Gobsmacked in America; or The Tweetering Inferno

Oh blog, poor blog, you have been mightily not been much present for the Dear Readers of the world in 2017.

It's not your fault. Wailing negativity each and every day has dominated the news and the talk and politics and the personalities which a battered modern America has brought forth are fairly depressing. I really do not want to add even more weight to the self-manufactured drowning stones being looped around America's neck. So I've kept my mouth shut, my keyboard untouched.

And the information flowing from the political distortions of reality presented as fact is a likewise river of sewage pretending it's a princess. The emperor may have no clothes, to quote the fable, but in today's world none care but we will video him with their phone as he goes walking past. The screen is running the show.

So I've just been working on real human interactions. Not writing about it, not observing, living. Such tends to severely limit writing.

And the good and the positive which I have encountered this year, I've kept clutched silently to myself, as if such things were tattered remnants of a nation once proud and mostly honest. Festering sores aren't much use to share with one's fellow humans. Though if your fellow human is indeed covered in festering sores, maybe one should speak to it.

In more simple terms. the cheese has fallen right off the American cracker.

It's on the floor, even if you like, clean it off, put it back on the cracker, you'll know.


PS - Fear not dear reader. Your  Cup of Joe is here, even when quiet. There's 12 years worth of archives to read - just click on a month in the sidebar on the right. You can see how many dead links and dead websites and music and video sites that aren't around anymore. But I am still here. I be back.

A Decade of Writing on the Web

I've been so busy I missed my own blog birthday - 10 years are done and I'm now on Year 11. Yay me.

Obviously The Regular Reader knows the posts here have been intermittent in the last year or so, but that's changing as a few new adventures are compelling me to become more prolific here. Details on that will follow very soon.

When I began this page, the Web was exploding with blogs, and many of those are now kaput. I am not kaput. That noisy proliferation has now turned into a far more vast cacophony of voices and images which get Tweeted and Pinterested and Instagrammed and Facebooked and far more names of platforms being created. I'm a long-form writer who abhors brevity. Except when I don't.

And still, our world is only just inside the doorway of what is possible with the Internet. If the Internet is the New Alphabet then we've only gotten 3 or 4 letters figured out. More is to be discovered and the new combinations possible are far too large to even imagine ... so far.

When I was a wee boy, knowing down in my bones that I wanted to be a writer, I think I saw a Writer as a process that ended with being a Good Writer Who Writes. Now these many years later, I see it's a process of creation that never ends.

What's been the best writing here? The most popular? 

The Google stats say "Dr. Evil Running Congress?" has been the most viewed post, with over 22,000 views is Most Popular, but that's likely because the image I used of Dr. Evil became a hot listing via image searches using Google. Also popular, pretty much all posts about Frightmare Manor, the haunted attraction located just down the street, have been huge hits on the Web. And they are getting ready to open up again for 2015.

I have various favorites, but here are two posts that I rank as my own best.

First, "Martian", a rumination on the planet Mars and the robots we've placed there. It's from the very first weeks of publishing, and I really like it. In fact, other than movies, I've probably written the most about my fascination with our universe, our solar system and how we do and do not explore it.

My next favorite is also from the early days, "Would You Like To Hear Some Stories?", a post prompted by my sister-in-law and the very real and astonishing experiences of her family during World War 2 and how the posting of those events led to the discovery after many decades of what happened to Katherine's mother's cousin, revealed in the comments of that post.

You Won't Believe What These 10 Bloggers Said!

And a fine Saturday morning to you, dear readers. Does it seem like I have not been writing? Sadly, this is true - I've not been writing and I fear I may be suffering from an affliction of age perhaps or of aging, which I shall try to explain. (NOTE: There is no list of what bloggers said in this post, I'm utilizing a click-bait post headline.)

News and information storms the world from every outlet, being shared and repeated and misreported and re-oriented, invented and re-invented, magical mathematical formulas hoovering up every nano-bit of content for global distribution and personal consumption - each keystroke and image commingling like turbo-charged teenage desires,captured and stored and re-visited and re-distributed .... the digitization of civilization means there is room on some remote server for your great aunt's collection of googley-eyed potato chips she's been "crafting" since all her kids grew up and left, just as every troll-fired insult, every secret, every wrinkle in Fame's fabric are all residing in numerical notations in vast continents and seas of data.

