Monday, December 17, 2007

Mystery in Cyberspace

Would someone, please, answer me this: why does Mozilla Thunderbird refuse to deliver an email message with a URL to a review on The Fix? Actually, though it refused on my laptop, it then crashed my desktop. (Not only that, I had to unplug my computer for ten minutes before I could get it to reboot: nothing else-- including turning it off and then on-- would work.) Thunderbird delivered the identical message, sans url, without fuss. The url looks perfectly ordinarily... Are there urls that are poison to browsers? Does anyone know what could be going on here? (And would anyone like to experiment with their browser, to see if it's something weird in my account settings?)

The review, by the way, is of Vandana Singh's Conversation Pieces volume, Of Love and Other Monsters. Micahel Fay writes: "Of Love and Other Monsters recalls for me Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. [...] Singh writes with a beautiful clarity. Each character is sharply drawn, and the inevitability of the story pulls the reader headlong with it—helped by a compelling sparseness of prose. Nothing unneeded is written, leaving Of Love and Other Monsters with an incredible tightness that is rarely seen even in the best of today’s modern short fiction."

Of course it could just be the way Mozilla Thunderbird interacts with both of my computers. (I have other problems with Thunderbird, you understand, that no one else I know seems to have.) I sometimes think that software interactions resemble medication interactions & responses: you never know when a compatibility problem might crop up.

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