Recently I was driving on I15 near Los Angeles and happened upon the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum. I heartily recommend it for anyone with a few hours to spare. Inside you will find touching family momentos, the jeep from Roy's TV show, awards, movie posters, a tribute to Roy's sidekicks, outfits by Nudie the famous western tailor, comics, cereal boxes, sheet music, guitars, and many more things. The overwhelming feeling is of a simpler time; an innocent time long ago lost in America. Trigger is there (mounted not stuffed) and we missed Roy by an hour. He stops by 2-3 mornings a week. The museum maintains a web site www.royrogers.com and you can also find information about this and other unusual roadside attractions at http://www.roadsideamerica.com. In the gift shop you can by King of the Internet Cowboys T-shirts and mousepads along with all the pictures, postcards, and video tapes that you would expect to be there. As I got back in the car after this pleasant interlude the radio was announcing that Indianapolis would begin searching grade school children for guns. It was a jolt back to reality. 

The Emperor's New Clothes Department: 
Recently Reliastar began running some new commercials. I have watched a lot of commercials in my time but I have never seen a commercial that almost made me throw up before. This is the scene: A bartender has jars behind his bar. A customer comes in and asks if the bartender has pickled pig's feet in the jars. The bartender replies that he has those and other things. The bartender then proceeds to open one of the jars and, in the single most revolting scene I have ever seen in a commercial, begins to eat what appears to be a human ear! If you want to see what Reliastar does, go to their web site www.reliastar.com. You sure won't learn what they do from this commercial. 

You say you're happy with Windows 95. 
You don't feel the need to move to Windows 98. Has anybody mentioned that Windows 95 is not change of century compliant? They will. Of course a mere $109 upgrade to Windows 98 will solve Y2K compliance. Score: Microsoft 1, Consumer 0. 

The Decleron: 
Jokes are flying about the new chip from Intel the Celeron. Basically Intel removed the cache from Pentium II chips to slow them down a little and make a competitive product for the AMD K6 and the Cyrix processors. The "Celery" chip is, in my view, a bad move on Intel's part. Make good chips, make them fast, make them better and they will come. This has been the philosophy of Intel in the past. Making a bad chip to compete with marginal players is stupidity on Intel's part. 

Some of you emailed me to remind me that Netscape has not been swallowed up. I still think it will be. Feel free to email me on anything: jnelson@ibiz.net 

Jim Nelson 

iBiz