Tumblr for the Lipitor generation

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Here’s how I feel about the different social media sites and their uses:

·        Facebook, for the young, is for connecting and gossiping and embarrassing one another.

·        Facebook, for those of us who are no longer young, is for keeping in touch and swapping recipes and Simplicity patterns and posting pictures from thirty years ago and embarrassing one another.

·        Twitter is about branding and advertisement and being stupid in fifteen words or less. If you are not consistently very witty, you shouldn't really bother posting, unless you're Katy Perry or Justin Bieber, in which case it doesn't matter.

·        Pinterest is for those who like to post and share pictures of fashion and decorating and jewelry and cute boys. Much though I like all these things, I decided after a few months that Pinterest was not for me.

·        WordPress is a nice stable blog website, full of people with all kinds of interests. I have made some very nice Internet friendships on WordPress.

·        Blogger / Blogspot ditto.

·        Tumblr is a friggin' zoo.

 Let me expand upon this last statement.

Tumblr is something for everyone and no mistake: lots of beautiful photography and art, lots of underdone cheesy humor, lots of selfies. Also lots of bizarre political thought and amateur porn. It's a more freewheeling version of Facebook in which you don't need to friend anyone, and in which most people use handles and aliases. Nothing comes to you automatically on Tumblr: you have to shop around for it. Once you find something with which you feel comfortable, those people will be reblogging from other similarly-oriented Tumblr blogs, and you can follow those in turn, and - within a month or two of careful tending - you will have a beautiful Tumblr garden / dashboard full of lovely and amusing images and texts to enjoy!

Let me give you a head start. Let's say you're a mature person, a little literary, a little artsy, with a taste for kitch and a goofy sense of humor. You might like to look at the following Tumblr blogs, just for entertainment's sake. (And if you’re reading this on Tumblr, look these folks up; you won’t be sorry.)

  

·        Diane Duane. Diane (who blogs under her real name) is a successful author, mostly sci-fi and young adult. She lives in Ireland and posts wonderful pictures and texts, and she is very responsive to her fans and readers. She is very likeable, and I recommend her highly.

·        Devilduck. This is the ultra-kitschy Tumblr blog of one of the guys associated with the well-known Archie McPhee joke shop in Seattle. If you like pictures of people wearing horse masks and Christmas trees decorated with Cthulhu tentacles, this is the site for you.

·        Bad Postcards. What it says. Mostly 1950s and 1960s; mostly cute, some poignantly nostalgic, and almost all in brilliant Kodacolor.

·        1950s Unlimited. Like Devilduck, but a little more on the sentimental side. If you get misty-eyed over black and white photos of people using cigarette machines, you'll feel very at home here.

·        Well, That’s Just Great. The drily amusing / often hilarious daily chronicle of a man named Anthony Giffen who lives in central Florida with a dog named Ducky and a partner named Gizmo. Highly recommended.

There: I have sanitized Tumblr for you. I guarantee no porn, no dangerous radicals, no homicidal lunatics.

Now get in there and explore Tumblr and stomp around a bit.

You might just have fun.

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Famous on the Internet

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There is a website called Klout, which tells you how influential you are on the Internet, on a scale from zero to 100. Only a few people have ever achieved a perfect score, and then they fall away again. I believe they give you a 15 or a 20 just for signing up, but then they monitor your Internet presence – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, other social media, blogs, et cetera – and make your score more precise.

Some examples:

Justin Bieber’s a 93, or he was the other day. The Boston Bruins have the same score: 93. The New York Yankees have a 95.

Among my friends: one of my acquaintances (a former Brown student) has a score in the mid-60s. Partner has a pitiful 12. Two of my other friends are in the 20s.

I am currently a 37.

What does this mean?

Well, I consider that my score is pretty good for someone who has less than a hundred Facebook friends (it’s in the sixties, actually). Partner has less than twenty Facebook friends.

I love asking my student assistants how many Facebook friends they have. Invariably they have hundreds. One, a serious young man who’s going to be a junior next fall, has over 500; one of his classmates, a girl, has over 900; two recent graduates (I mentioned one of them above) have more than a thousand.

What does any of this mean?

It means: you can be famous on the Internet, if you know what you’re doing.

Just be careful.

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Self-branding

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We all have Internet identities, don’t we? All of you who are reading this have one, in one way or another. You have an avatar, or a photo. You have an online bio. You probably have a more-or-less-clever alias (I use “Futureworld” for my blog identity, which isn’t terribly clever, but I’m foolishly fond of it).

So: we are all branding ourselves.

Branding used to be reserved to companies and vendors and businesses, to whom it was important. They had images and slogans. I think of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”:

What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

And that was written more or less a hundred years ago.

The other day I was walking to the office, and I saw one of those big commercial trucks with the company name painted all over it: ROYAL FLUSH PLUMBING. On three sides of the vehicle there was a big image of a cute guy in a kilt, with a big smile and a wrench over one shoulder.

We stop at the same intersection, at a red light. I glance over at the truck, and the driver. I do a classic triple-take: I look at the driver, and the image on the side of the truck, and again at the driver.

And he grins, and waves at me, and the light turns green, and he drives away.

It’s him! It’s the kilt-and-wrench guy!

