Umm ...

I got the Canon CanoScan 8600F. I'm not enough of a techie to really say it's a great scanner, but it does scan slides at least well enough to produce what you see. I'm still learning to use it -- some of my scans came out so dark they were unusable, but that's likely because I haven't read the directions enough to get to the part where you can adjust the scan brightness.

Note that this is not a dedicated slide/film scanner -- it's a flatbed with a scan unit both in the lid and in the bed. The lid unit is covered by a flat panel which you remove when you want to scan slides. You put the slides in a bracket that goes on the scan bed, set it to scan slides, and it does the rest.

I needed a flatbed scanner, and this one was not only rated highly, it had this additional useful feature of slide scanning.

Something I learned that the rest of you probably already know: I will never, never, never again buy a multi-function printer/copier/scanner/fax unit. It's one of those swell gadgets like a combined jet fighter-helicopter, or automobile-boat, that look sweet on paper, but sucks in real life. You end up with a sucky jet fighter which is also a sucky helicopter, or a sucky boat that doubles as a sucky car.

The printer function malfed on the Brother that I had -- and that made the copier and fax-incoming features useless. I took it in to a factory-authorized repair center to get it fixed TWICE, at great expense, and it was never really right. Which meant I had to hassle with the damned thing for some time, and was crippled in what I could do in my office the whole time.

I'd paid so much for it that I persisted in trying to get it fixed long after I would have just thrown out a cheap standalone printer, and gotten a new one. Or a standalone fax, or scanner, etc.

Plus, I like to buy a supply of ink cartridges in advance, so I have plenty on hand for when I run out. I was stuck with about $60 worth of ink carts.

In future, I'm buying all standalone units. With standalones, it's easier to cut your losses and upgrade when one of them malfs.

And just as an aside, screw you Brother. You're off my list.

And hey, since I'm wound up, I'll just say this too: Go into Office Max or Staples or wherever you buy your ink cartridges and look at the selection. The variety of the damned things is literally insane. I know printers could be manufactured so that they accepted any specific one of about a half dozen, or ten at the most, ink carts, and those could be made by generic makers at about a tenth the price. You should be able to buy printer cartridges in any corner store -- and if there weren't 700 different f*cking designs, you could.

In my opinion, we're being anally raped by printer manufacturers (and others) who deliberately build endless confusing glitz into their products so they can keep us addicted to whatever crap they condescend to sell us sheep.

I accept the fact that I'm one of the sheep, and probably always will be. But damn! I don't have to like it.

Strangely enough, I've never had a broken bone in my life. (If I was a nice Christian, I suppose I might attribute it to the fact that the Creator of the Entire Universe personally watches over me -- all those people die on planes and stuff because God is too busy overturning the natural laws on a spot basis so as to keep clumsy horses from breaking my pinky toes.)

Duke once stepped on my dog's foot too -- I was leading Duke and Ranger was trotting alongside, Ranger suddenly yelped and I looked back to see his entire lower hind leg under Duke's foot. He limped off whining, but a few minutes later he was fine.

One thing that helped was that we kept the draft horses barefoot in the winter. Snow sticks to steel horseshoes and builds up a big ball of ice under each foot, which then breaks off at irregular intervals among the four hooves, keeping them with constantly uneven footing. A bare horse's hoof sheds snow easily, though. But a bare horse hoof also distributes weight more evenly across the lower surface of the hoof, compared to a shoe, which puts all the weight on a narrow band of steel around the edge of the hoof -- more easily crushing your toes, foot bones, etc. Probably the real reason my dog and I were only mashed, and not broken.

Also: Interesting thing about distribution of weight in horses (and dogs, cats, etc.) is that the weight would be evenly distributed among the four legs only if they had no head. With the head and neck, especially the weight of both in a big critter such as a draft horse, there's quite a bit more weight on the forelegs than the back ones. All the better to mash you with.

"Big Damn Horses" is a great description. I'll have to remember that.

They're really big when they step on your feet. Also when you're trying to catch them and they're feeling frisky and playfully tap a plate-sized hoof in your belly as they gallop past. And especially big when they're 18 hands or so high and you're only 16 hands high, but night after night still have to get 60 pounds of harness up on their backs.

Still, sometimes I'd gladly trade THIS life for THAT one.