AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

             THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Del came back to his senses chastising himself. Lucidity, lucidity at all costs! Machines don't beg doctors to kill patients! Lucidity, damn it!!! How is lucidity obtained when in a coma? he wondered. And as always, because of his experience, the answer came instantaneously: prayer. He mumbled a Rosary. And in the middle of a Glory Be, out of the blue but with poignant clarity, he remembered a moment well after he had been banished from the keyboards, but shortly before the 'additives' - the damned drugs - had lost their magic. He had met a marvelous Estonian girl, marvelous because she was so pure and clean and straight and unsullied by drugs or cynicism or attitudes. Juula was fresh and had honest twinkles in her eyes. Del had been entranced. But after all the bad living he'd been through (with the worst yet to come) for all he was bedazzled, he had refrained from courting her because for the first time in his life, he knew with

            THE STORY OF DEL - Delete And Del?  Well, despite it all, Del was doing pretty well and occasionally even having a good time. With the possible exception of a pinch of Lebanese Gold he had once smoked at a party back in his 'clean days,' the drugs used to manage his coma (surely not induced!) were far better than any of the stuff he could have scored at the streetside tiendas. And the round-the-clock IV feeders were sustaining him with all kinds of vitamins and minerals, the equivalent of 7 nutritious meals a day, probably to compensate for all the garbage bin repasts of 'the bad old days.' Del's mind would zone in and out, but when 'coma-present' as opposed to 'coma-absent' he was  paradoxically more constructive and logical than he had been in ages. He saw things not only with a sharper edge, but with a form of self-deprecating tri-dimensional detachment. For example, it was instantly clear to him that all the 'doodoo' stuff he

           THE STORY OF DEL - Delete And at long last, it would be great to have another American saint. Of the 10,000 saints venerated in the Roman Catholic Church, fewer than a dozen were from the United States. Whenever Father Oregano thought about this anomaly, the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team came to mind. For as there was not enough snow in Jamaica to favor sledding champions, in America there was way too much adoration of filthy lucre - 'the devil's dung' - to foster sainthood. Hell, in the USA even local cafes and pizzerias were quoted on the stock market and generated bigger revenues than the GNPs of most 3rd world countries. In any case... If the identity of this eventual benefactor and future saint was still a question mark, his demonic counterpart had a name and a rap sheet as thick as an encyclopedia: the driver of the offending Toyota, a certain Hilario Baltazar, had stolen the vehicle and at the time of the accident had been even more wasted on drugs than De

          THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Chances are that if the motor had been running on fossil fuels, he might've heard something, turned, and seen it coming. But the damned car made about as much noise as a junkyard refrigerator. It wasn’t fair! Un-doodoo! The impact on Del's body was catastrophic, like a meteor landing on a bag of potato chips. The only three parts of him miraculously left unscathed were his hands, eyes and iPhone. For long months, the beeps on the life support systems attached to his splintered remains would abruptly flat-line and issue jarring acoustic alarms that had medics, nurses, and organ harvesters scrambling to his bedside. But each time, with a rattle and a moan that stubborn clump of cells called Del would pull through. Father Oregano, who ran the hospital's Catholic chapel, was already calling it a miracle. The only problem was finding the holy person responsible for Del's prodigious survival. What happens when major miracles  - obvious mira

         THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Heartened, Del checked how Amazon stock was doing and sure enough, it was going great guns! They had just bought the Galápagos Islands from Ecuador... ...and were now investing bigtime in an innovative Hyperloop delivery system that could get any product to its customer within 5 seconds from the order. Every home would be equipped with a high-tech dumbwaitress called 'Lorraine.' 'Honey, what do you say we buy this Pentola Crockpot Slow Cooker?' 'Sure, Marge, good idea.' CLICK! Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Mississippi three… WHOOSSSSH -- PLOONK! And voilà Pentola Crockpot Slow Cooker!  One click. A single click of the mouse (or poke of a finger) and through Amazon - thanks also to Del's MINUS 25 dollar investment - every commodity known to man would be instantly available. One click... like Santo Katrulz! One click... like Amazon's Lorraine. And soon, if he worked well and hard: one Click for the late, great and

        THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Whatever... Lhasa or Katmandu, for the time being it was all one blurred 'Wisdom of the Orient!' And so Del whipped out one of those new flatscreen handheld devices from which he had been so ingloriously flicked away like a green manure fly on a Parisian croissant, and began gathering information. Number one: he'd be needing money - of course, wouldn't you know it?!  Money, always money! But Lhasa wasn't all that expensive and flying there via Las Vegas and Helsinki would only set him back about the same as an Uber to Kansas. I t was cheap, but still considerably more than the minus $25 he had in his wallet! Wallet? What wallet? Patting his derrière, he felt that it was missing. Ah right! While smoking a dynamite Colombian strain (oddly sticky to the touch) he had invested his entire deficit in Amazon stock. Yes, following the advice of a Dutch dude with dreadlocks called Warren Van Buffet he had diversified his portfolio. And all f

       THE STORY OF DEL - Delete But where could a stupefied derelict such as he find the required wisdom? Where could he learn the arcane secrets of turning sausages back into pigs?  Easy - in the part of the world famous for its transcendental wisdom: Nepal! It was always a cinch - almost second nature - for Del to leap to such 'right sounding' yet fanciful conclusions. Having lived on the keyboards of the world, he had read fantastic amounts of fact, fiction and garbage. But in truth, he had exclusively read those parts that for one reason or another the original authors had decided to forward-delete. So of the three typologies - 'fact, fiction and garbage' - his intellect had mostly been formed by data source #3: Flapdoodle Bunkum Piffle Phooey & Hooey! Speaking of which: yes, Nepal! Del had to go to Nepal. Nepal was the place. Nepal, Nepal, Nepal! It was the place with the highest statistical density of wisdom, a 'percipience' so light and airy that a