He must be used to people reacting the way I did, but he was evidently still very pleased that I’d recognized him. Well, why not? He had his face plastered all over his truck. He likes being recognized.

He knows everything there is to know about branding.

(Postscript: I told the first part of this story to my friend Apollonia. I hadn’t gotten further than a description of the picture of the guy with the kilt, and she said, “Oh, you mean Royal Flush Plumbing.”)

(And then she blushed a little.)

(My goodness!)

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Death on the Internet

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A co-worker and dear friend – let’s call her Lily – passed away about two years ago. At the time of her decease, she had all of five Facebook friends, of whom I was one.

She used to fret over her Facebook status constantly. She hated the fact that Facebook presented her as both a graduate of Harvard and Simmons. “Why doesn’t it always show Harvard first?” she asked me.

“It’s Facebook,” I said. “It addresses itself to the person looking at it. It may think I care more about Simmons than Harvard, and it’ll show me Simmons first.”

She looked murderous. “There’s got to be a way to fix this.”

Well, if you’re on Facebook, you know that there are very few ways to outfox Facebook.

Anyway, as I said, she passed away. I did not delete her from my Facebook friends, because I like seeing her name come up on my “friends” list. (Three of my seventy Facebook friends are deceased. I refuse to delete them. I like seeing their faces and names on the list. It allows me to pretend that they’re still alive.)

And then, the other day, I saw the following in my Facebook news feed:

LILY posted (five hours ago): I'm on the 6th day of Raspberry ultra drops and have lost 7lbs already, it's insane! the first 3 days alone I lost over 2lbs. it really is amazing... you gotta check it out!

Dear me. Evidently someone hacked poor Lily’s Facebook account (which was, of course, never deactivated), and is using it to promote Raspberry Ultra Drops, whatever the hell they are.

This is pretty funny, since (as I said) Lily had all of five Facebook friends, and I’m sure all of us were startled to see Lily posting on Facebook from beyond the grave.

But it made me think of George Carlin’s old joke: “If you die while you’re on hold, will the little light on the telephone stop blinking?”

We all have dozens of Internet identities and membership and accounts. What happens to them when we die?  Should I notify Facebook that Lily’s account has been hacked? If I do, will they do anything about it?

And what will your survivors do when you pass away, and suddenly six months later you come back from the dead on Facebook with news about a new weight-loss plan?

Probably it’s worth thinking about.

I love thinking about Lily, floating around in the afterlife, incensed about her Facebook account being hacked. Lily was the soul of propriety.

But I suspect that, wherever she is right now, she’s pretty calm about it.

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The fragility of the Internet

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I still have shelves and shelves of books: novels, poetry, history, biographies. Also reference books.

But do I really need reference books? Isn’t that what the Internet is all about? Twenty years ago, you had to know how to use a dictionary, and an encyclopedia, and an almanac, and a phone book, to look anything up. Now Google and Siri have everything wrapped up.

So long as you have 3G, or 4G, or WiFi, and provided your battery is all charged up.

The nice thing about those big lumpy reference books is that they’re not going anywhere. They will sit on my shelves, ugly and faithful, until they’re called upon for use. They do not require electricity, or an Internet connection.

What if an electromagnetic pulse (AKA EMP) happens? Or a huge angry sunspot? Or an attack by hackers from some unfriendly country?

And the Internet goes away. Electricity too, for a while.

What will we do then?

My books will still be useful. It’ll be just like the 1980s. I think I’ll be able to survive, for a while.

But for the young people who were born after the Net took over the world, it will be torture.

Poor things.

You can come borrow my dictionary.

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Change of site, Jan 1 2013: a heads-up

To all my good friends on Posterous (and on Blogger too):



I have been having nasty problems with Posterous lately. I publish my blog there, and Posterous used to be nice enough to post it to Facebook, and Blogger, and WordPress, and Tumblr. Lately, however, Posterous has been very cranky; it won't do WordPress and Tumblr at all anymore (this has been flickering on and off for several months now).



So I am very seriously thinking about moving my main blogsite to WordPress. 



It's a nice site, and there are lots of folks over there I like; most of my favorite blogs are on WordPress. They won't let me upload MP3 files, as Posterous does, but I have found a workaround for that.



Also: Posterous autoposts directly to Blogger, and I have a number of readers on Blogger. And I don't want to lose them. (For some reason, WordPress won't autopost to Blogger. Go figure).



Anyway, on January 1 2013, I am going to go to WordPress and Tumblr (and Facebook) exclusively, I think. Unless things in the Posterous environment change significantly.



If you subscribe to me on either Posterous or Blogger, please do me the enormous favor of going to futureworldblog.wordpress.com and subscribing to me there. It's a very nice site, trust me.



And everything will be just fine.

Social media (and especially Pinterest)

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Social media allow us to craft our own image and present it to the world, in ways that only a few artists and writers were able to do in the centuries before us. More than that: we can do it over and over again, in various ways. We don’t have to present ourselves on Facebook in the same way that we do on LinkedIn, or Tumblr, or Twitter.

