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I’m going to die without ever kissing Jane Hill. I was reminded of that all over again as news of Google’s latest eavesdropping methods hit the airways. According to the latest reports, the giant internet guru has been tracking “every move you make” by storing information about our whereabouts when we open any number of their apps.
This has got some folks up in arms. They are shouting “invasion of privacy” and demanding a Senate subcommittee be formed to see if some “ex post facto law” hasn’t been breeched.
They act like “keeping track of someone” is a new phenomenon. It’s all Sputnik, flying drones, space age stuff to them! Shoot, Google didn’t invent GPS, nor were they the first to discover a “ways and means” of pinpointing an individual’s exact location at any given moment.
You should have heard the steel ball bearing roaring across the hardwood floor in our third grade class. It was loud as all “get out” as it echoed across the silent room. Buddy caught it with his foot about the time Miss Belle said, “Kesley Colbert, I know that was you!”
“Yes ma’am, I’m sorry, it slipped.”
Bud dropped it back in my lap when he moved up front for his reading class. I laid it in the little slot for pencils at the top of my desk. But the temptation was more than I could bear….. I eased it down to the floor and accidently gave it a nudge.
Apparently you didn’t get two slips with Miss Belle. She hauled me to Mr. McIver’s office. He gave me a couple of whacks with his “Board of Education” and collected the offending bearing.
I couldn’t go to the house after the final bell. This was 1954. You get whipped at school—you got whipped at home! It wasn’t too complicated back then. I figured I’d hide over on West Cherry Street in those tall bushes behind Yogi’s house. I was thinking about joining the circus when Dad caught me by the arm.
Nobody knew I was there! You couldn’t see the road, or vice versa, from where I was hunkered down! There was no possible way he could find— He whipped me plumb out of the gallberry bushes, down a row of Fire Light Hydrangeas and into Bo Booth’s yard next door.