It sort of reminds me of the old-style tourist trap stores, where endless shelves of unspectacular crap are crowded with artifacts which no one really wants or needs - a mundane proof of life.

And yet here in this odd store, one could discover the works of poets and philosophers, of heads of state and victims of those same states, history, geography, science ... both real and unreal ... and then there are the commentaries of folks who have access to this tsunami of details. 

Outright lies, theories and fantasies endure among the eternal flow of what your child did or did not do, what you ate or did not eat, what you heard or saw or imagined you heard or saw, among the steady rain of outrages and screeds of the Offended. Petty cruelties live alongside endearing tales of pure goodness.

I've discovered that though I am (in digital terms) an old practitioner of online writing, I prefer to wait until I've found something worth saying, worth writing down for all or none to see and read.

The brittle and bitter and the superfluous all bellow for attention. My fingers poised above the keyboard - but what could I say? Some aspect or trend or idea strides across the digital landscape and I ponder what (if any) insight such items offer. The result is that I may decide not to add to the negativity swirling overhead, or to proffer some heartwarming tidbit, or simply to be satisfied that some other person has made note of the event.

And being somewhat non-young, I move and think slower than the hotshot young gunmen and gunwomen who stomp out into the streets for high noon showdowns. 

And so this post has an ambiguous ending -- did anything change? Was some realization made? You will have to return here to find out ... and I will be here.

More Great Moments in Writing

Great writing is flourishing in the comments section of Amazon (as I've recently noted). Today's example comes via the hundreds of  'reviews' of a BIC ink pen ''designed for her":

"I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day's tree felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to earth between two giant redwood trunks."

---

"Normally my hand writing is defined and strong, as if chiselled in granite by the Greek gods themselves, however upon signing my name I noticed that my signature was uncharacteristically meandering and looping. More worryingly the dots above the I's manifested themselves as hearts, and I found myself finishing off the signature with a smiley face and kisses. Obviously I had no choice but to challenge the delivery man to a gun fight on the rim of an erupting volcano in order to reassert my dominance. Had I not won this honourable duel this particular mistake might have resulted in a situation that no amount of expensive single malt whiskey and Cuban cigars could banish. I leave this review here as a warning to all men about the dangers of using this particular device, and suffice-it-to-say will return to signing my name with a nail gun as normal."

---

"Gone are the days when I had to wrap my delicate lady hands around an ugly man pen to write my recipes and devotional love poems to men. Now I can commit myself to writing to do lists with an oh-so-soft grip between the frail appendages that - were they stronger - could be called fingers."

Great Moments In Banana Slicing History

Apparently everything real or imagined is for sale on Amazon.

But as entertaining as the products might be - like the UFO Detector or the Uranium Ore or Tuscan Whole Milk - it's the comments/reviews which are the most entertaining.

For example, take the Banana Slicer for sale.

- "For decades I have been trying to come up with an ideal way to slice a banana. "Use a knife!" they say. Well...my parole officer won't allow me to be around knives. "Shoot it with a gun!" Background check...HELLO! I had to resort to carefully attempt to slice those bananas with my bare hands. 99.9% of the time, I would get so frustrated that I just ended up squishing the fruit in my hands and throwing it against the wall in anger. Then, after a fit of banana-induced rage, my parole officer introduced me to this kitchen marvel and my life was changed."

- "I always struggled with cutting bananas. Should I use my holiday cookie cutter set? My spoon? My laser pointer? My chainsaw? Sometimes the options were so overwhelming that I'd just throw caution to the wind and eat the banana skin-on. This tool has really taken the complexity out of a task that had left me in tears time and time again. Thank you Vittorio Banana Slicer."

- "As you may or may not know, I have 27 trained monkeys I use to do my evil bidding. Well, the younger monkeys teeth have not fully developed and so slicing a banana to feed them is a necessary chore. The adult monkeys used to have to chew up bananas and feed their young but not anymore with the Victorio Kitchen Products 571B Banana Slicer."

Pages of comments/reviews begin here.