The wonderful world of e-mail - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced their special awards to be presented at the Oscars this year. On Wednesday, it was announced that the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award will be given to Dino De Laurentiis. The Thalberg, which was given to Warren Beatty last year, is given to, “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” De Laurentiis joins producers like Steven Spielberg, Albert Broccoli, Darryl F. Zannuck, Clint Eastwood, Saul Zaentz and Lawrence Weingarten among others, for his work in producing such films as La Strada and Nights of Cabria (with Fellini), Serpico, Death Wish, Blue Velvet, King Kong and the upcoming Hannibal.
The Honorary Oscar, which has been awarded to people like Akira Kurosawa, Elia Kazan, Barbara Stanwyck, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Michelangelo Antonioni, Kirk Douglas among others, is given to an individual whose career represents, “exceptional distinction in the making of motion pictures or for outstanding service to the Academy.” Announced yesterday, the recipient is Ernest Lehman. Mr. Lehman has received 6 Oscar nominations for scripting Sabrina, North By Northwest, West Side Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He was also nominated for producing Virginia Woolf and Hello, Dolly!
VANCOUVER -- Certainly the moon landing in 1969 would be considered a modern triumph of technology. The automobile, television and sliced bread join that list as well. The entire galaxy of the world wide web -- the Internet -- is applicable, as is the focus of today’s rant, e-mail. It truly is a wonder and the precise personification needed that we do live in the Information age.
I’ve used e-mail for a couple of years now. It’s both a delight and a marvel, truly when one thought of the tid-bit that it was ‘instant.’ (To rain on my parade ever so briefly, it isn’t that ‘instant’ for me. The program I use to send and intercept e-mail messages is Microsoft’s infamous Outlook Express. Provided by my Internet-service provider, I use it. Once composed, my e-mail sits in my outbox until the program kicks in and sends and receives. One can, through fiddling with the settings set the intervals to which the program checks your account. For me, I set it at two minutes. I guess my rational for that is that if it is ‘instant,’ two minutes is as close as I get. Technophobe am I.)
E-mail has afforded me a lot of things. I am able to fill up account up with daily e-mails from CNN and the New York Times for news, The Hollywood Reporter and TV Guide for the latest show biz stuff and the White House press office for press releases and other junk. Actually the White House press office is a useful tool. I logged on to their website < www.whitehouse.org > and followed the links to their press area. There one can have all kinds of litter forwarded to their account daily. I get to read Jake Siewert’s press briefings, as some schmuck transcribes the whole thing.
The other day, with my Outlook Express was open, I decided to clean up the folders. Actually, until very recently I received and stored all my e-mail in and only my inbox. Until I discovered the use in sorting e-mails as they arrive, I disposed much e-mail. I don’t think I’m Irish, but I’m hardpressed in throwing away anything. Ditto with e-mail. Thank goodness I don’t use a Yahoo or Hotmail account, as I’ve had probably passed my disk limit many times over. I keep practically everything. Most, if not all outgoing messages I compose, I have stored in my outbox. I also keep all my news letters from The Hollywood Reporter, as well as e-mails from the good people at TV Guide. That’s about a thousand e-mails right there. The White House folder, at last check, clocks 1000+ messages, and that’s just the last year of the Clinton administration!
I guess it is the fact we live in the information age. For me, I find it more practical to go into my White House folder for a quote from the President, rather than surfing the White House site. Also, if I have to check an item that TV Guide reported on two months ago, it is practical for me to check the TV Guide e-mails I keep rather than going onto Mr. Showbiz or any database on < ew.com >. Also, if I need a tid-bit checked out at the Television Academy, one merely fires off an e-mail and in a day or two you’ve got info that would have taken you a couple of days to find at the public library or not at all.
Another thing that e-mail is good for is the fact in my situation I’ve been able to get in contact with some pretty heady people. Strapped for sources for a paper I was co-writing a couple years ago, I sent out a generic e-mail to politicians and press people and soon enough answers were flooding my e-mail. It’s cool to think your high school project is quoting from some of your country’s top politicians and journalists.
Managing one’s account has also proven difficult. I keep a Yahoo! account that I use for emergencies like if I would ever be out of town. Anyways, I receive mail there and once I’ve read messages I merely delete, as most do. However with Outlook Express I find the use of folders as carte blanche for keeping messages. I hate deleting. I guess it’s this insane feeling that I have, that if I do delete a certain message I’ll regret it someday. Doing so however has grave implications, namely on my hard drive. The old thing probably is slow because of the couple thousand e-mails I keep stored. Again, I reiterate my technophobe status. What were we to do without e-mail? I sincerely wonder. It’s amazing the magnitude one can become informed and how one can actually risk their life.
A couple of months back I discovered that my Yahoo! account, which I use when not home, has the ability to check my home account. With the server’s name and my account password inputted to Yahoo!, soon enough I was reading e-mail I thought only readable at home. Anyways the other day at school I logged onto < yahoo.com > however the server must have been down, so I decided to go into Hotmail. I inputted the same info and managed to download the messages from home, however I did not check the stupid box that said to leave the messages on my server. Thus I looked at those messages, read the subject and from lines and deleted them, thinking that when I got home I’d read them in full detail. However they were gone. All the messages sent me that day were gone and I actually felt sick to my stomach. When I got home and opened my account I got no e-mail as when I downloaded them at school and deleted them, they were taken off my account’s server, thus forever gone. Information is vital, and truly the magic of e-mail hit me hard that day. E-mail is wonderful, all right.
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