I’d allow certain exceptions, of course. Any card issuer could be granted additional time to comply if their IT staff (and here I’m talking about programmers, not the suits who wouldn’t know a variable from an array or define “third normal form”) would come to the throne room and explain why they couldn’t have these changes coded by the weekend.

I’ve recently been immersed in a project involving letters, about 700 of them. Obviously artifacts of another era. Specifically, they were written during the Great Depression. A man named James Linsley, a street-car operator at Minneapolis, Minnesota, longed to return to farming, and wanted his son to learn the ways of the farmer. With his wife Martha, he bought a small farm at Nevis, Minnesota, but there was no way to give up his paycheck. So in the summer of 1932, Martha and their two children, John and Ruth, decamped for Nevis, while James stayed in town.

It didn’t work. Two years later they had lost the farm and all were back in the city. But while they were giving it their best shot, the letters flew back and forth. On some days, all three of the Nevis group wrote to James, and James sometimes wrote to all three of them on the same day as well.

Many years later, when little Ruth was in her 80s, she bought a manual typewriter and transcribed the text of all the letters, and wrote a charming narrative about the experience. The letters are full of marvelous details about, both letters and narrative present a close-up look at life in that time and place.

Ruth’s daughter took the typescript to a friend of mine to be converted to text, and started editing the files. I was hired to build a website. I’m pretty proud of it right now, and when all the navigation is finished in a few days, I’ll be unbearable. Fifteen of the forty chapters are now up, along with about 170 of the letters. The DearDaddy.com home page is up, but if you want to dig into the content now you’ll need this link to the Our Story page.

Now that we are in the hardest economic times since the Linsley’s tried their hands at farming three quarters of a century ago, there may be some value in taking a look at those letters. Just don’t expect it to be as quick as digesting the 140 characters of a tweet.

We’ve been here only three months and don’t know who lives there. Lived there, certainly noone lives there now. We joined a few neighbors in less than complete dress on the cold and misty street. By the time any of us were out there, it was beyond anything that any of us could do, we’d have to wait for the firetrucks. But I don’t have much hope that much of anything was saved, when I first saw it there was clearly no way to save the building, and not much chance of saving anyone or anything left inside.

One of the neighbors said it was a shop or a barn, and that the house next door was on fire too. The angry tower of flame I first saw, and the taste of the smoke that filled the street outside, suggested oil and tires, but I have no real idea. I just know that there was nothing a regular homeowner could have done. No garden hose was going to slow this down. Incredible power was at work as we huddled on the edge of the activity, unable to see or change what was happening, stunned. Awful, staring through the darkness into the gates of hell.

Maybe a quarter hour later, the flames are gone, the billows rising from the site are the white of steam. The night is lit by halogen floods and the flashing red lights from the firetrucks that ring the block. Those who know what to do in the face of such conflagration are mopping things up.

If I Were King, I would have been just as powerless.