When it rains… (I get wet)

This hasn’t been the best of weeks in recent memory, cartooners.  I was doing a few chores on my desktop computer Monday afternoon when the fershlugginer thing decided it had had enough and whipped out the Dreaded Blue Screen of Death.  I waited until it finished its snit and rebooted…only it wouldn’t reboot.

I shut it down, and later that evening (much later—we’re talking after midnight) I turned it back on to see if it had worked out its issues…and though it seemed to perform much more slowly than it had previously, it eventually returned to the land of the living.  Its visit here, however, was brief; it froze up again that afternoon (dispensing with the Blue Screen) and from that moment on, anytime I tried to resurrect it the computer flatly refused to cooperate.  I tried two resets…nothing.  I ran a series of diagnostic tests, and when it received a failing grade on the hard disk portion of the exam I started getting that pit-of-my-stomach feeling that this was not good.  Against my better judgment, I decided to restore it to its original factory settings (I would have backed up my files, but I couldn’t even get past the “willkommen” login) and danced a gleeful jig when that seemed to do the trick.  My celebratory dance came to a screeching halt when I got an error message that read: “Just between you, me, and the printer, my friend—your hard disk needs repaired or replaced.”

Not the kind of confession that I need at this point in life, by the way…but I will swallow hard and take it in to the computer doctor by the end of this week.  If you were asking yourself by now—“Does this mean that silent movie you were going to review won’t be up today?” the answer is “Affirmative.”  And since the Crime Does Not Pay series that I do each week in this space on Fridays relies heavily on screen grabs…there’ll be a delay in that, too.

However—I am working on some items that will not require the participation of my desktop assistant, and I’ll roll those out next week.  Until that time, be excellent to one another.