Google on Your Cell Phone November 30, 2006March 5, 2017 BILL MOYERS ON . . . . . . ‘the great divide that has opened in America between those who advocate war while avoiding it and those who have the courage to fight it without ever knowing what it’s all about.’ His speech at West Point. Long, but worth it if you have time. TED KOPPEL ON . . . Jim Maloney: ‘Ted Koppel’s report on Iran will be repeated on the Discovery Channel Monday 12/4 at 9PM and again on Tuesday at 12AM.’ ☞ Boy, how I hope Vice President Cheney will not attack Iran. It’s unthinkable – but if Sy Hersh is right, it’s being thought about. Maybe we can get the VP to Tivo Koppel’s report. If only we had known a little about Iraq before we went and attacked it. (Seriously; wouldn’t that have been a good idea?) MORE HOLIDAY GIFTS FOR YOU I tried to give you an early gift last week (the magnifier at the bottom right corner of your Internet Explorer 7.0 browser) – and at least a few of you were thrilled by the discovery, as I was. But a lot of others of you gently mocked me (‘Why bother with the thingy in the right lower corner – just hold down Ctrl and move the scroll wheel to make the print any size you want. This feature has been available since the initial browsers of the mid-nineties. Really, Andy!’) – never mind that my Thinkpad has no scroll wheel – and others of you one-upped me (Dean Reinemann: ‘I have been using Opera as my web browser for several years. You can zoom the contents of any Web page from 20%-1000% using the zoom drop down or the + and – keys.’ Randy Kirchhof: ‘In Firefox, you can do a CTRL-+/- to adjust font size.’) . . . and so I’m back with more gifts. Actually, these come straight from David Pogue in the New York Times, so I’ll let him tell you himself. Suffice it to say, I’ve started text-messaging Google from my cell phone to get all but instant answers to just about anything. How cool is that? I texted Google ‘Reservatrol grapes’ – which is to say, I typed that into my cell phone ‘compose message’ screen and then sent it to 466453 (which is GOOGLE on your phone keypad) because I was wondering whether you needed to drink red wine to live forever, like the mice recently in the news – or whether it would it be enough to eat unfermented red grapes. Half a second later Google texted me and asked: ‘Did you mean RESVERATROL and grapes?’ Well, yes. I had misspelled it. That’s what I meant. (But no, Google had nothing to offer my cell phone on the subject, though it quickly confirmed for me that, yes, Jacques Chirac is president of France; and, when I typed in WEATHER and my zip code, it gave me a forecast.)