ZGram - 3/3/2002 - "To shoot or not shoot the pony"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

-- 
Copyright 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - 3/3/2002

Where Truth is Destiny

Good Morning from the Zundelsite

It looks like I am back, albeit a bit shakily.  My computer nightmare 
is far from over, but with the help of a few volunteers who dropped 
in and strenuous coaching via telephone, at least I am able to read 
my e-mail and will now attempt to send out this Zgram.

Don't expect me to answer your messages soon if ever - it is too 
complicated to explain what happened and what are the stumbling 
blocks.  The consensus verdict is that a virus infected various 
computers *at the same time* - although I cannot imagine how that 
could have happened since they are not interconnected and I did not 
swap any disks.

Here is a simlified description of what went on this past week, as 
detailed in Ernst Zundel's February 2002 "Power Letter", his 
communication vehicle with his long-time supporters:

[START EXCERPT]

We have a serious emergency on our hands.  We have computer problems 
- big time!  For a while we limped along, more or less from incident 
to incident.  Things went from bad to worse.  We could not get a 
handle on our electronic woes.  Computer crashes followed more 
frequent and more scary crashes - till finally all went dead!

	All our volunteer friends, whom we contacted, could only 
temporarily raise that faithful helper in our office to anything more 
than a few moments of gasping life - only to collapse again before 
our very eyes.  Watching these efforts,  I remembered a wartime story 
my father once told me.

	It happened during the great retreat of the German Army from 
Stalingrad in that hellish, blizzard-covered Russian steppe.  Both 
men and beasts were overworked, fatigued beyond their endurance when 
one late afternoon my father, who was a medic on Germany's fabled 
ambulance trains which picked up the seriously wounded and maimed 
from the retreating front to take them home to hospitals in the Black 
Forest, Bavaria and elsewhere, found a group of battle-hardened 
soldiers, all bundled up in thick, woollen scarves, straw  covering 
their felt boots, all shivering, all hovering and huddling over 
something lying on the ground, talking to "it" lovingly, coaxing it 
to get up, to try one more time.

	My father naturally assumed it was a couple of wounded, mud- 
and snow-covered soldiers who had collapsed and given up.  It 
happened all the time.  Being a medic, he knew it was his job to give 
First Aid even in desperate cases, and so he commanded the soldiers 
to let him through.  They objected, jostled, but eventually made way.

	What he saw, astonished him.  It was one of those unkempt, 
wiry little Russian ponies which had collapsed in a puddle of icy mud 
and slushy snow.  Jointly, the German soldiers - Landsers, we called 
them - tried to pull it up, tried to unburden it from its load of 
gear with their own frozen fingers.  They pushed it and shoved it and 
coaxed it - but nothing could move that animal.  Finally one of the 
Landsers could not bear the suffering of that loyal helper they had 
gotten used to in their desperate, painful retreat.  He undid his 
pistol - and, tears streaming down his stubbled face, shot it in the 
head to put it out of its pain.  The whole group turned away their 
faces to hide their unmanly emotions.

	That story has haunted me for the last 52 years!

	Strange why it would come into my mind while Ingrid tried to 
revive her trusty old friend of many years.  She tried this, she 
tried that - intermittently calming and composing herself with yet 
another cup of coffee.  She finally confessed that buried deep within 
the electronic innards of her loyal Mac were all of her books, almost 
seven years' worth of her ZGrams, her letters, my newsletters and 
correspondence and many, many of my trial transcripts, along with 
well over 4,000 documents that made up the Zundelsite - in other 
words, we were not dealing with an old computer but a friend of long 
duration.  Heck, to me it felt almost like having had a death in our 
family!  Our electronic pony seems to have expired!

	We could not find help  so far, locally.  I put out an SOS to 
computer magazines and computer outfits as far away as Louisiana, New 
York and even Los Angeles.  Ingrid contacted her youngest son, who is 
a computer professional, with the idea of airlifting him from 
California to Tennessee to rescue our "pony" - but it turned out he 
was not yet able to fly because of a recent operation.  So "it" still 
sits there, while poor Ingrid types out her newsletters on a 
makeshift program tauntingly called "SimpleText" - easy for you to 
say! - while I do the rest with scalpel and gluestick to hopefully 
get this newsletter to you, albeit late!

[END EXCERPT]

We haven't yet shot *my* pony - there is just too much information I 
would like to retrieve if I can.  But I just want you to know that 
this morning at 4 A.M. I was able to read some of my voluminous 
e-mail for the first time, and that today I feel a whole lot better 
than I did yesterday.

Hang in there!  We're mosying along!

Ingrid

=====

Thought for the Day:

"I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall 
down.  You might think we would lie there and rest awhile."

(Max Eastman)