This site may harm your computer

Waiting for a flight at Hamburg airport early last week I sat down at an internet terminal and was about to drop a coin in before the nice man sitting next to me said, “take mine, I have to go and there are about 25 minutes left on it.”

I thanked him warmly and sat down in his place, immediately typing lettershometoyou into Google to see if I could find Adsense ads on my blog. You’ve probably heard that they’re out there, lurking on every wordpress.com blog. It’s the price you pay for free hosting, and no amount of whining is going to get wordpress to take them off short of your paying them to do so.

Problem is, if you’re logged in to wordpress.com you never get to see them.

So every once in a while I slip into the skin of Joe Regular Blog Lurker to try to find out how Google is making an even greater mess of my blog. Do they stick ads for jock itch powder next to posts about my mother-in-law? Blurbs for psychiatrists next to write-ups about psychos? Tart up my skiing posts with pitches for helmets and handbaskets and other crap I have no use for?

The list of hits Google chucked up had me scrambling for my camera. Not for what they said, but for the public terminal’s net-nanny warning label:

At first I thought they were referring to my blog. After all, even if there are no trojans waiting to ambush the unsuspecting visitor, there is a ton of stuff here people might find harmful. Fake news, accounts of deception and outright lies, denunciations of crap, transcripts of discussions with an underage female child concerning condoms, naked girls in newspapers, death and more death. I don’t know why I haven’t already been hauled before a judge as a menace to society.

Then I realised the warning was all about WordPress.com. How could it not be? The link is to wordpress, not lettershometoyou, which only appears in the description.

Maybe it was just a forewarning, because a few days later I and millions of other unsuspecting WordPress.com bloggers logged on to find our blogging universe turned inside out without so much as a ‘”hey guys, guess what? Big changes coming up tomorrow at 4pm Pacific Daylight Saving Time.”

Did someone at WP central hit publish instead of save by mistake before turning out the lights for the weekend?

I’m sure after a few months this will all die down and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about, but in the meantime wordpress.com probably is harmful to your computer. Judging by the number of pissed-off entries on the forums, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a youtube video posted of someone throwing a laptop out the window frisbee-style in frustration. I don’t care what it looks like, merely uploading an image, for example, has become a mind-numbing chore, a multi-stepped process where once a couple of clicks sufficed.

This in an upgrade? Sure the savvy bloggers using wp.org had a go at it for a while, but given the huge drop in skill level between those bloggers and duffers like me using wp.com, didn’t they think to test it on a few hundred of us wp.com users who’d never seen it before? They could have run a little sneak-preview contest, choosing a hundred or so bloggers to run it through it paces for a month just to iron the kinks out.

Hell, maybe they did test it out on no-brain bloggers like me, I don’t know, but the way it was released reminds me of the time I bought a new desktop from Dell a few years back. The monitor was a new flat-screen model from the Korean firm LG, back when flat screen meant the surface was flat. The rest looked like an old-style monitor.

Anyway, the first one they sent didn’t work, so I sent it back.

The second one arrived three days later. It didn’t work properly either, so I sent it back, too.

The third one arrived a few days after that, and it didn’t work either.

So I phoned up Dell to complain – not for the first time – and asked them why they couldn’t ship me a monitor that worked. Their response? We can’t test the monitors as they come in, we just ship them along.

Fair enough, I said, but can’t they at least have someone switch it on at the factory? Twist a knob? Tweak a button?

Nööö, too expensive. It’s cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and have the consumer do the testing.

Happy blogging.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Germany’s ban on Scientology would be a Gong Show move.

What I can’t understand is why the German government even pays attention to Scientology. Instead of banning them, thereby creating a cause célèbre for them and inviting a Falun Gong-type protest road show every time Angela Merkel goes abroad, what they should actually do is make a day-long introductory course in Scientology a requirement for first-year University students.

That’s about how old I was when I found myself walking down the street in Los Angeles one day in May, 1980. I’d just spent the winter working for the railway in northern British Columbia, was about to quit my job and go backpacking to Europe for the summer – it turned out to be a whole year – and was kinda bored waiting for life to get underway.

A woman approached me and asked if I’d like to take a personality test. I said sure, why not? I sat down at a desk out on the street and was handed a very long questionnaire. I’m pretty sure they tell everyone what they told me once the
results came in: I appear to have things pretty much under control, but if I check out the answers here, here, here and here, when things get rough I react in strange ways.

But Scientology can help! Sceptical but curious, I paid $20 to enroll in a day course.

