Before the advent of the personal computer, nothing said 'sexy business fetish' better than an Underwood typewriter and golden formal dress gloves.

Hey, everybody, happy William Austin Burt day!

“Who’s that?” you ask, because apparently you have nothing better to do with your time than to ask pointless questions about silly stuff you read on the Internet.

Well, here’s a huge clue: QWERTY.

That’s right, in 1829, 180 years ago today–and I’m not making this up—American inventor and statesman William Austin Burt filed his patent for the typographer, which many people consider the earliest predecessor to the modern typewriter.

Burt’s typographer wasn’t much of a machine. It used a selection dial rather than keys, and it put text on paper slower than you could do it by hand. No surprise there, I suppose, as Burt worked in two notoriously unhurried and inefficient professions during his career, serving both as the first postmaster in Mount Vernon, Mich., and later as a state legislator.

Poor Burt never was able to sell his magic writing gadget. But he did all right for himself by also inventing a solar compass and using it discover one of the United State’s largest iron-ore deposits. That made him a world-famous surveyor, if there really is such a thing as a famous surveyor. I admit I don’t know the first thing about the business of surveying, but I’ve seen those guys at work on the highway, and they look about as amped up about their jobs as my accountant, or that old guy with the oxygen tank who says, “Welcome to Wal-Mart.”

Others recognized Burt’s genius, though, and built on his idea. By 1855—and I’m still not making this up–Italian inventor Guiseppe Ravizza had created a prototype typewriter that he called a “scribe harpsichord, or a machine for writing with keys.” It sounds more savory in his mother tongue, of course: Cembalo scrivano o macchina da scrivere a tasti. I’d order that dish at The Olive Garden any day.

Ravizza’ contraption immediately captured the attention of Sicilian mobsters.

A lot of people don’t know this about gangsters, but they’re batshit crazy about keeping meticulously neat records of how much money they’ve loaned out and whether their enforcers are meeting monthly quotas for breaking kneecaps. Many members of the Costa Nostra also spend their free time cataloguing the hundreds of thousands of pizza recipes created every year by the chefs over at Pizza Hut, proving that everybody needs a hobby, I guess.

The Mob was pleasantly surprised to discover that the typewriter not only made it easier to take and read notes—especially ones spattered with spit and blood–but also increased loan-sharking productivity by a whopping 73 percent!

This fact wasn’t lost on business owners, many of whom had close ties to organized crime and needed to make a switch anyway. By the early 1900s, secretaries everywhere were using typewriters to write complaints about sexual discrimination in the workplace to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission faster than their bosses could chase them around the old Dictaphone.

Today, of course, the typewriter is a relic. It’s been all but replaced by the personal computer, although the PC’s electronic keyboard owes its basic QWERTY layout to the mechanical wonders of yesterday, and the PC itself jams up almost as often as the arms on a 1920s Underwood but is infinitely more difficult to fix.

About the only professionals still using typewriters—this really is true–are certain divisions within the New York Police Department, which admitted earlier this month that it spends more than $300,000 a year maintaining their old clickety-clackers to write reports. Most other typewriter aficionados are useless relics themselves—those slow-moving workers at the Department of Motor Vehicles, for example, and journalists who still cling to the idea that each of their words is so precious they need to carefully hammer them out with black ink on a platen.

As for myself, I haven’t used a typewriter in years. But I hope you’ll join me today in saluting William Austin Burt. He’s a true American legned legend.

I’m pretty sure I’ve come down with a bad case of the summertime blues. And, as everybody knows, there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues, so the best I can do is sit and wonder what I’m a’gonna do.

This is exactly how my family and I look this summer, except that instead of being happy because we're staying at our beach cottage in the Hamptons, we're bored and angry because we've got nuttin' to do 'cept fer sittin' on the porch and bitchin' about the weather at home in Colorado.

I won’t be taking a vacation, that’s for sure. Because I gots no money, no time.

I’d love to take two weeks off and hop in the automobile with my wife and kids to go see some of the rest of America. Or take six weeks off and jump in a plane to go see a big chunk of Europe. Or take a year off and board a cruise ship to go see as much of the world as we can fit into 365 days of pure escapism. The world is really, really big—I don’t give a shit what Disneyland says about it being a small world, afterall—and I suspect it’d keep us entertained right up until the end.

But barring a miracle on the scale of coaxing water out of a stone, none of those things are going to happen. I’ll be taking what they call a “staycation,” or what poor people everywhere angrily refer to as sittin’ on the porch. No wonder poor people always look a little pissed off and a lot bored. Porch sittin’ ain’t what it’s cracked up to be, and it ain’t cracked up to be much. 

If I’m super, super lucky—I rarely am–I’ll be able to keep myself from nodding off on the morning bus ride to work so I can take a quick look-see at Colorado’s famous mountains as they flash by my window. I’m sure the peaks are magnificent, because tourists travel here from all over the world to see their purple mountain’s majesty.

I see them—the tourists, not the mountains—all the time on the famous Pearl Street Mall & Ye Olde Tourist Trappe in Boulder, where I work. A lot of them—again, I’m speaking of the tourists here–seem to love ice cream, and toy shops, and dining at al fresco at cafes, although not necessarily in that order.

But I hate them—let me clarify that I’m still talking about the tourists–what with their contented-smiley faces, colorful tom-tinkers, drippy waffle cones, and whatnot. I hope the happy bastards all get painful sunburns sitting outside eating pasta alla carbonara in Colorado’s famous sun, which is about a mile closer to the Earth at this altitude than it is in New Jersey or California or wherever it is they hail from, and often takes ignorant tourists by surprise.

