AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

                    THE STORY OF DEL - Delete The machines went nuts: DLING-BLING-WAAAAAA! But this time, Juula nipped the reaction in the bud. "No, no, calm down!" "Sorry." "Del, honey, you just said the 'operative' word: 'LINK'." LINK "For zapping paragraphs, the pilcrow is a LINK and for zapping words, the space bar space is a LINK. The command for both is the same: Look to the left of the cursor, see what's there, and then cancel rightward up to and including that same value. The New Del? YES! 'Connective reading' has been around a long time and everybody is familiar with it... It's called 'Browsing.' Well now we have 'Connective Editing.' CONNECTIVE EDITING And browsing and connective editing even have a few things in common. For instance, distance doesn’t matter. One touch zaps any paragraph no matter if composed of a single word or a thousand. So it's like a mouse click on a browser link: it d...

                   THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Del came to his 'coma-present' senses again with a blissful smile. And she was right there by his side with her smartphone in her hand. "Hi Del... How are we doing?" "Great, Juula! And so happy to see you again!"  "While you were sleeping, I programmed our little paragraph killer." "Ah yes, the pilcrow connector." "Want to see?" Juula held her smartphone up to the slits of Del's bandaged head - a look definitely reminiscent of the Invisible Man - and zapped a whole bunch of paragraphs in rapid succession, at single 'semi-automatic' taps. "Wow! That's faster than a computer."  "Faster and with less anatomy involved. On a phone, no less! But that's nothing. Ready for another short geography expedition?" "Lead the way!" "Okay, first we click that toggle again: 'show non-printing characters.' Okay, last time you saw the pilcro...

                  THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Exactly right. The common topography of any text!" "Now this is where your old keyboard job comes into play. Knowing that there's a pilcrow before and after every paragraph... how does that inescapable fact favor deleting paragraphs? Put on your thinking cap!" "Hmm... well first you have to select..." "BZZZZ! Wrong!" Alarmed, Del quickly corrected himself: "No, no, no... I don't have to select.... but you'd better give me a hint, Juula... or you know what could happen!" "Okay, here's the hint: it's forward deletion, like what you've always done, but with a twist - a slightly different instruction." "Okay, a new instruction... We have a paragraph, and like all paragraphs there's a doohickey..." "A pilcrow!" "...A pilcrow before and after. No selection allowed." Arnold Schwarzenegger to the rescue! That Austrian weightlifter - ...

                 THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "All right, buckle up. Here's a copy and paste job from the internet: '100 Best First Lines from Novels'."  Best first lines from novels "We'll take out the graphics and leave only the words. Only plain text. Now look carefully and tell me what you see?" Del looked long and hard and failing to see anything meaningful, was afraid that his bruised ego would be tempted to transform her into a paramecium or a postcard of the Matterhorn. But instead he held strong and steady and was even shot through with a pertinent thought regarding such awful transformations: Luckily for us, God had a good attention span! We love to say 'it's a crazy world,' but actually, it's not crazy at all. It works. A beautiful Estonian girl doesn’t turn into a flower pot or a boxing glove on a sudden divine whim. God was… "Del, hello? Del?" "Oh... Nothing, comes to mind, Juula. I mean I see words of course....

                THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Good morning, Del! Ready for the big day?" "Sure, what do you have in mind?" "A tour... to a place you've often seen but never noticed." "I like it already. Where?" "A page in MS Word." "Eh? Microsoft Word? I must've done two-thirds of all my work there - even starting before Windows. If there's one place that holds no mysteries for me!" "So you might think, my sweet bundle of mashed-up bones, so you might think!" "Okay, I believe you, number one because I have to and number two because I want to. But may I ask why?" "Yes, of course. You feel that you were unjustly removed from the telephones and tablets of the world, correct?" "Well, I can't say 'unjustly' - there wasn't any room for two deletion buttons, so they left the big guy - they left Backspace... but all right, yes, it hurts." "What if I told you I could...

               THE STORY OF DEL - Delete This is when life support apparatuses should ALSO be clamoring, thought Del. Not only when he was about to die, but also when he was about to live! La Vita è Bella! "How did you get in?" "After we met, you never let me out, remember? So, I'm not here," she said indicating the whole ICU, "I'm here." She touched the side of her head. "That's terrible. One wrong impulse and I could turn you into a carrot juicer!" "I know, but you won't, because I have a job for you. And it's right up your alley, and since you like me so much, I'm going to be your muse. And you and I are gonna be too busy having fun!" "Whoa!" And just as Del had ruminated, all the warning bells went off and it was a concert of ringing, singing, wailing and bling-blinging. And one of the apparatuses - Infusion Pump N° 17 regulating Medication Line N° 23 - even started playing the bagpipes. To hell wit...

              THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Except she didn't budge and remained at the center of his thoughts, close and real, sometimes lingering in view of his third eye as if actually visiting him there, close to the end wall of the Intensive Care Unit, a zone that among themselves, the health operators called 'Row Hopeless.' Naturally, no visitors were allowed, so whatever was going on with Juula was more like a 'visitation,' but either way, he eventually decided that it was all good. Of course it was! He was thrilled to have her there by his side! They were silent visits. Most of the time, she'd just sit there by his bedside showing a strange annoyance while writing notes on her phone. Little huffs and once even a discreet sigh of disbelief. Del was too keen on looking at the water-and-soap honesty of her beauty to wonder about what she was doing. For at least a full hour he had contemplated the 'perfection' of her tortoise shell barrette and the aub...