 

 

Take me, for example. My Facebook persona is pretty vanilla. I repost this blog to my Facebook feed, but I suspect very few of my sixty-odd “friends” read it. And, after all, why would they? Facebook Loren is mostly 1970s Pacific Northwest Loren. A large percentage of my Facebook friends are my school acquaintances from Battle Ground, and various Pacific Northwest relatives. As you can imagine, their politics vary considerably from mine, in most (though not all) cases. So: we stick to safe topics, and harmless photos, and nostalgia.

 

 

LinkedIn Loren is very dull: he’s just a brief resume.  He has a reasonable number of connections, but (since he’s not actively looking for a job) he’s not out there roaming the LinkedIn network very much. Mostly I use LinkedIn to find out what my various work acquaintances are doing nowadays. Now and then I’m amused to find that some of them are exaggerating their titles, and their experience, and their education, and their accomplishments. (But I won’t rat them out. Not here, anyway. Give me a call, and I’ll tell you all about it.)

 

 

Twitter Loren is a nonentity. This blog reposts there too, but I seldom look at Twitter; it’s too busy, too full of chatter.

 

 

Blog Loren is the same person on Posterous, Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress, as this goes out to all four. Three of them – Posterous, Blogger, and WordPress – are full of windy pontificators like me, so I’m just a face in the crowd there. I’m not really at home on Tumblr, which is really more about images and memes and being cutting-edge. I like Tumblr, though, more as a subscriber (and occasional reposter) than as a contributor. Few people on Tumblr read me, but I read and look at lots of people on Tumblr, and enjoy them very much.

 

 

Then there is (or was) Pinterest Loren.

 

 

I heard about Pinterest, and decided to try it. I was sort of charmed by it; I liked the mosaic layout of the pages, and the variety, and the ease with which you can browse, and the way you can click through a pinned image to an original website. In no time at all, Pinterest Loren had lots of stuff pinned: funny pictures, and cute puppies and kitties, and cute G-rated men, and pretty landscapes, and . . .

 

 

OMG.

 

 

Pinterest Loren was a sixteen-year-old girl.

 

 

I deactivated Pinterest Loren not long ago. I don’t think he/she will be back anytime soon.

 

 

I think I did the world a favor.

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Internet identities

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I had a acquaintance some years ago who was active on every single social-networking site: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. He was anxious to make a name for himself. More than a name: an image.

 

 

(This is not me, by the way, so get that idea out of your head. It’s not one of those “I have a friend who . . .” things. This is a real story about someone else. You know I always tell the truth about myself. Well, most of the time.)

 

 

My friend's LinkedIn image was professional: he'd had more jobs than you could shake a stick at. He was all over the place in his profession, rising from level to level. You could trace his career growth on a graph, if you wanted to: manager, director, executive director –

 

 

Except that it wasn’t true. I knew that he'd actually lost his previous job and wasn't working at all at the moment. So: he was either making it all up, or misdating the information he was posting. I didn’t want to call him out – who wants to destroy a career? – but I had a strange feeling about all of this, as I watched him go from untruth to untruth on LinkedIn.

 

 

Then there was his Facebook persona.

 

 

On Facebook, he was Mister Philanthropist. He was all over the place: giving speeches here, making heartfelt appeals there. He was amazing. Some of his Facebook friends were buying it: he was getting “Congratulations!” comments right and left on his various philanthropic / altruistic posts.

\

 

(I, on the other hand, knew that he might or might not be making this stuff up. And, even if he wasn't, he was certainly making the LinkedIn stuff up. And, for those of us who were following him on both LinkedIn and Facebook: we had to ask ourselves how he could possibly have the time to do all these things – be a stellar businessman and a stellar philanthropist – at the same time?)

 

 

So what’s a girl to do?

 

 

I could have messaged him, or confronted him. So could lots of other people, I imagine.

 

 

But I didn’t.  Oh, well, I thought.  It’ll blow up eventually. And, when it does, it will be spectacular.

 

 

And we (who knew the truth) will be able to say: “Oh, I had no idea! I thought it all sounded a little out of kilter. But I really didn’t know he was doing all of that . . . “

 

 

A warning to all of you fibbers out there: the truth will come out.

 

 

The Internet is built that way.

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Etsy

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Etsy is an interesting website on which craftsy people sell craftsy things: soap, jewelry, clothing, ceramics, jewelry, homegrown herbs, jewelry.

 

 

I like that the Internet has brought back a kind of corner-store mentality to the world.  I like seeing that people are making artisanal candles and selling them on the Web.

 

 

I only wish those craftsy people were getting rich. 

 

 

But most of them are not.

 

 

Back in the faraway 1990s, I used to sell lots of stuff on eBay: vintage phonograph records, books, memorabilia.  It did not make me rich, and it was often a pain in the keester.  Finally I gave it up.

 

 

A eFriend of mine crafts beautiful little accessory items and sells them on Etsy.  She spends hours making the items, and more hours photographing / describing / posting them.  She is not yet independently wealthy, however.  (Do yourself a favor and check out her things.  They are very pretty.  I myself have purchased two of her handcrafted necklaces, to give as gifts, and they were both very pretty.)

 

 

One of the other things I like about Etsy is that, when you join, it gives you a “taste test,” to see what kinds of things you like.  Kind of like being at the optician: this, or this? Except that it’s: chair, or necklace?  Pottery, or scarf?

