Bob Crewe died at the age of 83. You may not know the name – I’ll admit I did – but you surely know the songs.
If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know I can have some strong opinions. But with the U2/Apple thing, I feel ambivalent. On one level, I’m oddly entertained by people freaking out over Apple’s forced iTunes download of U2’s new album, and wonder if it’s just a first world problem. I particularly loved how it ruined someone’s “carefully curated collection.” I’m impressed how well the secret was kept, with the release date of the next U2 album still unclear to the media as of last month.
Then there’s the Why U2? contingent epitomized by this quote: “It’s true that Apple’s wine-drinking, plane-flying user base probably overlaps with U2’s cool-dad core audience more than most bands.” Ah, U2’s not cool enough; here’s the album should have given away instead, and maybe they’re right. Fortunately, I’ve read plenty of suggestions about how to delete it.
The result of this apparent misstep is that the album, Songs of Innocence, is crap. 24 hours after release, it was deemed the worst U2 album ever, as though one could decide something like that so quickly. I still haven’t hear the thing, so I have no opinion.
Deep Dark Fears is “a series of comics exploring those intimate, personal fears that mostly stem from your imagination getting darkly carried away.” Read more about it.
One of my favorite movie quotes, maybe because it’s so meta: “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” (Grand Canyon, 1991)
This Sergio Aragonés masterpiece is included as a fold-out poster within Inside Mad. His priceless gift to all Mad fans shows over six decades of Mad contributors and ephemera within a mish-mash of Mad office walls. The only thing missing in this beautiful mess is a key. Doug Gilford will be attempting to label everything you see with brief (pop-up) descriptions and links to pertinent pages…
Our church, First Presbyterian Albany, hosted a work camp in the city the week leading to the 4th of July. Homes were repaired/painted throughout the city; 400+ youth and adults, from several states, including Hawaii, plus folks from Ontario, Canada, were hosted at Myers Middle School; 75+ First Pres folks volunteered to make it all happen. We received some media coverage, including one of the radio stations, WFLY present on opening day. Here’s the web link to the Times Union article. Plus nice coverage from a local public radio station.
Paul Mazursky wrote and directed Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Moscow on the Hudson (1984), An Unmarried Woman (1978). But I saw (or heard) him in a number of TV shows and movies.
Some of SamuraiFrog’s favorite Marvel stories; nice reveal in Fantastic Four #21. Also, for round 15 of ABC Wednesday – YOU can still join! – Mr. Frog will “highlight a different Muppet for each letter, hopefully, some of the lesser-known Muppets and milestones in Muppet history.” So far, A is for Arnold, who you WILL recognize; B is for Bobo the bear.
Mark Evanier wrote about The Battle of the Network Stars, some cheesy TV competition c. 1977. What struck me is that I knew every actor and the associated show from CBS, all but one from ABC, but had serious trouble with the NBC stars. Even I knew of the actor, say, Jane Seymour, I had no idea what show she was representing.
I don’t comment on every post. It’s not that I don’t appreciate them; I may not have anything to say.
Wayne John wrote in June: “Well it’s been about 2 months since I’ve written my little ‘I’m back’ post, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about writing something here. I have, in fact, written a number of posts that I simply haven’t made public.”
Now he has a different, more monetary reason for some of the non-production. Still, many bloggers will relate to this:
There is one decision that I’m making though, and that is to stop being so damn hard on myself.
I haven’t posted anything because I have been striving for a level or quality that is simply not achievable on a consistent basis. With each post I write, I try to make it “Epic” or “value filled”, and while those are great marketing buzz words, I simply don’t have time to write a post of that nature each and every time.
I’m sure you don’t expect it either, so why have I been so damn stuck?
It’s all me. I strive for perfection. Add to that a healthy does of OCD and nothing gets done.
To some degree, that even happens to me, the guy who blogs day in, day out. I want every post to be “value-filled.”Don’t know how to explain that term except I know it when I feel it.
When I’m tired, or busy, or sick, or, in this moment, all three – a lingering chest cold has ruined my sleep – I need a cheat.
This brings me to Anita’s blog. She notes a bunch of stuff about the ROI (return on investment) of leaving comments. She does it because she wants to show she’s spent time and effort visiting the blog or wants to share feelings, give thanks, show love/hate, motivate, or ask questions, which is what most of us who aren’t lurkers do.
Yet, I don’t comment on every post I visit. It’s not that I don’t appreciate them; I may not have anything to say. I like Jaquandor’s Something for Thursday music or SamuraiFrog’s look at old Marvel comics; I just have no pithy retort. The exception is ABC Wednesday participants; I ALWAYS comment, though sometimes I struggle with something new and different to say to 70 people over three days, even when I enjoy the post, which I generally do.
This assumes that I don’t have trouble leaving comments. Occasionally, DISQUS, which Arthur@AmeriNZ uses, can be balky. And Blogspot’s word verification can be incomprehensible.
Anita also does things a bit differently than I. She’ll report errors in grammar/spelling and facts, on the blog. If possible, I tend to contact the blogger directly by e-mail, when I THINK the blogger will appreciate it. There’s a really good reason for that. When I was a new blogger, I’d see an error, make a comment correcting a grammar/spelling error on the blog, and expect to be appreciated; no such luck.
Bloggers are human, writing without an editor, generally, and they make mistakes; goodness knows I do. One of my terrestrial friends calls me a grammar Nazi, which I don’t think I am. I’m constantly frustrated by the goofs I make, which I never seem to see in draft, only after it’s published.
