Red ring of death or just red ring?

Sometime in the mid-eighties every news report in America seemed to carry something about Lyme's disease. Apparently if you caught it your brain could melt or some such (as I write this, it occurs to me that I have absolutely no idea what happens to you if you catch Lyme's disease. Is it bad? Do people die from it? Perhaps nothing happens at all except that your blood all of a sudden takes on a delightful and refreshing citrus flavor.)

All of the reports said to look for the same thing: a red dot with a red circle around it. "Like a bullseye" the mid-80s TV reporter would say with gravitas.

I never worried about Lyme's disease because like any sane person who grew up in the era of air conditioning and cable, I never went outside. Like Ronald Reagan thought that AIDS was punishment for the sinful lives that gay people led, I too felt that any idiot that spent enough time outdoors that he had to worry about ticks got exactly what he deserved.

Now, thouogh, I finally understand how those people must have felt!

See, I have an XBOX360 and today I saw a red dot surrounded by a red ring. A bullseye that might as well have been pasted over my heart.

I turned off the machine and turned it back on and it booted up just fine, but now the idea is planted in my head: this XBOX360 mght be on the verge of death. I just spent 3 weeks in May without an XBOX360 because of an incurable red ring and... well, I just don't think I could go through that again.

It would break my heart. Like a disease. Like a Lyme's disease.

I'll keep you posted on whether or not the 360 lives or dies. I'm going away to Pittsburgh for a few days and maybe the time away will cool the machine down so much that any hint of a problem will simply disappear.

I don't have high hopes.