Jack Clark, Lee Vines & John Harlan

I am always a bit uneasy when an offer is extended to me to switch to a new and improved version of anything. The new bells and whistles are all shiny and clear enough to entice me. Then I get to the part about logging into my account, which requires my username (which one?) and password (again, which one?). How many account numbers, usernames, and passwords do I have? How many is enough? Too many? Insufficient? Bank account number and pin number. Essential. E-mail username and password. Important, but not absolutely essential. Or are they? How did I communicate before the world went geeky? Or did I? Blogger, Amtrak Guest Rewards, Kodak, BMG All Music, Fantasy Baseball, Special Olympics, United Way, Flickr. I'm sure there are more that I can't think of at the moment, which only serves to make remembering account numbers, usernames and passwords all the more difficult. Painful even. I needed to come up with some kind of mnemonic device. A system! Clever pretentiousness surged. I could take words from the titles of 19th century Russian novels, switch a few of the Cyrillic letters to numbers (I forgot what that is called,) transliterate the remaining letters in accordance with the Library of Congress Romanization tables, and capitalize here and there to take full advantage of case sensitivity. Then, if I was having trouble remembering a password, all I would have to do is scan the hundreds of 19th century Russian novels on my shelves, and it would spring forth. Right? OK, where was I? Oh yeah. The new version of Blogger. I decided to take the plunge. After a few invalid password messages, I finally got there, or rather, here. As I was making the switch, all thought of what I was going to write about flew out the window and I found myself writing this instead. Oh well. I feel a bit relieved. Cleansed. I now can hardly wait for whichever of my passwords will be due to expire at some impending date. I'll type the old one, enter the new one, and finally, verify the new one, hopefully to remember it. What I really need is a master list of all my account numbers, usernames and passwords. A living document. Of course, I'd have to protect it with a password. I imagine a hushed, disembodied voice: "The password is..." Whatever happened to Allan Ludden anyway?