. The shades of white in photographs and other images were the wrong color too.

She admitted that she had dropped the iPad. It was kind of slippery, she said. It may have come out of her hands. Once.

This revelation is being shared – not as a public shaming for letting an iPad hit the ground – but as a tutorial on how the thing can be repaired.

With a hammer.

Actually, I didn’t take a hammer to it, but I probably would have if I’d had one handy. In this day and age, when we have trouble with something, the first thing we do is Google it. Which is exactly what I did.

Unbelievably, the search results brought up a string of conversations written by folks with the same glowing red iPad screens, all of whom admitted the tablet had been dropped. Not so unbelievably, many of them blamed the baby, a neighbor, or their mother-in-law.

Almost every posting was bragging about having repaired their iPad by:

SMACKING IT ON THE BACK.

I immediately had a mental image of a newborn iPad being readied for its journey into the great computer world and receiving that life-bringing Smack! Picked up the tablet and gave it a whack. Nothing. Whack. Nothing. Third whack. Nothing.

Back to YouTube. The image is of an actual video in which a successful computer repair person brought their sickly iPad back to health with a hammer. (If you can’t fix it with a hammer…) Picked up the iPad. No hammer at the ready, so I grabbed the salt shaker from the table. Tap. Tap. Double Tap. Nothing.

Back to YouTube. After rereading those really happy people who revived their beloved tablets with the Smack-Method, I thought I’d give it another try.

Baby slaps. SMACK.

Red gone. Color correct.

iPad: Back in business.

The moral here?

It would follow the lines of that bigger hammer thing, but would include some newborn slaps and a salt shaker – which sound kinda like a bad science fiction movie plot.

Always happy when things work out, however crazily!

Come visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main Street, Broken Arrow OK!

Music. Soothing the savage beast and all that.

August 3, 2013 /

Music.

It’s always amazing to me how our brains link things together. Since I have only the one brain, I can’t say whether my experiences are unique or universal. Things like tasting a particular food and immediately conjuring a memory.

Things like – hearing crooner Dean Martin’s voice soaring from the shop’s speakers and immediately thinking of my Dad, the biggest Dean Martin fan I have ever known. I’m guessing that – because he had it on the television and I was intrigued enough to watch with him, I remember segments like Crazy Gugenheim and Foster Brooks, the (now politically-and-socially-incorrect) lovable drunk who could not get out a complete sentence without a hiccup.

Now, I just have to hear Dean Martin singing and I can remember my Dad in his big green easy chair, watching the TV program.

Foster Brooks, the lovable drunk, lived to the age of 89. Singer and actor Dean Martin was 78 when the curtain dropped down. My father had just pushed 50.

So, I hear his music and think of him. Because we never had that time together as adults. Never spoke together as men. Always – dad and kid son.

I grew up, but he never grew old.

And that darned brain. Connects us like a time machine to other places and times with – whatever – as that fragile thread hanging tough against the winds of time.

Just now, I passed through the shop office, where the television was in action for no one (got to justify my cable bill, you know…) and KOTV was running their (probably obligatory) program about Oklahoma. Lawton, was said and I turned around and saw my childhood neighbor Tony, an award-winning photographer, now working in front of the camera as well. They were visiting Wayne’s Drive Inn, in Lawton.

Bam!

Immediately after seeing an image of the place, I was mentally hearing Roxanne, by The Police. You know it, probably. Roxanne. Roxanne. You don’t have to turn on your red light.

You don’t have to wear that dress tonight.

It was the first hit for Gordon Sumner, the Englishman in New York who called himself Sting.

When I heard the song on the car radio, I was waiting for a to-go order for Alicia, me, and soon-to-be born Dustin at that Lawton OK drive in. We lived off Cache Road. Just visited Wayne’s the one time, but it had nothing to do with the food. I recall a great burger, but our family’s time in Lawton – at that point – had just about played itself out.

Crazy brain stuff. See a Lawton, Oklahoma burger joint and immediately flash to a memory of Sting and Roxanne and my wife and baby boy. And just moments after enjoying a dose of Dean and the vivid recollection of my long-dead father. In truth, these three generations have music as a common thread.

