I’ll have a Mayfly and Tamagotchi Cheezburger to go, please

I still have so much to learn about blogging, so I decided one day to go beyond my daily fix at Lorelle on WordPress to see what others could teach me.

Boy, did I learn a lot.

Did you know that one-quarter of all blogs are Mayflies in disguise? That’s right. Hatched overnight, they fly around for a few hours, then die by the tens of thousands on your front porch. So if about 120,000 new blogs are coming online every day - down from a peak of about 175,000 per day a few months ago - that means that 40,000 are created, then left to die of neglect after one post.

The 90’s-crazed Tamagotchi used to get more love and respect, but then again, you actually had to pay for one of them.

I also learned that something momentous happened to this blog about two weeks ago. Did you notice? Neither did I. Apparently it managed to slip through the six-month barrier, an invisible wall which many new bloggers hit but never go beyond. They start out with high hopes and dreams, get bogged down when expectations fail to meet reality or they simply run out of things to say, then chuck it for something else. Do they get tired of playing with their Tamagotchi blog?

Another thing impossible to miss when you go searching for info about blogging is that YOU TOO CAN MAKE $$$ from YOUR BLAWG!!!

If I had a euro for every time I stumbled upon a blog which had that message, I wouldn’t even have to consider blogging for money.

I got the feeling while slogging through the wasteland which is marketing blogs about how to market your blog, that if everyone is telling everyone else how to sell their blog, they’re basically trying to make money by doing each other’s laundry. It ain’t gonna happen, unless of course you get some sucker to come in from the outside who plunks down hard-earned PayPal for their ideas, which I have a sneaking hunch will all boil down to this:

1. Set up a blog called How to Make Money From Your Blog.

2. Get suckers to pay for the information.

On the content side, one thing that everyone hammers away at is: keep your blog focused. But what does focused mean? If it means always talking about the same subject, or talking about the same branch of knowledge, forget it. Some pull it off beautifully, but I’d have to split this into a dozen different blogs to do that. A left-wing loony political opinion blog, a sorely neglected advice column blog, a fake newspaper reporter’s blog, a journalism and media blog, a 70’s nostalgia blog, a pissy rant blog… If you feel so passionately about so many things, how can you just say OK, online I’m going to do one thing and one thing only? This is me, fuzziness and bad habits and all.

Another thing is SEO - Search Engine Optimization. Do everything you can to make sure that Google, Yahoo and Co. are spitting out your blog when the masses type in keywords you’ve tagged on your posts or put in your headline.

I must be doing something right then, because anyone looking to spank naked, screaming personality-disordered 9-year-old grannies in a German sauna while holding a copy of Monocle Magazine turned to pictures of totally shaved buggy-eyed zoo animals copulating, they always land at the right place.

I think that if everyone managed to optimize her blog for search engine,s we’d all be back at square one, where content rules and only the most interesting blogs would stand out.

Or would they?

I challenge any so-called blog expert to claim they could have predicted the phenomenon which is I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, a collection of photoshopped cat pics and mindless comments in pseudo-English which also happens to have been in the top three of the 1.2 million blogs on WordPress for months now. Yes, it’s funny to millions, which is a huge plus. Yes, it’s focused. Yes, it has perfected SEO, but can you really call it a blog when you have almost no original content? It’s hugely popular, but it’s like comparing battleships to canoes. They both float on water, but that’s about it.

Who knows whether in five years blogs will be just another thing which came and went, taken over by Second Life or micro-blogging like Twitter… but that’s a whole new post’s worth, and according to the experts this one is already too long and has failed to stick to one subject…

© 2007 lettershometoyou
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Has anyone stolen your writing lately?

Well I had a post in the bag all ready to go, and then this comes up…

Lorelle on WordPress said a while ago that getting your blog content stolen isn’t ever going to be a matter of if, but when.

But still, I thought: OK, I’ll deal with it when it happens.

So now it’s happened.

Some”blogger” in China is harvesting WordPress.com blogs at a tremendous rate, sticking them up on his site as if they were his own, slapping Google Adsense ads on it to boot.

I would provide a link to the blog just to prove my point, but therein lies the problem: If you point to him and say “LOOK, he’s stolen my stuff,” and provide a link, all he is going to get are more hits and more money from Google.