 

 

Afterward, it gives you a list of things you might like.

 

 

The first time I took it, it recommended two basic categories of things to me: French Provincial furniture, and silver skull jewelry.

 

 

Go figure.

 

 

The Etsy algorithm knows my inner soul!

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Verizon FIOS

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We got an email about a month ago from our landlords, informing us that there would be a Verizon FIOS meet-and-greet in our apartment courtyard at the end of May.

 

 

Our longtime internet / phone / TV carrier (which began with C and ended with OX) had excellent customer service, but had been getting progressively more expensive over the past few years. So, we thought, why not go have some punch and pie, and hear what the nice FIOS man has to say?

 

 

As it turned out, we were pretty much the only people who turned up at the meet-and-greet. (I had a very small Italian cold-cuts sandwich.) It was hosted by a cute young salesman, who talked us into switching from C + OX to FIOS. (He also offered us a whole boatload of gift cards, which very much sweetened the deal for Partner and me. We love gift cards.)

 

 

The actual conversion happened about a week ago. Poor Partner: he was home alone when the Verizon installer came. It took the installer forty-five minutes to find the place where the cabling enters our apartment. (It was in my clothes closet, incidentally.) Then it took another four hours for the installer to set everything up.

 

 

Then it took us another three hours in the evening after the installer left to get everything up and working.

 

 

The process wasn’t perfect, but then: what is? I got the master account working, and then started creating email accounts. I bogged down for a while, but finally figured it out.

 

 

Conclusions:

 

 

·       The FIOS network is faster (slightly).

·       The TV service (especially in HD) is clearer and has less interference.

·       We get more features (like caller ID and voice mail) for less money (at least for the next two years).

·       I vaguely recollect that, ten years ago when we went from ATT to C+OX, we went through the same kind of hell week.

 

 

More than a week has passed. I’m getting pretty much the same amount of email I was getting before; everyone has found me, even some of the spammers. I’m getting used to typing my much longer (but very descriptive) email address. And did I mention how much faster the Net is?

 

 

Shop around, kids. Shop around.

 

 

There’s gift cards in them thar hills.

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Logos Quiz

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I was browsing drearily on my iPad the other day, looking for some new diversion, and found something called the “Logos Quiz.” Stupidly I assumed (for various reasons) that this was a Bible quiz. And I’m just a fool for Bible games and such.

 

 

But the game is far more insidious than any Bible quiz.

 

 

You are presented with a table of several dozen advertising logos: images, typography, color schemes. None is complete. You must identify them.

 

 

At first I was sniffingly scornful. Some ad agency put this together, I thought; product placement as a game.   Hmm. Starbucks, of course. Firefox. Barbie . . .

 

 

Then: goodness, I thought. This is harder than it looks.

 

 

There are (I think) eight levels; I’ve only made it to Level Five. The brands aren’t just American, but worldwide. Some are achingly familiar; others are almost-but-not-quite obvious.  (Quick, describe the insignia on a Saab!) Sometimes it’s just a font, or a combination of colors.

 

 

I was amazed when I opened the Financial Times on Monday and found that the redoubtable Lucy Kellaway had  written this week's column on the Logos Quiz! (I was angry, a little, because I’d already made up my mind to write about it, and Lucy stole most of my thunder by making most of my points before I could. But she writes so much better than I do, so there’s no real harm done on the cosmic scale.)

 

 

Here are some of her points, and mine:

 

 

Point One: Advertising / logos are insidious. They dig into your brain and nest there. You will be amazed at what you recognize viscerally. (Quick! Sketch me the Nike logo! I know you can!)

 

 

Point Two: Things that are obvious to me as a fifty-four-year-old are not obvious to a twenty-year-old, and vice versa. (Lucy, close to my age, recognized the Kodak logo right away, but her young son didn’t; he recognized the Xbox logo right away, but was scandalized that his mother didn’t.)

 

 

Point Three (Which Lucy Didn’t Make In Her FT Article): The companies must be giggling about how this game is working in their favor. People are actually Googling their logos and corporate branding!  (My first thought, when I saw the game, was that it was somehow sponsored by a corporation or group of corporations.  I still think that this might be true. Who knows?)

 

 

Postscript: I don’t know if you read Thomas Gibson. He’s a little too FutureWorld even for me. But I read one of his novels, “Pattern Recognition,” a few years ago, and it made a little impression on me, mostly because its main character is a media consultant who reacts to corporate logos on an instinctive level.  You know the Michelin Man? She has a reaction to him that resembles anaphylactic shock.

 

 

I think I understand that. I used to feel the same way about Speedy Alka-Seltzer.

 

 

(Now: can someone explain to me the logo with the letter “N” shooting a laser beam off into space?)

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New improved websites!

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I do not read the New York Times online much anymore, as I have said elsewhere.  I do, however, read David Pogue.  I hate his smarminess, but I love his advice, and he’s right about technology most of the times, and he has taught me a lot.

 

One of his recent articles (which you may or may not be able to read, depending on your subscription status) talks about kids and their familiarity with technology.  In short, David says to stop telling stories about how your eight-year-old helped you fix your iPad, or reset your LCD projector for you.  Your children were born into a technology-rich world; of course they know how to do these things.  (I think back to when I was a kid, growing up with TV.  I was completely comfortable with it, but my parents treated it as if it were breakable.  I wasn’t allowed to touch the channel knob (yes, channel knob, no remote controls in those days) until I was maybe ten or eleven.)

