It’s no secret that I’m a technophile. While I am completely book-obsessed, and particularly interested in keeping books printed on paper (I do so love holding a book in my hand), I am also a huge nerd when it comes to technology. To give you an example, my television is connected to a media computer that I built myself and it runs Ubuntu Linux as its operating system; if you know not what that means, just rest assured that it’s pretty deeply immersed in the nerd-realm. I have been playing with the entrails of computers ever since my high school computer programming class had to build our computer lab out of outcast parts of machines that were already presumed dead. The end result: QBASIC and Pascal programming on 386s running Windows 3.1. Fast forward to today: I know computers pretty well.

But I decided to follow the path of a writer. Such is life.

For writing, I use my laptop — an Apple MacBook. About two years back I purchased the white model and while I was happy with my purchase, I wanted a little more from it. Over time, the white top case and keyboard became discolored and refused all methods of cleaning. Add to that the top case had a defect, as many of the MacBooks did, and cracked around the area where my right palm would rest. After buying and installing another white top case that again became discolored and cracked, I’d had enough. I wanted to trick out my typewriter.

Now it’s well known that writers have been tricking out their typewriters for years. Hemingway always painted racing stripes on the sides of his typewriters, and often added a sweet spoiler on the back to cut down wind resistance from his furious typing. I heard Faulkner had some sort of alcohol dispensing unit (think beer helmet at sporting events) on his typewriter. I’m stepping in the footprints of giants here.

What I wanted was my white MacBook to have a black interior. This is totally possible with my MacBook version; if you recall, Apple simultaneously released a black MacBook with the white one (and for some reason charged people $100 extra for the privilege of owning it). So what I did was I went online and through eBay I purchased a black screen bezel (that piece of plastic around the MacBook’s screen) and a black top case keyboard. I love taking apart computers, so doing this came easy to me. You can do it, too, and I suggest taking a peak at iFixIt for tutorials. You do want to be careful, though, as if your MacBook is still under warranty or AppleCare doing this may void these insurances. Most likely, if your MacBook is like mine, it’s long out of warranty.

But I wasn’t done there. Being the rugged individualist that I am, I wanted the little glowing apple on the reverse side of my screen to get some love too. So what do I do? Pop the screen out, of course, and poke around. The plastic apple on my MacBook version was covered with a white paint on its backside to aid in the white glow. I pulled the apple out of the shell, sanded off the white paint with fine grit sandpaper, and affixed red and green colored transparency paper to it. Reassemble it all, and look what you get: a tricked out, unique MacBook, that sets me apart (at least a little bit) from the overzealous hipster Apple fanclub. Hey, if I use this machine to get creative the machine itself might as well be creative too.

While I don’t have any pictures of the process, I do have some shots of what the MacBook looks like. The whole thing is pretty smart looking, if I do say so myself.

My friend Tom just sent me an article from The Guardian’s book blog; “Turning men into Page Turners” by Jean Hannah Edelstein is just an abomination of thought. It’s as though the most dastardly advertisers in the world coalesced into a Voltron-sized bad-idea-machine and presented a thesis of the most evil proportions at the World Summit of Terribly Awful Things. Ms. Edelstein presents some recently uncovered statistics from the University of the Obvious, basically summing up to “women read more than men.” All right, fine. Nothing too shocking here but also nothing too offensive. But the worst idea Ms. Edelstein ever had comes gurgling to the surface when the crux of her argument is revealed, and I quote:

Real change won’t occur until publishers band together and make a concentrated effort to re-masculate reading. One option, I suppose, would be to publish special gentlemen’s editions of books that are currently targeted at women, but might actually have male appeal. Female protagonists could be given male names, and romantic plots could be tweaked slightly to be more about football.

She might have said we could re-masculate reading by giving male authors who are more in line with Hemingway, books about guns and fishing and fighting, a fair chance instead of focusing on so-called “chick lit” about shopping and studs. Do you really think it’s even remotely plausible to re-brand a “chick lit” book and just put in male characters and male situations? I mean, this is the kind of thing Hollywood might dream up; it’s just awful, spurious even, and a slap in the face to literature. It’s a bastard of an idea, the kind of thing one thinks about and then quickly dismisses out of the fear that Satan might rise from Hell and offer you the world if only you’ll act on it. Wow, this lady is thick.

I don’t have an answer for getting men up to the reading levels of women; I think it would probably start with a child’s parents encouraging reading, and that encouragement being made consistent by teachers over the course of said child’s education. That’s probably all there is to it. Show both men and women alike that reading is enjoyable and show men specifically that reading isn’t just for chicks. I think the mental prowess that reading instills is pretty damn masculine. But ultimately you’re not going to turn a lifetime non-reader into a voracious reader; it’s just not possible. You gotta sow that seed from the moment of birth.