Hadda get a new cell phone

Lost my second TracFone cellular last week, so I had to get a new one. Luckily, though I hate having to patronize such a politically-incorrect retailer, the Wal-Mart near where I work had TracFone's newest base-level offering, the Motorola C139. (And for just $19.97, even less than the already-dirt-cheap MSRP -- and less than half what I paid for the old one.) PricewaterhouseCoopers' TelecomDirect News reviews the unit here:

 "It may be hard to believe in this era of handsets with cameras, media players, instant messaging apps, e-mail clients, Web browsers, Bluetooth and GPS that all some people want in a cell phone is... a cell phone."

All I have to add is, "Well, DUH!!!" Kudos to Moto for being the first(?) cellphone maker to realize that some of us haven't the need, desire, time or $$$ for a phone with Swiss-army-knife capability and VCR-level complexity. I just want to talk on the damn thing, not take pictures, play music, text-message people, send e-mail etc., etc., etc. (Okay, the games function is useful when waiting on something and not driving, but that's it. And I miss being able to play Snake II on the old phone. Dangit.) If this phone's sales take off as I believe they will, consider it a message to all those pencil-necked geeks with too much time on their hands and too much processing power to play with who seem to have been put in charge of designing almost all the electronics that rule our lives today: namely, that just because a device can have 200 different functions does not mean it needs to.

Louisiana's governor thanks Atlanta's citizens for their kindness to Katrina evacuees

From today's letters page in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a message from the governor of my stricken home state that makes me almost as proud to be a present-day Atlantan as I am to be a former New Orleanian:
( Gov. Blanco's thanks to Atlanta )