 

 

So: at the age of fifty-four years, I am a knackered old horse in a field full of Kentucky Derby winners.  The young people are laughing at me and running circles around me, as I complain and try to figure out how to format something in Microsoft Word or Excel.

 

 

But, kids, can I make a couple of suggestions?

 

 

-        One: logout buttons.  I pay a lot of my online bills at the end of the month, in one long session; I log out of one site and into another.  The login is easy; how many ways, after all, are there to format a “username” / “password” page?  But the logout – sheesh!  Sometimes it’s a tiny six-point “logout” at the top of the page; other times it’s a big red button at the very bottom of the page, down below where I haven’t scrolled.  Suggestion: make it a nice visible red button at the (let’s say) top right of the screen, with the words LOG OFF written on it.  Make this an industry / Internet standard.  This would be very nice.

 

-        Two: checkout pages.  They’re all different. Some want my life story; others want my name and credit card, and that’s it.  Let’s standardize them. What’s the harm?  I would think that this kind of standardization would appeal to the banks and credit-card companies, and everyone else besides.  It would be kind of like shopping in a real flesh-and-blood store: the checkout process in Home Goods resembles the checkout process in TJ Maxx, and Walmart, and Stop & Shop, and CVS.  Is there any reason it shouldn’t?

 

 

-        Three: passwords.  I know my own system.  I use a simple password for things I don’t care about, like logging onto a news website; I use a more complex password for anything financial.  As a result, I get all mixed up.  I try systems and mnemonics and all kinds of things.  I end up writing my passwords down, which we are told is exactly the wrong thing to do.  Can someone please figure out a better way to do this?  Thumbprints?  Scanning my driver’s license?  Retinal imaging?

 

 

 

These are my brilliant ideas.

 

 

 

Now I, the old knackered horse, will go lie down in the field and die.

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Purging my Facebook page of undesirables

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Facebook has gotten labyrinthine and arcane. It’s almost impossible to find your settings, or your privacy settings.  And just try finding a list of the things you’ve “liked” over the past few years.

 

 

I finally cleaned out my list.  Cereal companies!  Pasta-sauce companies!  Actors and actresses I liked in a couple of movies!

 

 

Most of all, however, it’s left-wing detritus.  I’m left-wing myself, and (like everyone else) I like being told that I’m correct in my beliefs, and that the other side of the aisle is crazy.  But people like Keith Olbermann are so shrill!  Olbermann is our Limbaugh: a hectoring name-caller.  He reposted a silly thing back in February or March about Rick Santorum being a porn addict, which was widely attacked and which he withdrew, lamely saying that it was “a joke,” and that people had obviously misunderstood. 

 

 

Also, he posts ten or fifteen times a day.  Try that on your Facebook feed.  (It used to be your “wall.”  Now it’s – what? – your “timeline.”  Or whatever.  I can’t keep up with the new Facebook language, and I frankly don’t much care.)

 

 

Also: Olbermann was fired by his most current employer.  He is evidently unbearable.  Which is proof positive that you don’t have to be a Republican to be a jerk.

 

 

Anyway.  Who else have I purged from my Facebook friends?  Goodbye, Neil Patrick Harris.  Goodbye, Cape Cod Potato Chips.  Goodbye, Quaker Oats.  Goodbye, some odd anti-Dick Cheney group I must have joined during the Bush administration.

 

 

My Facebook feed is slightly less cluttered now.

 

 

Now I can read all about my real friends.

 

 

Like George Takei.

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The Liebster Award

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I was surprised and flattered on Monday morning to receive a note from the talented Melissa Hassard, who edits and contributes to the poetry / prose / photography collective “20 Lines A Day,” telling me that she’d nominated me for something called the Liebster Award.  This is a nice little accolade given to bloggers, recognizing them for their contributions. 

 

 

It comes with a couple of rules:

 

 

-        You must thank your nominator in your blog, and link back to his/her blog.

-        You must display the award itself (see above).

-        You must pass the award on to five other blogs (preferably those with small numbers of readers), and notify them of their award.

 

 

Well, thanks to Melissa for the award.  And do check out “20 Lines A Day”; you’ll find some excellent stuff (including Melissa’s poetry, which was the first thing there to catch my eye.)

 

 

The nicest thing about the Liebster is that it needs to be passed along.

 

 

(I think a lot of us began this thinking it was only a matter of time before we became a combination of the Huffington Post and Martha Stewart Omnimedia.  We have learned.  But we have also had a wonderful time.

 

 

(And now, here we are winning awards!)

 

 

Here are my five nominees:

 

 

-        Topsytasty.  This is a very well-written little series of articles, mostly about food, but also about the author’s early life in Rhode Island and his current adventures in the Pacific Northwest.  The author is also the younger son of my frenemy Apollonia, and he shares her wit and eye for detail.

-        Going Dutch.  This is mostly photography, with food and anecdotes thrown in; the author / photographer is originally from the Philippines, and now lives with her family in the Netherlands.  She takes wonderful scenery / flower photographs – just the kind I try to take, except that mine never turn out right.  Hers are always beautiful.