Since I raised a stink in WordPress’ forums the past couple of days, the “blogger” has taken down my content, but that still leaves I don’t know how many bloggers on WordPress - and perhaps elsewhere - whose material is being sucked through the intertubes for deposit at some slime-hill called… damn, I can’t say it. I won’t say it!

I left a comment at another WordPress blogger’s blog to let her know that her photos had also been stolen, but I have no time to extend that courtesy to everyone.

So all I have to give is an Open Letter To You, Thieving Blogger.

I’ll make an exception this time. You MAY steal this and place it on your blog front and centre:

I am a thief.

This blog is a fraud.

I am trying to make money off other people.

I have absolutely nothing to contribute to the millions of blogs already out there, so I will be a parasite.

Please click on the Google Adsense ads, which drape these stolen goods like stinking vapour.

I will make money the easy way that way.

That is all.

Perhaps I was just born unlucky.

PS: If you want to check whether your content is being thrown up on another site and passed off as original, check out copyscape. Just type in your URL. Who knows, you might get an eye-opener like I did.

© 2007 lettershometoyou
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Various needlepoint projects

What are needlepoint projects, aside from something new I’ve stuck on the sidebar under that photo?

They’re things I’ve come across

things I’ve thought about

things I’ve lived through

things I’ve had to learn the hard way

things I’ve talked about

things I’ve written about

things I might write about

things which take a long time to work on

work through.

Life is a series of stitches. Day by day we weave another into the tapestry which forms the big picture. Laughter to brighten some here, grief to darken some there.

It makes a life. Birth and death are the frame, but the pattern is yours to choose.

No, I don’t do needlepoint. My mother has a collection of them, though. When I was growing up she always had one on the go. This one is called The Four Seasons, bought at Expo ‘67 in Montreal, completed in 1970 and now hanging in the living room to brighten the home of her closest friend. It’s about three-foot square, 100 stitches to the square inch. One of her smaller efforts, actually. Did them all while bringing up three boys and nursing full-time at a hospital. Click on it to see a much larger version.

I’d most likely get blood poisoning three minutes after picking up the needle, so these are my needlepoint projects. Trying to put a new one in every week, and will leave them on a new page. Let’s see what sort of pattern they weave.

They’ll go on a separate page, but for now, the first two stitches:

When we cannot find contentment in ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere. - François Rochefoucauld

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. - Albert Camus

Exporting paranoia: how the American war on terror is starting to terrorise Germany and how you can cope with it

For those of you who may have missed it over the weekend, press reports say that terrorists trained in Pakistan have slipped into Germany over the past little while. They’re planning to kill us innocent folk at random partly because the German army has 3,000 soldiers in Afghanistan working as part of the international force to piss off the poppy-growers rebuild the country.

I’m sure it all makes sense to our Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, whose efforts to scare the public into thinking they’re in danger of attack and to clamp down on civil liberties to combat a threat - real or imagined - has inspired the more artistic among the hoi polloi to start stencilling his image on the wall.

Oh, you remember the Stasi, don’t you? The State Security branch of the former East Germany? Spied on people - terrorised them?

Schaeuble is trying his best to push through measures which amount to the most invasive encroachment on civil liberties on German soil since the start of the Cold War. Scariest among them is his wish to allow online searches of people they just don’t like.

In other words, the government here would have the right to somehow secretly install a keylogger in your computer so they could track everything you do online. Every email, every search, every chat, every forum post. Everything.

How they would get beyond a well-maintained firewall is beyond me, but fortunately they’ve just told him he can’t have his way - at least not for now, anyway.

This all fits a pattern of course. The US Department of Homeland Security - a most Orwellian of labels if there ever was one - perfected the art of keeping the populace in a state of constant paranoia almost from the day it was formed a year or so after September 11, 2001. Anyone remember all those scares about white powder in envelopes a few years back? Duct tape? Orange Alerts? No surprise that this has been accompanied by an erosion of civil liberties including a warrantless surveillance program.

Like with everything else originating in the United States, it takes a few years to wash over onto our shores, but eventually it makes it here.

Is resistance futile? Perhaps not.

