Reality bites; It could be over in a few moments

In an incident worthy of "Six Feet Under," a elderly woman died of dog bites in a rural county not far from Austin.

On Saturday afternoon, Lillian Stiles was doing what she loved, tending her yard and flowers from atop her riding lawn mower. About 4:15 p.m., she would be found fatally mauled by a pack of dogs.

Stiles, 76, was found lying in her front yard at her home near Thorndale with bites all over her body. She had been attacked by six pit bull-Rottweiler mixed-breed dogs owned by a man living less than 500 yards away.

Just like that, while her husband of more than 50 years watched the Oklahoma game in the house, Lillian was gone. "I'm going out to mow," she might have said. She often did this while he watched football. She loved tending to her yard, according to the extraordinary report in the American Statesman:

http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/11/28dogs.html

We have so little prepared in our hearts for death, at least compared to other cultures. Savor every minute, even the ones that seem less than attractive. Live for the present. It could all be past as quickly as a handful of dogs can climb over a three-foot chain-link fence.

Why read blogs, if editors don't read mail?

It's a crowded blogosphere out there, so I am grateful for anybody who's reading more than I do — and willing to report it. An entry in the local newspaper's blog made me wonder about this contract we have as blog readers. At least it seems like a contract, when a paper pays editors and reporters to, well, report.

Last week the American Statesman ran such a blog entry from its "Digital Savant." By way of comedy, or maybe frustration, he posted an entry about "Yawn-Worthy Tech Words" that says his finger moves to the delete button when any of the following words appear in his in-box e-mail:

MMORPG
Tech-savvy
Proprietary
Security-enhanced
Solution
Wireless
Hotspot
Must-have technology
Functionality
iPod-compatible
Anything to do with awards for blogging
Mobile
Storage
Microsoft

Wow. Unless it was an attempt at comedy, some of those words are actually important — if you want to know something about a tech product's capabilities. As someone who said he was an iPod user, how can he decide if a new accessory is something that works with that device he joked was "surgically attached to my hand?" While looking for a new laptop, I wanted to know "how do you determine what you might buy if you're immediately deleting everything with "wireless" in it?"

My Mac's dictionary widget reports that the antonym of savant is 'ignoramus.' The approach of deleting as editing makes me wonder how an editor gets to savant status. The word savant, from the French, means literally ‘knowing (person).'

I sat across from an IDG tech editor at a media dinner last month who admitted he had his knowing radar turned way down. "Face it," he said. "If I have a chance to cover this release from IBM, and one from this tiny little company, which is going to be more important?" A quest for knowing is why we're reading blogs. I think it means the editors are supposed to be reading for us — at least before they're so quick to delete.

To his credit, Omar Gallaga replied right away:

They keep forgetting to add the "(Idiot)" to my "Digital Savant" title.

There really is a problem of volume, though. If you saw all the press releases that I see in a day (not including the ones directly related to my main job at ¡ahora sí!), you'd see that some sort of filtering has to take place or I'd spend 80 percent of time wading through e-mails that have little to no use to anything we'd likely cover.

My point in the post wasn't that deleting e-mails is better than reading them -- it was that subject lines tend to blur together and there are some words that pop up again and again, even when they have little relevance to what's actually in the press release. You don't know how many times I've received an e-mail with a subject line that says "Must-have technology!" only to open the message and see that it's for a Budweiser koozie or a subscription-based service for Internet porn.

Truly, we live in amazing times.