Hasty Word What Might Have Been

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After a new milestone of 125 posts, it’s time to catch up and ponder blog status.

Catch up

The trouble with having a self-imposed word limit is you leave stuff out. In my recent posts, here are two things I could have said:

During my Schizophrenia piece, in my part on celebrities being harassed by mentally ill fans, or by fans who had gone to the dark side, after noting that award-winning free lancer John Scalzi had replied to thank me, I wrote, “Ain’t it a nice small world?” 

Meanwhile, I could have added, but didn’t, that Seth Godin is a successful businessman and entrepreneur with several projects on the go, a man with several bestsellers. In other words, busy like Scalzi. But both times I e-mailed him, he gave a thoughtful reply. It’s a nice world. 

I was not writing to Godin socially, but to help him. Because although his blog is nice, and I guess I would like conversing with him in a bar, I don’t want to impose on a busy man.

I do write socially to Derek Sivers, who gets oodles of e-mails, because we know each other, but what I send is more like a business memorandum, complete with subject line, rather than a conventional “no-subject-heading,” on nice bond paper, “personal letter.” Come to think of it, now that telephone companies have been “deregulated,” and the cost of long distance calls has plummeted, I wonder if anybody writes traditional letters anymore? A pity, as nobody will ever publish “The collected phone calls of…” 

In my piece on Recruit Schools, I said that only in the U.S. do recruits get disdained and called maggots. What I could have added was what I found the next day on Quora Digest: (a very entertaining e-mail service, but a terrible time sink for me) Someone asked, “Are British drill instructors just as tough as their US counterparts?”

The shortest reply was by Vic-Mortim, who wrote: “The British ones used to be about equal, in the old days. But being tough is not necessarily the same thing as being effective, and getting the best out of people. So British drill instructors are a bit more sophisticated, deploying some of the advances in human psychology, using a mixture of some toughness, and playing the role of a kind of sports coach.” (I can’t find the Quora link)

Speaking of Britain, 90 per cent of the London tourist attractions are in Central London, so that is where I am headed in a couple weeks. (See musical footnote) If you have any questions about those strange chaps, leave a comment and I will hope to address it, maybe after asking a real live Britisher in a pub.

Incidentally, the British Broadcasting Corporation website has a link for “report to us a grammar or fact error” so I wrote they had misused the word “including.” I explained that as the Oxford dictionary says, and US lawyers know, the word including MEANS “but not limited to” but the BBC had misused the word to cover everything in their listing of jury-awarded damages.

Blog status

My WordPress blog has a stats feature, which at least twice has shown someone coming to the site from a Facebook link. I presume someone has quoted me on a Facebook post, but I don’t know what I wrote that was worth the effort. From my old blog, blogger Scott Berkun tweeted to quote me after he was amused at me, during my humour-for-nerds piece, complaining that a sense of humour helps me when “the world is just not as black and white as it’s supposed to be.”

I have learned that, in WordPress, views are not counted if the reader stays around the six posts on my “home page, so maybe I have been mistaken as to my lack of readers. Nevertheless, even after 125 posts, my old (longer) blog still gets more hits. I will continue to pretend I am serving readers, but I secretly know I write to compulsively keep myself busy. Time to switch hobbies, eh?

The last couple times I hit “publish” I noticed a little lower right side note that my piece would be sent to X number of people. I’m dimly surprised. I guess you would call them blog followers; I don’t suppose I’ve met them in real life. I regret that often, after I first hit “publish,” for the next half hour, I end up making my piece ten per cent better from fussy last minute edits, but I guess I’m the only one who would notice. For readers wanting “just the facts, Ma’am” the initial post is sufficient.

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Sean Crawford

April 20,

As Russians will be Russians,

Because they are from Star Trek’s Mirror Universe,

 2022

“Next Flight to London, leaving on runway number five” (link to click on song)

Got guitar? If you are in a band, then this old folk rock song from my boyhood in the sixties, which has “never been prominently covered,” might be quite a challenge to remake—but hey, it’s old enough to make it new again. … I see in Wikipedia the airport voice—which I really liked—was merely put in to substitute for missing guitar solos. Recorded only a few years before women’s liberation, the person with agency, leaving a romance to have a career, is a woman. I’m glad to hear this song again.