I think anyone who really knows me well is aware that I'm a hopesless romantic. (By which I mean to say I am totally hopeless when it comes to romance.) I loathe Valentines Day and its forced conventions. I consider washing the dishes and cleaning the bathroom to be ultimate acts of affection and expect these deeds to be viewed in the same light as a quiet dinner for two or a weekend getaway. (The closest I've come to commitment is linking my homepage to hers.)

So in otherwise real life, I'm not all that sentimental. (More like semi-mental.) Anyway, buying an appropriate Valentine's gift for my sweety squeeze snookums honey bunny is pure agony.

The Web to the Wescue! Hey guys, find a repository of really mushy stuff on "One Thousand Valentine Poems Home Page." They claim this to be the largest collection of love poems on the internet. (Their home page has a disconcerting painting of a couple apparently about to suck face, so be forewarned.)

There are more sloppy sonnets here than you can stand to read. You could email her one every day from now until the14th. Heck, she might even get the impression that it's HER you care about and not that large-screen teevee at her place. Isn't the web great?

The thought of using the convenience of the Web to deal with this tiresome day, February 14th, is really tempting. I could send a card, flowers or chocolate by remote control. (Speaking of love, you gotta love that!)

Assistant Commissioner Arthur Gross of The internal Revenue Service, after ten months studying the IRS' computer systems has pronounced the whole thing a nightmare that should be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. The IRS isn't having much luck with their antiquated computer systems. Even after hundreds of millions of your dollars and mine were spent attempting to modernize the way our returns are processed, the various databases still don't "talk" to one another. Typcial. Even their much ballyhooed website was poorly designed for a high traffic (slow, clumsy . . . sound familiar?) and they've defaulted to a text-only version as a quick-fix.

The last thing I needed to see was file footage on the tube of an IRS office where an acre of typists were transposing all the figures I had paid my accountant to carefully enter into the tax form, into some antiquated terminal--sometimes multiple terminals, (up to nine different ones for one return sometimes.) Put yourself in their place. After you sat for eight hours a day, let's say for a couple of years, typing numbers from tax returns all day what do you think you're error rate would be? Do you think you'd even care? The IRS admits that 22% of the returns it processes it fowls up in one way or another. A main source of data scrambling is the human interaction. Filing your taxes electronically will solve enumerable problems in today's process. At least you won't have a bored typist jumbling your numbers by mistake.

A girl gets pregnant every twenty minutes in the state of Georgia. Most of them are unwed and poor. The odds aren't much better in the rest of the states. Our current "solution" is to pay them to do this. I read where some of these girls don't care who the father is, that having a baby is a self-esteem issue. How we sunk this low I have no idea. They are locking themselves and their child(ren) into a cycle of poverty from which they may never escape. And taxpayers are expected to play Uncle Sugar.

Now they're called, "Parenting Teens." We used to simply call them sluts. Why are we not requiring child support from the father (or the father's parents)? Why should society subsidize this madness?

The general line is that we need to provide more education to these misguided teens, and I think that's a crock. Research is showing that the kids who are having kids were well aware of the risk they were taking and took it anyway. Just like trying to discourage teen cigarettes smoking, we've pounded messages into kids' heads throughout their formative years to no avail. At the same time we've taken steps to remove any social stigma associated with unwed mothers and even put services in place that would encourage teen pregnancies and then we wonder why the numbers grow.

Now, if you're a teenaged girl in Decatur attending high school and you happen to give birth to a child, (kind of an extra credit project), that's perfectly okay--bring your infant to school with you and put it in the state-funded day care center while you study algebra and get ready for hockey practice. Meanwhile, 34 billion (BILLION) of yours and my tax dollars go to support these "families" every year. The way things are going you can expect that figure to increase.

Two of my guitar heroes are proving to be more prolific and popular in death than during their too-brief careers. Jimi Hendrix has a "new" record coming out. Recorded just before his tragic passing. Frank Zappa's projects completed in the final years of his life are continuing to emerge. Their music was as differenct as their lifestyles: Jimi partied himself to death; Mr. Zappa, (who was vehemently anti-drug) succumbed to prostate cancer.

Through a deal between the Hendrix family and MCA Records, Hendrix's "new" release, "The First Rays Of The Sun," will contain material already released but this will be the first time the songs appear in the form Hendrix originally envisioned. In addition to the CD, "First Rays of the Sun" is also being release on "heavy vinyl" for the needle freaks.

Back in 1977, Frank Zappa delivered a four disc, eight-sided collection to Warner Bros' Records en masse. He called it "Läther" (pronounced leather), The Warner Brothers executives decided a box set by Zappa had no commercial potential and released the masterwork in pieces much to the composer's dismay. I was lucky enough to live in the LA area when Zappa, in a show of defiance, appeared on FM radio inviting listeners to tape "Läther" in its entirety rather than buy the Warners' dismembered releases. "Läther" has finally arrived in its original form (plus bonus material) and is a monument to the incredible range Zappa's musical spectrum encompassed--everything from orchestral to comedy.

Finally we are getting audio versions of a "director's cut" from a couple of important artists. It's gratifying to see the families of these two musical greats acting as curators of important cultural libraries.

I got this new gig where I have to use a Windoze machine. As a Mac enthusiast for the past twelve years I wasn't looking forward to it. Five days in, I had heard the phrase, "It's just like a Mac!" way too many times. I know the Mac, I've worked with the Mac, Windoze 95 sir, is not like a Mac.

While I was being shown the "great features" of Windoze 95 I kept asking myself, "Haven't I been doing this for years?" Ten years? So it's Windoze in the morning and my Mac at night, and I keep hitting the 'control' key instead of the 'apple' key and I'm trying to close my Mac window hitting the resize button. My brain's hemispheres are at war. It looks like some of this stuff was switched around from right to left just because of Microsoft's embarrassment about aping Mac's interface so closely.

Anyway, I WILL say that if you judge a platform soley on speed and processing power, this Compaq thing they're making me use is beefy, quick, and solid. But I miss my spectacular Mac crashes. The unhappy faces; the deadly black screen; that warm adrenaline rush when you realize you might have screwed the pooch and all your files too. So you frantically start turning off extensions and pulling out boards and zapping PRAM and. . . HEY! she's back up! Yesss!! Macs' frailties are part of their charm. Just like an arcade game, they blow up, die, and with a little luck experience and calm, you can generally bring them back to life again. It builds a bond between man and machine: my Mac NEEDS me. Not so in the boring Windoze 95 world. The damn thing never crashes.

What's to love?