Maybe there is some DNA thing about things like that. Father, son, grandson – have all performed before audiences. My great-grandfather Caleb had a musical program in San Francisco in the early days of radio. Hit a couple of notes of just about any song and I can quickly dish up a memory of a place, time, or experience.

Too bad the genetics didn’t come down from a silversmith, athlete, politician, or conman: some DNA that would have made for an easier living. Family. Gotta love ‘em anyway.

We’re like family here! Come visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main Street, Broken Arrow, OK!

Forty years? Can’t be that long ago…

July 29, 2013 /

It may have been the approaching anniversary date that prompted it, but a week or so ago, the Tulsa newspaper This Land published a first person account of a prison riot. If you’d told me it happened forty-years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.

You: It happened forty years ago.

Me: What? I don’t believe you!

And there you have it. I told you I wouldn’t believe it if you told me. That’s because parts of it seem like yesterday.

The Tulsa World published a book of front pages some years ago, and a copy of it just came in this afternoon. I was thumbing through it and Bam! There is the front page from July 28, 1973.

STATE PRISON INMATES SEIZE GUARDS, reads the headline, SET BUILDINGS AFIRE.

Here’s what I knew then: Not much.

Here’s what I found out later: It could have been a scary deal. Sure, it was scary enough for a lot of people back then, but I was just out of high school, living in a little cracker-box rent house with my buddy Faron Kirk.

There was smoke pouring out of one of the buildings, and rumors pouring out of most mouths in McAlester. Remember, a lot of folks had jobs at the prison, or had family members or friends working there. It was big news. Really big.

We wanted a better look, so Faron Dean and I climbed up on the roof of the house for the bird’s eye view. It wouldn’t have mattered much if we’d had the dog’s eye view: there was nothing in between the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and our little frame abode.

While we were up-top sightseeing, a highway patrol car rolled up and the trooper put it into park and opened up his door. He rose up from his seat just enough to holler at us over the window frame.

“Could get dangerous out here,” he called out. “You boys need to get home.”

“We ARE home,” we called back, from the rooftop.

“Then you need to get to someone else’s home,” he answered, in an official tone.

We thanked him, and after he drove off, Faron and I took a vote amongst ourselves and decided we’d stay right there, mostly since we were young and foolish. Didn’t want to miss anything.

The Tulsa World page says the riot was started by “five white inmates ‘who were doped up on something.” They were quoting prison spokesman John Graham.

In truth, even from our front row seat, there wasn’t a lot of action visible to us. The morning paper rattled us, though. I recall reading this (also on the front page of the World):

At one point, some two dozen Highway Patrol troopers doubletimed toward the prison’s east gate, where an estimated 50 to 100 inmates were attempting to crash through to freedom.

Oops. That’s the gate that was nearest our rent-house. Probably one of those doubletiming troopers had been the one who warned us we ought to skedaddle.

When we finished reading the newspaper account of what had happened just across the way from us (the only way we could learn anything), the store owner put us to work in the meat market. We had an assembly line working back there, digging into loaves of Holsum Bread, lining up the slices to be slapped with mustard, a slice of bologna, a slice of cheese, closed up and stuffed into a sandwich bag.

We did that for hours. I don’t know how many people we were feeding, or which side of the wall they were on. I assumed all the sandwiches, potato chips, and such were going to law enforcement and prison workers. It wasn’t so important to me then. Those were about the most exciting bologna and cheese sandwiches I ever made, though.

It seemed calmer Saturday evening after work. We didn’t bother getting up on the roof. In front of the door was a little square of concrete that was too small to call a porch, but we were sitting on it like it was one. Dusk was drawing near. One of those hot July evenings that only get comfortable when the sun finally drops out of sight.

About then, when the sky to the east had already gone dark, and a quiet had settled over the prison and its activities, there came a lone voice. A man’s voice. Could have been a guard in a tower, could have been an inmate in the prison yard beyond the chain link.

Summertime, he sang out. Nice voice, really. Acappella. Right on tune.

“Summertime,” he sang, “and the living is easy.”

So many summers ago, but I still get the eerie-chills when I remember the way that song carried over the walls as the last of the sun slipped away. Back when the living was easy.

Come visit! (No singing required.)

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main Street, Broken Arrow, OK

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