For those hoping to survive the coming onslaught of terror attacks in Germany, here are a few tips:

• Don’t walk, cycle, drive or take a taxi. In 2006 there were a total of about 5,000 traffic deaths in Germany. The media plays this as good news here, because the numbers have been declining every year from a high around 20,000 in 1970.
• Don’t take the train. You never know.
• Don’t take a bus. You’ve seen how they can blow apart so easily.
• Be suspicious of your neighbour, especially if he looks foreign. If you see a group of five or more, report them to the police. You never know.
• Don’t go shopping. Above all, avoid public markets and squares. You never know.
• Report fat people at once. That could actually be a suicide belt. You never know.
• Remind people that because the terror cell which perpetrated the attacks of September 11 camped out in a suburb of Hamburg, it could happen again.
• Keep the hype going by reminding people that Germany was targetted last year in a foiled suitcase bomb plot. Just don’t tell anyone that of the nearly 500 terrorist attacks or plots in the whole of Europe in 2006, that was the only one carried out by Islamists.
• The day the first terrorist attack hits, make sure you turn around and tell me, “I told you so.” To that I’ll respond: yeah, and in the meantime, another thousand people have died on roads in this country. Another 50,000 died in Hamburg during the Hiroshima of Germany. You think we’ve got problems today? Sure, there are always problems. LIFE is a problem. Deal with it. LIVE it.

Or have we forgotten what a great American once said? The only thing we have to fear is Fear itself.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Be real to one another and you could have a friend for life.

Dear all,

I had a lot of goals on my recent trip back home to Vancouver. Unencumbered by the obligations inherent in travelling with wife and daughter, I had free reign to paint my days as they came: kick over some old stones in my home town, get together with old friends - some of whom I hadn’t seen in more than 30 years - re-connect with family strung half-way across Western Canada, even interview my mother on camera about her life growing up in the good-old days.

One friend I met up with is Wendy. You’ll find her on my blogroll, Living Life Lusciously. Wendy is a special friend to me, not only because of who she is, but because I met her at a time I knew would never come again. I knew that with every turn of the corner, every new country, every new challenge in a three-month jaunt throughout most of western Europe, a month in Egypt, a half-year in Israel and a month in Turkey from Summer 1980 to Summer 1981 that I was living through an irreplaceable high point in my life.

I could go on and tell you the story of how I met Wendy and how I feel about our friendship, one that has endured a dormancy which would have snuffed most others. But she beat me to it! With her permission I’m copying verbatim something she wrote on her blog not long after we met up again for the first time in more than a quarter-century.

The only thing I’ve added is the bold at the bottom. As I read it I said out loud to myself: YES. This is so true. Live your life this way. It’s the only way.

Yesterday I met a friend I hadn’t seen in more than 27 years. Ian and I came across each other in the train station in Sevilla, Spain in 1980. He was standing with his backpack on, staring up at the train schedules when I spied him. The little Canadian flag stitched onto his pack seemed to wave at me like a tiny beacon of home.

We were both heading toward Portugal - the Algarve, then Lisbon. We were going the same direction and like travellers the world over, we threw our lot in together, sharing train rides, squashed bread and tomatoes from backpacks slung onto so many overhead racks, and hostels at the end of the world. The goal was to see as much of Europe as possible on the least amount of money.

After a week travelling together, we went separate ways at the border of Spain and France, I heading toward Switzerland to visit relatives and family and friends, Ian heading to Greece and points east. For a while we wrote each other, but then somehow the letters stopped, life got busy, moved on and we lost touch. Then one day last year the phone rang and I heard his voice. I knew it instantly. Thanks to the internet, Ian had found me. He lives half a world away, but this spring planned a visit to Canada. So we arranged to meet.

This is one of the thrills of a lifetime. Old friends return like the recesses of memory, suddenly coming into focus again, clear and bright like a glossy photo. In a few short moments, we picked up where we had left off, sensing the passing years melt away like butter in the sunshine. We reminisced about our travels, caught upon where the intervening years had taken us, and shared the details of our lives today.

These kinds of connections, made at different points in our lives, remain as part of us. The people with whom we share our lives don’t just come and go, disappearing forever without a trace. They all leave a mark, an impression, and that mark is woven into the fabric that makes a life. These people that we encounter are co-creators with us in the weaving of our lives, making us who and what we are. Even if we lose touch forever, they will always be a part of us.

That is way it is so important to be real in all our relationships. Artifice not only robs others of the truth you have to share, it prevents us from being known for who we really are. It prevents the heart connections that shape us and give our lives flavour. We need these connections to build our lives. These connections are the thrills of a lifetime - the love we share, the lives that touch ours, and those impressions that last forever. So I thank you, Ian, and all the others, who have helped to make my life. You are the thrills of a lifetime.