I in the meantime, I’m jus’ a’gonna to sit here and wonder what I’m a’gonna do, ‘cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues. Damn the luck.

I received crushing news this morning from my son, Gabe.

His favorite car is the Subaru Outback.

He’s 14 years old, and I fully expected him to make his father proud by naming something sporty, like a Porsche Carrera, the new Chevy Camaro or a Ferrari. But he just had to go and pick my least favorite car. Now I finally understandeth why God spake these words in Genesis: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, who doth also prefer the Subaru Outback, and they shall be one flesh (King James Version).”

Don’t get me wrong. The Subaru itself is probably very well built, durable and pleasant to drive.

I despised Subaru Outback drivers until my son announced it's his favorite car. Now I'm softening my stance against this glorified station wagon.

It’s certainly got to be better than the piece-o-shit car I drive, a 1999 Dodge Grand Caravan. I’ve driven this car 10 years, and hated it 9 ½ years. Everything’s gone wrong on it—the engine, transmission, ignition switch, rubber trim, horn, water pump, alternator, interior trim, rotors, folding seats, wiper motor, air conditioner and, three times, the heater core (if you don’t what one is, you don’t want to know). I’ll celebrate like it’s Mardis Gras when the junk man finally hauls it off to be crushed. And if you wonder why Chrysler’s struggling to survive, just e-mail me. I’ll fill you in.

But Subaru drivers represent something truly vile (an anagram of evil) in motoring.

Did you ever find yourself doing 30 mph on a 55 mph stretch of road? I’ll bet you passed a Subaru when a passing lane finally opened up. Were you ever forced to wait until a red light turned green to make a legal right turn? Blame the Subaru. Have you ever nearly rear-ended the car ahead of you because the driver inexplicably tapped the brakes going through an intersection? Subaru!

There are other irritating drivers on the road—anybody in a Honda or Toyota Prius, for example—but Subaru owners take conservative driving to new heights. Or lows. Subaru drivers are so risk-avoidant, they actually pose a threat to other motorists.

If I’m on a two-lane road pulling up to a red light, I always take an inventory of the cars in each lane. If there’s a Subaru in the left lane and five other cars in the right lane, I immediately pull to the right, knowing that’s going to be the fast lane. If there’s a Subaru in each lane, I beg God to explain what I did wrong to be so accursed. Then I quickly pop another Xanax before the road rage kicks in and I do something stupid with the .357 magnum tucked under the front seat.

I’m not privy to Subaru’s marketing data, but I don’t need no stinkin’ marketing expert to tell me who buys Subarus.

About 78 percent of Subaru owners are women, 21 percent men, and it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going on with the remaining 1 percent. Most Subaru drivers are 45-65 years old, but drive like they’re 80 to 85. They tend to be well educated, but they’re also disturbingly cocky about it. They’re typically middle- to upper-middle class, and work mainly in seemingly independent yet safely subservient roles as engineers, teachers, editors and the like.

Almost all Subaru drivers consider themselves politically and socially liberal, but are strangely resistant to innovation, which they see as inherently threatening to their way of life. They reluctantly use e-mail and the Internet, for example, but are frightened and confused by computers. This Luddite-like behavior explains why most Subaru owners make up almost the entire subscriber base of old-school publications like The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. It also explains why they rarely consider reading online. Online publications are scarily short and to the point, and clearly aren’t produced by real writers who know how to string 20,000 words about day spas or apple orchards together in coherent ways.

Nearly 95 percent of Subaru owners are the sort of squishy dog lovers who believe their pets display so many anthropomorphic traits they’re barely distinguishable from humankind, even if Fido is clearly dumber than a post. Some 85 percent own both a dog and a cat, and their back seats are nearly always a disgusting giant ball of fur and slobber separated from the front seat by a homemade screen that’s loosely tied to the headrests with bits of multicolored string.

Almost no Subaru owners smoke—it’s far too expensive and risky–but about 90 percent have purchased tea or coffee at Starbuck’s in the last 24 hours. Unless, of course, there’s a local coffee shop near their home or work. Then that’s where they go to get their hot beverages. Why? Because they believe it’s important to stick it to corporate America by supporting independent retailers, as if the folks who work at Starbuck’s don’t need paychecks. In either case, however, they bring a well-worn refillable tankard, partly because it’s environmental friendly, but mostly because they privately believe they get a little extra brew for their money. Subaru owners are thrifty, and love freebies more than almost more than their cars.

Inspect the trunk or floorboards of a Subaru, and you’ll invariably find a pair of muddy hiking boots or walking shoes. That’s because 100 percent of Subaru owners feel they’re “sporty” or “jaunty.” They always spring for roof-mounted bike or ski racks at the dealership, although you’ll rarely see an actual bike or pair of skis on a Subaru, because to a Subaru owner, a stiff hike or walk around the lake followed by a massage or visit to the herbalist constitutes vigorous exercise.

It’s the same twisted psychology that leads Subaru owners to buy into the car’s billing as a rugged sport utility vehicle (SUV). In fact, it’s just an undersized, low-riding station wagon with all-wheel drive that would fail even a mild off-road challenge.

To be perfectly honest, though, there are at least two things about Subaru owners that I have to admire: They weren’t stupid enough to buy piece-o-shit Dodge mini-vans; and they aren’t stupid enough to waste an hour of their lives writing 1,027-word rants about enraged, lead-footed drivers of Dodge mini-vans.

So maybe I can begin to learn to live with my son’s fondness for Subys. Just so long as he always follows me on road trips.