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This morning I stumbled upon an old Newsweek column from 1995 in which the author went into great detail explaining why the Internet would turn out to be a colossal failure. It’s quite an interesting read (especially if you’re in need of a good laugh). How could a seasoned “journalist” make such a bone-headed prediction?

To be fair, the Internet as we know it today was still in its infancy back then, and it would have indeed been hard to predict  just how ubiquitous and flexible the medium would eventually become. But still,… Well, you probably need to just click here and read the column yourself.

I guess the moral of this story is be careful what you write and predict, because if you’re wrong it’ll be around to haunt you until the rivers all run dry thanks to the overwhelming success of the Internet. A bit ironic, don’t you think?

The Internet has altered many aspects of our American lives in recent years, and now it appears that big changes are on the horizon at the Post Office because of it. The U.S. Postal Service has just asked Congress for permission to stop delivering mail on Saturdays, and few expect the reduction in the services they provide to stop there.

For decades the post office served as a hub for correspondence and package delivery in virtually every neighborhood in America, and for much of that time they were a de facto monopoly in regards to those services. But the rise of UPS and FedEx in recent years cut drastically into their package delivery business, leaving them more or less relegated to delivering the mail. And then along came the World Wide Web…

The proliferation of email, instant messaging and online bill payment have cut deep into the Postal Service’s core business of “snail mail” delivery, resulting in staggering losses that the American taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill for. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see many of America’s small rural post offices eventually shut down and mail delivery nationwide cut even further (perhaps back to just 3 or 4 days per week).  Such a move would potentially allow the Postal Service to continue serving virtually every household in the country while cutting their workforce by a huge margin.

The last couple of decades have brought changes to our American way of life that few of us could have even imagined just 30 years ago. Some of those changes were for the better, but some were not. And I predict that we’re going to see a lot more changes in the decades to come.

Most Americans used to go to great lengths to protect their privacy, and some of us still do. But even as they maintain unpublished numbers on their landlines and keep their names off their mailboxes, many folks nowadays willingly give up their precious privacy in other ways without even giving it a second thought.

Take a walk through the mall or most any other public place and you’ll see numerous people talking away on their cell phones, often at full volume. What’s more, the topics often discussed would have been carefully confined to a private one-on-one conversation just a few years ago. For example, while walking through Wal-Mart a few days ago I overheard a man telling the person on the other end of the line (as well as me and about 20 other bystanders) that he wouldn’t be coming to work the following day because he had to go to court to face a DUI charge. Like we all needed to know that.

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The last round of heavy snow that hit our area was preceded by some pretty stiff winds, but the damage they caused were quickly covered under several inches of the white stuff. Now that the snow has melted, the aftermath of the strong winds is absolutely covering our back yard.

Much to our chagrin, hundreds of broken branches have fallen from our large sycamore trees, and of course they are scattered over a huge section of our lawn. Every spring we find ourselves picking up broken sycamore branches for at least a couple of hours before the first mowing, but this year it will probably take at least a couple of days. Sometimes I wish our beautiful sycamores were mighty oaks instead!

Those massive sycamore trees with their beautiful and intriguing bark were a major factor in our decision to purchase this place instead of one of the others we looked at, and I wouldn’t get rid of them for anything. But it sure would be nice if they would stop shedding so much.