Last month, I received a call from Johnny Carson, a man for whom I was once privileged to work. There was no doubt that it was Johnny because as my iPhone trilled its canned, bluesy theme, the screen lit up with the contact photo I had once assigned him, a characteristic pose I found on a postcard in the Paley Center Gift Shop. He's at his Tonight Show desk, probably early 1980's, wide-lapelled, his forefinger pistol-pointing to his temple in mock suicide. A call from Mr. C was not an everyday event, and even more rare since his death seven years ago. As it turned out, the King of Late Night wasn't phoning from beyond with a riff on Mitt Romney's car elevator -- in fact, as you may have guessed, he wasn't calling at all. It was his nephew Jeff, who now runs the store at Carson productions, one of the phone numbers I'd long ago entered for his uncle.
Which brings me, name-droppingly, and in a roundabout way, to a habit I have -- if repeated inaction can be classified a habit -- of not deleting the dead. Nothing is as certain as death and taxes -- except on my iPhone 4S where the Reaper takes a permanent holiday.
For geeks everywhere today is the day we finally see the device we
have all been talking about for the last year. For the last week I’ve
seen prediction pools where you get 1 point for each correct answer.
Seven or ten inches? Verizon or ATT? Stylus or finger?
There are only certain places I can take her. She is sort of bulky;
she never orders anything. Nowhere too crowded, I wouldn’t feel right
taking up a booth with her. But at the same time, nowhere that doesn’t
have the possibility of running into someone more interesting, in case
I wanted to ditch her, or at least set her aside for awhile. Somewhere
with just enough scenic beauty to fill a background but not enough to
completely divert my attention from her. 
However, I guess even he has to be right some of the time and in the instance of his “insane” (my words) purchase of the video game ROCK BAND last November (2007) I would actually say he was a genius. If you haven’t heard of it you must not have teenagers or been living under a rock. We, like all of our friends’ kids, are completely addicted. In
fact, the upcoming release of 
has us almost as excited as we were about the iPhone. 