I AM convinced that when one makes a little mistake, some OTHERS will use that to disregard the value of the whole piece. Statements of error others make I note by e-mail as well, though it’s important/egregious enough, I may note it in the comments too. This is based on the theory that an error, uncorrected will glean more. (No, I’ve long given up “fixing the Internet”, just a small patch.)
Anita will inform people she’s mentioned them in her post. Occasionally I’ll do that, though if it’s a regular reader, I don’t. Frankly, I love the joy of going to someone’s page and finding my name. The Google Alert is helpful in this regard, too.
This post may or may not meet my Quality Control standards if I felt better. Didn’t I say this, or something like it, before? Today, however, it will do; it most certainly will do.
Besides, the way I write this blog, it’ll never capture the zeitgeist of the times. I’m just not a zeitgeisty kind of guy.
I don’t know if you’ve answered this one, but I’d like to know in what city/country would you live if you could live anywhere else in the world. And why. 🙂
The default answer for a lot of Americans is Canada. It’s like the US, except they have better health care and don’t fear the metric system, the argument has been. And if the globe is warming, Canada might be a thought. But those waves of cold weather this past winter in the US, all stored to our north, and fueled by the Arctic melting, worries me.
The United Kingdom my wife loves. But it appears broken economically and is subject to that same nasty weather we experience on this side of the pond.
I don’t know enough about Belize, but moving closer to the equator doesn’t interest me much. I loved Barbados, but, in addition to too much heat, and hurricanes, I can’t imagine living on a small island. Not diverse enough geographically, and too expensive.
Ultimately, I think it’d have to be in the Southern Hemisphere. While Australia seems interesting, the ghastly warm weather that has been experienced in the interior the last couple of years, north of 125F/50C would keep me away from everything except the east coast cities.
Another option, I suppose, is New Zealand. This is in no small part because Arthur the AmeriNZ has described it so well in his blog and podcasts. It’s reasonably progressive. Now I may NEVER figure out its electoral system the way I know the US system. Then again the US system is broken, so no big loss.
Climate change will affect NZ too, but the southern landmass of Antarctica may make that a LITTLE less terrible, for a time. Now, it IS on the ring of fire of volcanic and earthquake activities, which makes me nervous. Still, I guess I’ll say New Zealand because at least I’d know someone there. *** SamuraiFrog wants to know:
At what point is an argument over for you? I know someone on Tumblr who recently engaged in victim-blaming just to end an argument. He felt bad about it, knew it was wrong, admitted it, and sincerely apologized. But some people are still invested in making him feel bad about it. At what point do you let something like that go?
It all depends. What is the “crime”, first of all? Some dumb comment someone makes in the heat of the moment might get a pass unless it’s so hateful and vicious that you have to surmise that, deep down, that he or she must be a really awful person.
Michael Richards of Seinfeld fame gave a really nasty racist rant, I hear. I didn’t listen to it. There’s a point, though, that it is in the past, and for me, Richards is there.
Of course, it matters if it is a real apology. Richards sincerely apologized. I’m sure I must have mentioned this topic somewhere about bad apologies. Oh, there it is, from 2009:
DON’T use the word BUT. An example would be, “I’m sorry, BUT you started it.” DON’T use the word IF. My least favorite apology: “I’m sorry IF you’re offended.” The clear implication is that you really SHOULDN’T be offended, but I better say it anyway.
Lame apologies get zero points from me.
Nasty words written are more difficult to forgive. I do know that people can get caught up in a debate on social media, though, which is why I tend to minimize my contribution to the same.
But some acts are so egregious that even a sincere-sounding apology is hard to accept: “I’m truly sorry that I molested those boys over a 20-year period.” Not satisfactory.
Now, online fights, I’ll just walk away from, even if THEY think that, by not responding, they think I think they’re right. I suspect that your Tumblr acquaintance, assuming he keeps his nose clean, will come out OK, if only because his critics will latch on to someone else.
Whereas a face-to-face or phone argument might be a different issue, especially among friends or relatives. You may have heard stories of fights that went on for years or even decades. True of my maternal grandmother and her brother over the fact that he was “living in sin” with a woman in the 1960s.
Go, Argentina!
And speaking of arguing – Not an ARA question, but rather a comment by Lisa to this post:
I would encourage you to try and get back into one of the groups at your church. That seems to be an area of importance for you and may be the best place to nurture those human interactions. But you’ll always have us…….:-)
As it turned out, I actually had an odd incident at one of these groups back in April, and it’s not entirely settled.
It was after The Daughter was starting to get better after her terrible March. I hadn’t gone to the previous meeting, partly because it was Lydia’s birthday, but partially because she was still having issues. Getting together with this group was something I was clearly looking forward to, as I had purchased lots of snacks.
But one guy dominated the conversation with references most of the rest of us did not understand for a good half hour. By the time I got to say something, someone made a joke that less upset me than distracted me from what I had hoped to be talking about. I angrily stormed out and didn’t come back for the last three or four meetings before the summer break. I may return in the fall.
Still, it’s not the same as one-on-one conversation with an old friend.
If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know I can have some strong opinions. But with the U2/Apple thing, I feel ambivalent. On one level, I’m oddly entertained by people freaking out over Apple’s forced iTunes download of U2’s new album, and wonder if it’s just a first world problem. I particularly loved how it ruined someone’s “carefully curated collection.” I’m impressed how well the secret was kept, with the release date of the next U2 album still unclear to the media as of last month. 