-        Well, That’s Just Great / Well, That’s Just Ducky.  This is a twofer!  The former is written by Anthony Giffen, a very clever Floridian who always gives me a laugh (you might say he’s like Dave Barry, but funny); the latter is written by Anthony’s dog Ducky, who speaks very movingly about how much he likes to chew things up. 

-        Tangly Cottage Journal.  I have a lot of childhood memories invested in the Pacific coast of Washington state, where we used to take our seaside vacations.  This blog, by a couple of professional gardeners living in the small fishing town of Ilwaco, is a combination of prose and photos, very casual, but charming (and, like “Going Dutch,” with lots of good flower photography).  Even if you’ve never visited Ilwaco, this blog will remind you of your own favorite little beach town.

-        Crypt of Wrestling.  Well, you knew I had unusual tastes, didn’t you?  This blog covers the waterfront of lowbrow 1960s/1970s culture: comic-book advertisements, movie posters, Rat Fink memorabilia, album covers.  It gives me an adrenaline injection of Early Space Age nostalgia every time I look at it. 

 

 

And hundreds of others.

 

 

You know who you are. 

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Goodbye, New York Times

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The only newspaper to which I subscribe – in the sense that there’s actually an ink-and-newsprint newspaper outside my door in the morning – is the Financial Times.  I began buying it some years ago because I liked the crossword puzzle.  Then, gradually, I found its dry British take on world politics far more appealing than the MacWorld version offered by American news sources, and its business coverage was intricate and mysterious.  I don’t know much about economics, but I have always been intrigued by the subject, and I always feel, when I read FT articles about the future of the Euro or the BRICs or Emerging Markets or black swans that I am trembling on the edge of recognition and understanding. 

 

 

Also, I like the salmon-tinted paper it’s printed on.  (Somebody on the bus asked me once: “What’s the matter with your newspaper, mister?  It’s a funny color.”)

 

 

Then, of course, there is the New York Times. 

 

 

I have been a faithful follower of the NYT (both print and online) for many years.  It has nourished me in many ways.  I like its rhythm: world news, national news, local (meaning New York City) news, op-ed, culture.  It’s unabashedly liberal, and I welcome its confirmation of my beliefs and prejudices (as do we all).  And the writing is generally excellent.

 

 

A little less than a year ago, the NYT announced that its website would no longer be free.  For full access, you have to cough up fifteen bucks a month.  (That’s just digital access, mind you.  A lot of porn sites cost less than that.  Don’t ask me how I know.)  You can still read twenty articles a month for free; you can also access the Times through search engines, etc.  But if you want to romp around on their websites – culture, videos, travel, food, movies, editorials, all the things they do so well – you have to pay.

 

 

Hm, I thought back in February 2011, and prepared to do without.

 

 

Then, for no apparent reason, the Cadillac division of General Motors (with which I have no real connection) gifted me via email with a nine months’ online subscription.

 

 

It expired on December 31.

 

 

Goodbye, Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins, both of whom I read consistently, and often laughed aloud as I did so, and quoted their nastier/funnier lines to my friends.  If I were a conservative (shiver!), I would probably find them strident and silly, kind of like the way I actually feel about Rush Limbaugh.  But I agree with them.  So nyah nyah!

 

 

Goodbye, David Brooks and Ross Douthat.  The former is a cheesy social critic who plays Edmund Burke, but not very well; the latter is the token-conservative editorialist, who takes a topic – like, let’s say, Ron Paul – and finds something to like in him after all.  Also, Ross is Catholic (but then again, in his columns, he almost always reminds you of that). 

 

 

Goodbye, Bill Cunningham, bicycling around New York and taking photos of people and their outfits.  May you live forever.

 

 

Goodbye, Mark Bittman.  You got a little Hollywood over the past few years, but your writing is excellent and your recipes are very good. 

 

 

Goodbye, Frank Bruni.  He used to do restaurant reviews; now he does general (and often political) commentary, and does it very well. 

 

 

Goodbye, Seth Kugel, the Frugal Traveler, so much better and more entertaining than the guy who was the Frugal Traveler before him.

 

 

Goodbye Nick Kristof and Paul Krugman, for cheerfully leading me into the coming political / economic apocalypse.  You’ve both been right consistently.  Keep at it.

 

 

And all the rest.

 

 

I’ll still be checking in, maybe twenty times a month, or maybe more.

 

 

(Is $15/month too much to pay?  Maybe.  We’ll see.  I may start jonesing for Gail and Maureen and Paul and Frank in a few months and give in.)

 

 

But for now: goodbye, my dear and lovely friends, goodbye.

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SOPA, PIPA, piracy, lending, and freedom

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I wrote about SOPA and PIPA a few weeks ago.  It now looks as if Congress is going to try again to push these pieces of legislation through, in a very slightly altered format.  The corporations are pushing them, you see; they feel that they’re losing money, and that the only way to prevent this is to prevent people from posting stuff like songs, and quotes, and interviews, and video clips, and chapters from books, and maybe sometimes whole books.