I was led inside a building and down a corridor to a classroom. There, I met some guy who sat me down and asked me to grasp in each hand a wooden handle attached by wires to some meter.

Even though I was barely out of my teens and didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, I did know that wood is a poor conductor of electricity. Ah, they explained, the meter will nevertheless pick up whether or not you’re accessing your engrams.

My whatgrams?

Your engrams.

That’s what they call the buried memories of bad things that have happened to us. Through the wonders of Scientology, those memories will be liberated, they told me, and eventually I would become what they call “clear” – free of guilt, worry, phobias, all the negative energy that holds the vast majority of us back from achieving our true potential.

To recover the engrams, I was to close my eyes and recall a time when I felt angry, or anxious, or scared, or whatever he asked. Not just recall, but remember what I was seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting at that time as well.

After a half-hour of this – it was really hard to do – I felt like asking him: I can go on, but why do I have to sit here like a jerk holding onto hunks of wood the whole time?

They also showed me a scratchy cartoon of two figures looking across at one another, the narrator repeating over and over that there are some people we have have affinity for, and we like them, and others we don’t have an affinity for, and we don’t like them. OK…

I don’t recall much of the rest of the day, because after that I sort of went through the motions just to see where this farce would lead, but I do remember the course leader getting into apissy argument with a colleague, which led me to believe that aside from their weird take on life, these people were not much different from the rest of us.

What they don’t tell you is that one only becomes clear if you pay enough money for the vast array of courses it would take to satisfy them that you are indeed clear. And once there, you can pay for more courses to move further up the ladder.

Used to be that once you’d paid tens of thousands of your life savings to these weirdos – and by then it was probably too late to admit to yourself what a fool you’d been – they’d introduce you to Xenu, an alien ruler of the Galactic Confederacy who, 75 million years ago,brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. The alien souls continue to do this today, and that’s what’s fucking you up.

But now this is all available on Wikipedia, so you have to wonder how they attract new customers recruits.

Because it’s such a great antidote to my Seasonal Affective Disorder, I’ve been doing a lot of silly humour stuff lately. I wasn’t going to tag this as such, but really: Scientology is such complete nonsense, such unadulterated shit, it can only be put in the category of humour, something that any sane individual can only laugh at. Even the flying spaghetti monster makes more sense.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Talking about death with a four-year-old

Dear Mom,

I’m writing this in a time zone ahead of yours so technically it is still your little red-haired granddaughter’s 10th birthday. I have to catch a train in a couple of hours to go meet everyone out in the country for a little celebration, so I’m going to have to do this on the fly. There are lots of things to tell you, but for now they’ll just have to wait for another letterhometoyou.

The other day I was going through some old notes and papers I’d put aside, scribblings of what she said, places we’ve been, talks we’ve had. I came across this and just had to laugh, because I remembered it while we were having a similar conversation just the other day. Later I’ll send that one and you can compare. This is dated April 2, 2001.

love,

Ian

____________

Daddy, when you die, you turn into a skeleton, right?

Yes, that’s right.

Grandpa died, right Dad?

Yes, he died.

Why did he die?

Well, first of all, we are all going to die one day. Your Grandpa was old, but he was also very sick. He had a disease that made his brain not work right. He couldn’t walk anymore, and soon, he couldn’t even eat anything. So he died.

What kind of clothes was he wearing when he died, outside clothes, or inside clothes?

Well, I guess he was wearing inside clothes. He died in hospital. Why does it matter?

Because if you die, you’re really cold, right?

Well, I don’t know. Nobody really knows what it feels like when you die.

But when you die, you become a skeleton, right? The flesh goes away and then you’re a skeleton.

Right. It all goes back to dust. But that’s not going to happen for a very, very long time. Do you know why the flesh goes away?

Why?

Because bugs eat it. Many bugs. Many, many bugs eat all the flesh. And when there isn’t any more, they go somewhere else. But the bugs only eat dead flesh. They wouldn’t try to eat you or me when we’re alive.

But what happens when the bugs die?

Well, I guess even smaller bugs eat the other bugs.

Dying is really boring, because you’re dead for a long, long time, and you don’t do anything!

Well, I don’t know about that. Some people believe that after you die, you become another person. And other people believe that after you die, you can become another animal. In another life. So they say that’s why you should be good and kind to all living things, because it could be someone you once knew. Like Grandpa.

(Very long, thoughtful pause)

Yeah, but when you die, you become a skeleton, right?

© 2007 lettershometoyou