All for now,

Ian

PS: Please scroll down one to “Thrills of a Lifetime” if you click on the link to Wendy’s post. - I

Come on in! Don’t sit there, that’s for company

Dear all,

I was in a major German department store the other day with a friend who was shopping for a bathing suit. I had some time to kill during the try-on phase, so I dithered about.

In my ditherings I noticed a wad of scrap paper in my pockets, so I dumped it into a nearby garbage can.

Clerk: That’s not a garbage can.

Me: But it looks like a garbage can.

Clerk: But it’s not a garbage can.

Me: It sure looks like a garbage can.

Clerk: (getting testy) But it’s NOT a garbage can.

Me: So where’s the garbage can?

Clerk: Right here.

Me: (noticing cushioned lid) It looks like a stool.

Clerk: It’s not a stool.

Me: (smiling) It sure looks like a stool.

Clerk: (not smiling.) Under the lid is where you put the garbage.

Note to major German department store: For the past 150 years since their invention by itinerant farm labourer Elmer Schmedlapp in Akron Ohio, USA, large cylindrical thingies made of galvanised steel have been considered by most of the civilised world to be Boeing jets garbage cans. Store productivity level would skyrocket if your clerks spent more time stocking shelves and less time telling customers the garbage cans aren’t garbage cans. Or they might simply take longer coffee breaks. Beats me.

All for now,

Ian

PS: I was going to submit this to Overheard in the Office, but since it happened to me directly, that would be cheating. That site, like its sister site Overheard in New York, are recent re-discoveries and have become daily summer brain candy.

PPS: For a sample discussion in English about Germans and stores, click here.

Why you have to go through hell and back (Part 2)

I’ve been putting off posting Part Two of Hell and Back because the entire episode makes me cringe with embarassment and a bit of regret and horror, but since  I’m usually true to my word, I’m just going to have to plow through with it. Given myself one hour and whatever’s written up ’til then I’m going to post and, uh… to hell with it.

It all had to do with the fact that 16 athletes all wanted to get a shot at eight open starting positions on the University of British Columbia’s two eight-man rowing crews. The year was 1983, and we were all young, foolish and eager to please.

After nearly three months of strenuous training on and off the water, the day which until then had only been whispered about was finally upon us: Initiation Day.

The guys already on crew had set the day out before us. We met at a bare, concrete block changing room at the edge of a rugby field at the far side of campus and were given our instructions. We were split up into four groups of four and given a list of tasks to perform, with the warning that we were not allowed to talk to another group should we accidentally run into one. And no shirking! The organisers had watchers posted at designated locations and would know if we’d failed to do what we were told.

The tasks seemed to be designed either to bewilder or humiliate us, but little did we know the humiliation that was to follow once we returned at 6pm with tales to tell.

Among our tasks was: buy a jar of olives, a block of ice and dixie cups. What the hell are we supposed to do with them, we asked? No matter, just do it.

Oh, and streak - for those who forget, that means on a rainy Saturday afternoon in late November with the streets crowded with early Christmas shoppers, take off all your clothes and run from the Hotel Vancouver across the square and over the steps of the old courthouse to a van waiting on Howe Street.

For those who’ve done that sort of thing, no problem, but for us it was the ultimate in daring. We could be arrested! Kicked out of school! What would our PARENTS say?

That was thankfully the last task of the day before we headed back to the rugby pavilion to meet the other groups and begin part two of the initiation.

Each team had to designate an orator. As the mouthiest of the bunch, I was thrown up on a table and started to recount the day’s activities.

“Show us your joke, show us your joke, show us your joke!”

So I did. Pants down, cheering, laughter, beer bottles shaken and fizzed all over me.

Next up, we finally found out what the jar of olives, the blocks of ice and dixie cups were for.

Everyone had to strip naked and line up in four rows of four at one end of the room with an empty dixie cup on the floor in front of the first man. At the opposite end of the room one olive lay on each of the four blocks of ice.

Try to picture it: the place is cramped and sweaty, you’re standing naked on a concrete floor being sprayed with beer by a bunch of jerks standing on benches around the perimeter dressed in streetclothes and laughing their fool heads off, and then you’re made to walk the length of the room, squat over the block of ice, pick up the olive with your buttcheeks, keep them squeezed tight enough as you waddle back to the line, squat over the dixie cup, and drop it in. Miss, and you gotta do it again.

