Bestiary

The Beast, which Harrumpher recently renamed my head Orc, has been particularly Orkish in the past few days. It's exhibited so many new and disagreeable features that I suspect it comes from Saruman's stables. That the Orc in the image (by Warren Mahy) is an archer all too appropriate.

However, the postal gods have delivered a diverting creature of another sort: my spiffy new mini-mouse for the netbook. I confess that I've never been very ept with a touch pad, and the one feature of netbooks that makes touch pads a problem is the lack of real estate surrounding the keyboard. When one reaches for the top rows of the keyboard, it's very easy to graze the touch pad and send the pointer on a mad journey of its own. The mini-mouse avoids this irritation.

Next question: it's a USB mouse because at $9 on eBay it's a cheaper solution than the wireless item, at $30 or more. This isn't the problem on a netbook that it might be with other machines.
Because netbooks need peripherals for so many functions, they come (or should come) liberally supplied with ports. I can spare one for a mouse. It is totally plug-and-play (I feared worse with a bargain anything) and was underway within seconds. My spouse, who is even less friendly to touch pads than I, is very happy to see it.

Whilst we're playing with images, it is the sort of mini-mouse to the right, and not the sort below. Nonetheless for people of a certain age, this peripheral inevitably conjures up Disneyesque associations, and I'm surprised someone hasn't taken advantage of that.