 

 

I hate the idea of an author or an artist losing money.  Authors and artists deserve to be paid for their work.  However: I keep thinking of the analogy of lending.  I buy a book, and it’s good, and I want my friends to share the pleasure, so I lend it to them.  Am I violating a law?  (Last summer I read “The Hunger Games,” and enjoyed it enough to go out and buy the two sequels in hard cover.  To this date I have not read them; I’m saving them.  But I have lent them to at least five people, who have adored them.  Have I done anything wrong?)

 

 

I was delighted to read the following from an author I enjoy very much, Neil Gaiman:

 

 

“… Places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent.

 

“I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

 

“What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”

 

 

I apologize for the long quote.  But he speaks well, doesn’t he?

 

 

I asked myself his questions.  When I was in school, how did I discover my favorite authors? 

 

 

Let’s see:

 

 

-        I stupidly bought “The Two Towers” through the old Scholastic Books network (do they still exist?) and couldn’t make head or tail of it.  (It begins with the line: “Aragorn sped up the hill,” for God’s sake.  Who the hell is Aragorn?)  My eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Lorenz, lent me his copy of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” and then it all made sense.  And then he lent me “The Return of the King.” He was a good man.

-        Our school librarian, no doubt now long dead, Catherine Schwarz, was always feeding me books through the library system.  It was through her that I discovered E. B. White, and Don Marquis, and Harry Golden, and T. S. Eliot.

-        In the Battle Ground Public Library, where I spent occasional evenings waiting to be picked up after school, they used to perch books up on the tops of the shelves.  Among them: “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “A Wizard of Earthsea.”  I read both, and now I am a fanatical lover of both Thomas Pynchon and Ursula LeGuin.

 

 

Do libraries pirate things?

 

 

Did Mr. Lorenz pirate Tolkien when he lent me his copies?

 

 

Do I pirate the Hunger Games books when I lend them?

 

 

I don’t think so.

 

 

Keep fighting back against these Internet-control bills, kids.

 

 

I think this may be an important battle to win.

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SOPA and PIPA

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As a citizen of the Internet, I assume you’re aware of SOPA/PIPA.  It looks as if both houses of Congress have tabled the original versions of the legislation (largely because of the huge anti-SOPA/PIPA movement here on the Net), and are rewriting them to be more specific.

 

 

I am uninformed, and can only tell you my feelings on these pieces of legislation.

 

 

Very simply: I was alarmed by them. 

 

 

Supposedly they were all about stopping piracy, and that’s fine.  But the corporations pushing the legislation were playing a double game: they were pretending that it was all about cracking down on websites (mostly outside the USA) that illegally distribute movies and music and such, while they were really thinking of the law’s very real application within the USA as well.

 

 

Did you notice the word “corporations” in the above paragraph?

 

 

Exactly.

 

 

“Piracy” can be very broadly defined.  “Piracy” could be something as innocent as a Tumblr blogger posting Disney images.  “Piracy” could be posting a link to a song you like, or a video clip. 

 

 

Which means that almost all of us out here posting our favorite quotes and links and clips on our blogs and on Facebook are pirates!

 

 

Not so, not so, croon the pro-legislation people.  We’re only after the real pirates.  David Pogue, who alternates between intelligence and toadydom, decided that the Google / Wikipedia approach – to black out their websites in protest – was an overreaction, and that they were siding with the pirates.

 

 

Well, yes, David, they were.  This is because we are all part of a big incestuous system called the Internet, and it’s all about trading information.  And Google, and Wikipedia, and all the rest, were perfectly aware that, once the legislation was in place, it would not be used merely to go after Swedish and Korean and Russian sites, but to go after sites here in the USA too.  Sites like mine and yours and everyone's.

 

 

How much of a pirate am I?  Not very much.  Last summer I watched the “Thor” preview on a probably-pirate Russian website, but – hey – a two-minute trailer?  If I go to Hell, or prison, it will not be for that particular transgression.  And sometimes I scoop up images to use in my blogs or on Facebook, and I do not always inquire about their copyrights.  And sometimes I quote books and poems and all kinds of things, and I do not add complete copyright information (though I try hard to credit the authors).

 

 

But I suspect that I too would be in violation at some point down the road if SOPA/PIPA in their original forms were enacted.

 

 

Because that’s what corporations do.  They restrict access. 

 

 

The Internet is a zoo. I love the depictions of it on shows like “Futurama” and “The Simpsons,” with people actually entering it as if it were a place, flying around among buildings marked GOOGLE and FACEBOOK and ONLINE GAMBLING and NAPSTER.  And that’s exactly what it's like. 

 

 

Frankly, it has always seemed to me that I have the right to share media with my friends.  It’s like handing a newspaper or magazine to another person so that they can read something.  I paid for it; am I the only person who can read it?  Really?  And how exactly are you going to enforce that?

 

 

I didn’t call my congressmen this time.  But if this legislation comes up again, in anything like its current form, I will.

 

 

So there, David Pogue.

 

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The iPhone 5: dream big!

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Tatiana, one of my student employees, sent me a link to a YouTube video a few weeks ago.  “You have to see this,” she messaged.

 

 

I was as blown away as she was.

