Mother-in-law jokes are so passe', so bad-Catskills-comedians (UK readers: working-men's club (the sort where chicken-in-a-basket is the culinary highlight) comedians), that I wonder if I should even share this. Then I remembered: it's not a joke if it's true.

One of the other items of note in this week's Onion is this story of a young woman's ordeal getting her 60-year-old mother online.

Well, as pathetic as that story is, there are a few things you should bear in mind:

1) The mother in the story (MITS) is more highly motivated than my mother-in-law (MIL)
2) MITS has successfully emailed her daughter - indeed, anyone
3) MITS has successfully navigated to and browsed a Website
4) MITS has mastered, to some extent, Windows
5) MIL has failed to master the complexities of an iMac

There's a saying - we can't choose our relatives, thank goodness we can choose our friends. It's just a shame we can't choose our friends' relatives (I'm lumping spouses in under the general category of friends, here)