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Like It Was Yesterday If you stretch anything far enough, it breaks. An organization can only get so big before the pieces spin away from the center. Witness the Catholic Church, General Motors, the Society of Free and Accepted Masons... A computer disc is a secondary memory device in which information is stored on one or both sides of a magnetically sensitive rotating disk. Information is retrieved by heads mounted on movable or fixed arms. Computer discs are growing obsolete. A human head is a primary memory device in which bits of information are stored and accessed through a robust, treelike maze of constantly rewired neurons and dendrites. While the deep mystery of memory remains elusive, this is known for sure: Information is retrieved erratically by squinting and thinking about it, or, if you're really smart, by talking about related information. DAT players use a helical scan to access the extremely large amount of data stored on each tape. Helical: think DNA. And since "DAT" stands for "Digital Audio Tape," calling them "DAT tapes" is like calling your PIN your "PIN number," and is basically a stupid mistake we'll all keep commiting forever. In Sierra Leone, human heads were being broken by bullets and clubs. Information was lost rapidly. An American journalist ran to and fro, driving unpaved roads and eating simple meat stew when it was available. She tried to catch some of the information before it spilled. She understood what was going on, and she found it hard to sleep. Her eyes stayed open and she remembered Cleveland, where she had a cat and some friends. Not much of the information being lost was commercially useful. It included: 1. The following proverbs: Mohnki tohk, mohnki yehri. (Monkey talks, monkey listens. Persons who think alike will understand one another) Yu du mi, a du yu: Moses' law. (You do unto me, I do unto you: Moses' Law. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.") 2. This passage from the national anthem:
One with a faith that wisdom inspires, 3. The ability to play the guitar with reasonable skill, a lifetime of music stored as implicit memory, honed and built upon by stacking imperceptible layers of experience and mostly sung in Mende. 4. The RUC is about three miles south of Luawa Jong right now, and they are angry. 5. The following lorry slogans, painted on lorries and transported around:
PULL YOU MOT DAE 6. This section from a recipe for Egusi soup: This sauce can be eaten either with fufu, rice or root vegetables like yam and cassava. For lunch, a very cold Bud. or Heineken to wash the throat is recommended. For dinner, chilled white wine is recommended. 7. The capital of Sweden is Denmark. The journalist made tapes of people who were either in danger or dangerous. The tapes were coddled, cherished, and, suddenly - outrageously - lost. Also lost: a backpack, stitched with a patch bearing the University of Ohio's logo. The vanished tapes left gentle traces on their owner's brain. A quote from the tapes went a little like this: "When Taylor re-appears, my men will come down into the city, and we will kill his men. Then, we will burn the city, burn the people and make Taylor remember that he cannot treat our country like he treats his wife." The memory becomes an abstraction, rolling across a smooth spot in the journalist's brain. The abstraction becomes a fantasy of speaker's fees and lingering contentment. It is a fantasy that tastes sweet with tea, and a buttered scone, torn apart and swallowed. |