 

 

It it (if you’re too lazy to follow the link) a conceptual video of the features the iPhone 5 might have. In brief: as thin as a playing card. Able to display a virtual keyboard (which can be manipulated and enlarged) on the desktop below the phone. Able to display 3-D graphics.

 

 

This is delicious.

 

 

Now, I realize this is all pie-in-the-sky.  It’s a wish list.  Of course it is!  The technology isn’t there yet.

 

 

But you know what?  It will be. And sooner than you think.

 

 

As I’ve said before, I am no friend of Apple.  I was one of their biggest fans, back in the 1980s and 1990s.  Then they became provincial and unfriendly, and I realized that the PC world – broad and dull as it was – was the world of the future.

 

 

Well, here we are in 2012, and what do you know? The iPhone and the iPad are way ahead of the pack.

 

 

Believe me, I know.  I bought a Kobo Literati reader about a year ago. It was slow, unhappy, pathetic.  Then a B&N Nook (reconditioned): nicer, but unable to do a lot of stuff.

 

 

Then the office gifted me an iPad, and it was as if someone turned on the light in a very dark room.

 

 

The iPhone 5 video is laden with comments about how ridiculous it is: “maybe in 2050,” one of them snarks.

 

 

Listen, junior: a lifetime ago – in 1995 – we were just getting the Internet in our offices.  We didn’t know quite what it would do, but we were very excited.  I remember one of my officemates telling me that she’d actually logged into the Aer Lingus website! I ran over to see.  And it was –

 

 

A picture of an airplane.  And nothing more.

 

 

This is it? we said. This is what the Internet is all about?

 

 

Well, of course it wasn’t.   Seventeen years later, we’re streaming movies and TV directly to our mobile devices and our televisions. We’re shopping online.  We’re doing everything online.

 

 

And these stupid commentators think that it will take another forty years to achieve a few more advances? 

 

 

I don’t think so.

 

 

We must be good at this evolution stuff.  We do it so fast.

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Every good blog deserves favor

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Apollonia’s younger son recently began a nice little blog, mostly about food, called Topsytasty.com.  It is very well-written and entertaining, and I wouldn’t have expected anything else from any offspring of Apollonia.  (He wrote a very nice little piece about Apollonia on her birthday.)  Lioness that she is, she is very proud of him.  But she worries.  “I don’t know if anybody’s reading it,” she told me.  “I mean, I am.  But who else is?”


“That’s the way of the Internet,” I told her.  “Who knows?  He could get discovered.  He might catch on.  Look: I post mine on four different websites every day, and I’m lucky to get maybe fifty reads total.”


“Huh,” she said.


“Well, some days I catch fire,” I said.  “But most days are slow.  I don’t write like Dickens, after all.”


“You write like the dickens,” she said whimsically.  (When she was a girl, back before electricity and indoor plumbing, “the dickens” was a euphemism for Satan.)


Anyway.  Go read that young man’s blog.  You will pick up a few good recipes, which is not nothing; also, as I said, he writes well, which is not all that common these days.


And, as a side benefit, you will make Apollonia happy. 


And, believe me, that is no mean feat.

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Loren Williamses of the world, unite!

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About a year ago I wrote about Googling myself and finding all kinds of other people with my name.

 

 

Well, I did it again, just for kicks, and I have to tell you that I appear to be proliferating.

 

 

First of all, I know you're thinking that I didn't just Google myself as a scientific experiment. Well, of course not! I am anxious to see myself come up first, and second, and third, in a Google search. I am hungry to become famous, without doing anything to deserve it. This is called “being a Kardashian.”

 

 

Loren Williams the fly-fisherman and expert on fly-tying is still easily the most popular of us. He dominates the Loren Williams community on Google.

 

 

Next down the line are Loren Williams at Georgia Tech and Loren Williams the Canadian artist. LJW/GA is a handsome Christian scientist who specializes in cellular biology; LJW/CA is a Francophone woman in Montreal who does lovely photography. Go figure!

 

 

A new figure is Loren Williams, the teenaged athlete from Iowa. There are lots of photos of him; he's an all-state wrestling champion, I guess. Go figure! (The football player from last year is gone. He was “Lorenzo,” however, so he wasn't really a full-fledged member of the community.)

 

 

Also still lurking around the edges is Loren Williams of Maryland, convicted of both real estate fraud and sexual offenses. And wouldn't you know that he's the only one with whom I share a middle initial?

 

 

I'm international, of course. In Scotland I am a type of mattress. In New Zealand I'm a competitive rower.

 

 

Every year, something new. Loren Williams the chemistry professor at Western Washington University! Loren Williams the dentist in Pikeville, Kentucky! Another Loren Williams the dentist in San Mateo, California!

 

 

(Also, a few months ago, Loren Williams, originally of Cheyenne, Wyoming died at the age of 69. Actually, according to the obituary, he “went home to be with Christ.” I hope he's at peace.)

 

 

But the best new addition is Loren Williams from Tomball, Texas. I quote:

 

 

“I was born on November 19, 1998! . . . I love animals. I have a puppy and a dog. They are so sweet! I have a sister who is 25 at the time. She is sweet... but you know how siblings can be!!!! I will be going into 5th grade this year and I am so nervous!!

 

 

Bless her heart.

 

 

The whole Loren Williams family is out here rooting for her.

 

 

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