Yesterday, I turned on my cell phone for the first time in about two weeks. I was at I-Con in Long Island New York and was waiting to meet up with some friends. I only turn on my cell when I’m out of town or at a convention, and the fact that I didn’t have to have it on in two weeks had made me happy.

First among my 19 voicemails was a message from Harlan Ellison, admonishing me for misspelling Edgar Allan Poe’s name in a ComicMix news story back when. He’s right, and I should have caught it. I’ve been a fan of Poe’s longer than anybody except maybe Jack Kirby. The problem is, when I’m under deadline pressure (and with the Internet that’s 24/7) I over rely upon my spellchecker. Sadly, those suckers ignore words that are misspelled into other real words. I let it do my thinking for me; my bad.

Mr. Ellison often refers to himself as a Luddite, disparaging our computer-communications society. I sympathize. Coincidentally, the very night before my wife and I had watched the first half of a Doctor Who serial, "The Mark of the Rani", which was set in 1811 at the birthplace of the British Luddite movement. They did a good job of disclosing the reasons behind the movement, except that I don’t think a pair of Gallefreyan Time Lords encouraged the Luddite movement.

For the history-challenged out there, the Luddites were members of a movement of English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Age who destroyed the machinery that they thought was taking their jobs. It is believed the media named the participants after Ned Lud, one of their ilk, although that might be apocryphal.

You can hardly blame them. The ruling classes always instill such fears in their workers as a means of keeping wages low and discipline high. There are always all sorts of odd ramifications to this philosophy – for example, our marijuana laws were imposed under the belief that they would deter Mexican immigration and take jobs away from the “common man.” If this sounds like our current immigration attitudes, well, that’s no coincidence.

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