The answer to the previous post's title is "NO!"

Firefox crashed yesterday after I made the third revision to the post, adding in some final links. Then MSN Messenger crashed, and Internet Explorer. When I tried to shut down AOL it hung, forcing a CTRL+ALT+DEL shutdown. Then Windows locked up, so I had to do an "ungraceful reboot" using the switch on my power strip.

I managed to interrupt the reboot and restart the computer in the "Command Prompt" mode - back in my day we called it the "DOS Prompt", sonny - and ran Scandisk without any of the Windows bells and whistles forcing it to restart every ten seconds. It found some problems and corrected them, but the surface scan (which came up clean) took several hours to run, during which I headed out into the Big Wide World to look at new computers. When I came back from Windows-shopping I saw that Scandisk had finished its run and I tried to simply restart the computer. It immediately crashed.

After a proper cooling-off period (during which the desk fan that I had been using to blow air through the PC chassis apparently died) the computer restarted with minimal failures. (I keep getting flashes of the Windows blue screen of death, which then go away without apparent consequence. I think if I knew computers better I would be very, very concerned.) I was able to use Firefox for a little bit, but then it crashed again. It is possible that my Firefox problems are caused by a corruption resulting from previous system crashes. But it's also possible that they are the result of increased RAM demands from the latest update to the program, or even from the latest and greatest banner ads which have always plagued me.

Meanwhile, my hits continue to run high, in the last two days almost entirely due to searches for "Cathy Baker Hee Haw". In the past week (thanks also to hits from The Anomalist) I have seen more traffic than I previously had in my best month. Someone needs to set up Hee Haw conventions along the lines of Star Trek conventions. An appearance by Cathy Baker would probably cause a riot!