I can’t remember whether our group won or not or whether there was even a prize for the winner, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to send us all to hell and back. To throw us all through an experience we wouldn’t forget, either as individuals or as a group.

It was more than 15 years later not long after I’d moved to Germany that I was attempting to tell that story in my fractured German at a bar when someone leaned over and said, “that happened to me too!”

I was stunned. I’d been telling this story for years in Canada and Hong Kong, and nobody had ever said that. Here I was thinking this experience had been unique to us, that these fellows had been geniuses - evil and twisted, but still geniuses - to have devised something guaranteed to weld us together as a group like nothing else.

“We had to go through that during our year in the Bundeswehr - in the army. One guy threw up in the middle of it all because he couldn’t stand it. He was never part of the boys after that.”

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Terrorist attack thwarted in luggage raid

we interrupt this blog to bring you a special dispatch from Definitely Not the Daily News.

by some guy we fished out of a gutter Special Correspondent

Edmonton (DNTN) A WestJet plane from Edmonton landed safely in Vancouver early last week, its 117 passengers and seven crew members completely unaware that a major terrorist attack had been thwarted just hours before take-off. Edmonton airport officials say they have tightened security in the wake of the incident, in which a male passenger identified only as “Ian” tried to get through security with a pair of banned substances.

“I first noticed that he looked incredibly relaxed and had a nice tan, which is a sure tip-off under our profiling scheme,” said Jusdoon Mejobbe, head of Throwing Things Away Unnecessarily at the Edmonton airplane take-off and landing facility.

“After his carry-on luggage went through the scanner, we did the usual. We asked him if he was the one who had packed the bag, and if it had been in his possession the whole time since he’d packed it. Then I asked him if we could open it.”

Mejobbe said he then went into Forbidden Liquid Inspector’s Pinching of Undesirable Toothpaste mode, or FLIPOUT.

“We opened the bag,” said Mejobbe, “and after sifting through layers of zip guns, depth charges, signal flares, gas canisters, switchblades, hash pipes, dynamite sticks, hydrogen bombs, terrorist manuals, Michael Moore DVDs, cocaine and dirty underwear, we noticed his toiletries kit contained two articles banned under Article D, subsection A, paragraph F, clause T of our regulations.”

Immediately calling out the airport police janitorial service under standard FLIPOUT and D.A.F.T. procedures to ascertain that the liquids were actually used for personal hygiene and protection from the sun and not explosives or anything that could go boom in any way, Mejobbe said he told the passenger of the serious contravention of Transport Canada regulations he had committed in trying to get banned liquids past security.

“We told him what we tell everybody. We treat everyone the same,” said Mejobbe. “It’s really quite simple. Since this was the first Sunday of the month and the Edmonton Eskimos had scored more than 25 points in each of their previous three Canadian Football League games including pre-season and at least 18 of them obtained by touchdown and two of those by a forward pass from a Canadian quarterback to a Canadian receiver, passengers were allowed to carry on any variety of liquid, provided said liquids were in duct-tape sealed containers of not more than 27.8 ml each and separated from each other by a lead-lined barrier of at least 3cm so as not to provoke mixing or spontaneous combustion during take-off or landing. However since “Ian” had attempted to carry on a tube of toothpaste of 73.4 ml and a tube of sunblock the residue of which amounted to 24 ml but was housed in a container of 100 ml which contravenes our D.A.F.T. rules for what can and cannot be carried onto a device destined to be airborne under power from thingies which go whirr, we informed him that he must make a decision as to what to do.

“He could either check the liquids through checked baggage and thereby qualify for entry into our Grand Prize Draw for a trip for two to Absurdistan for having the smallest-ever piece of luggage to be sent to the hold of an Airbus A319, or we could keep them.”

The passenger, contacted by telephone at his home in Germany, said he did the sensible thing.

“I told them they could shove keep ‘em,” he said. “Then I zipped up the bag and went for a beer. I ended up with sunburn and a case of Jungle Mouth so bad I had a whole row of seats to myself on the flight the next day to London, but what the hell. If that’s what it takes to keep planes flying safely these days, I’m all for it. Good thing they didn’t snag that case of KY though.

Damn. Did I say that out loud?

© 2007 lettershometoyou