Ramblin' with Roger

What IS this blog thing?

At seven months in, I’m still discovering the point of the blog, not so much MY blog, but the greater blogiverse. I have this friend Daniel who REALLY needs to do his own blog, I keep telling him, and he will, he says.
He sends me political stuff, plus weird stuff such as this, about cornstarch and this about, well, “sin” and this, which is just bizarre.
One of the things he believes is that the mainstream media (MSM) has dropped the ball in terms of the administration’s deception on Iraq. Daniel is someone I could safely categorize as “left of center”. Interesting, then, that the website for Chickenhawk Express expresses the same disdain for the MSM, only he says they underreport the great progress taking place in Iraq. I found the Chickenhawk via the “Next Blog” method. I’ve “corrected” him a couple times; I’m sure he appreciates it.

I know I feel compelled to chastize the MSM myself occasionally. This article about the new American Community Survey is so unnbalanced it would be laughable, except that it’s likely to be taken seriously. Where’s the stuff about the confifdentiality that Census folks are under? Or the fact that Census doesn’t really care about the individual response but rather the collective answers? Or that private industry IS interested in your individual private information that is far more invasive? To take one question, the time to work question is used for traffic maintenance, among other things, not to use to case someone’s house for a robeery.

I believe Polite Scott provides a great public service when he disects (as it were) the medicine in comic books and television shows. Really. My friend the Hoffinator thought he did a fine analysis of the medical show House, a program that she watches (and I don’t); there are people out there who take the medicine on fictional programs seriously. Also check out his post of 11/23, learn the meaning of the prefix yocto- and see Advent comic book covers.

You’ve probably read about the public service that Paul English has provided to get you to a human as quickly as possible on those automated phone systems most of us hate so much.

Marshall Brain has stats on consumer use of certain technologies.

Sometimes, the point of the blog is to be called out, in a most complimentary manner. Or in a mock confrontational manner as Sleestak and Mr. Hembeck seem to be doing over…Hayley Mills?

I find a lot of bloggers from Singapore, such as this one. Sure one finds the bizarre, or the blatantly commercial, on blogs, but perhaps also a greater understanding of the so-called global village.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve added a couple blogs to my list:
Big Fat Blog (BFB) was founded in 2000. “My original purpose with the blog was to point out just how insanely poorly fat people are portrayed in the media,” the author writes, but it’s expanded beyond that.
GayProf is a guy who just had a major breakup and REALLY wants to get out of Texas. I had this friend, Jennifer, who spent two or three miserable years in the Lone Star State. All of the straight men she met had gun racks, and she wasn’t a gun rack kind of woman. She’s now working for a great library in a great metropolitan area.
Finally, Church of Klugman– ya gotta love a guy with so much passion for the life of actor Jack Klugman.
Also added the TV.com website, with lists of shows old and new, audio interviews and local TV listings, that my late friend Tom Hoffman e-mailed me about…in 2001. Yet another Loganesque find.

(Geez, how did I miss the 70th birthday of Woody Allen yesterday?

Vito

Vito Mastrogiovanni – I loved saying the name, as it flows so mellifluously off the tongue – was this guy I met when I first went to Binghamton Central High School. My group from Daniel Dickinson met up with like-minded folks from MacArthur and West to protest the VietNam War and fight injustice. Even a straight guy like me knew how good looking Vito was. My sister Leslie had a major, unrequited crush on him.

I kept in sporadic contact with him over the years, then saw him again for the first time in a long time at his 20th high school reunion in 1990. Actually, I don’t know that he actually went, but the old group of us hung out together before and after the scheduled event. Vito, who was working behind the scenes in theater, both on and off Broadway, was extremely angry because he had AIDS. I’m happy to know that by the time he died the following summer, he was more at peace. Vito was the first person I knew personally who died from the disease, but was hardly the last.

Every year at this time, a part of the AIDS quilt comes to Albany, and I always go to see it. In fact, for three years, I was a “guide” at the event, helping people who might become emotionally distraught over seeing these representations of lives cut short. Today is the last of the three-day World AIDS Day Events at the Empire State Plaza Convention Center in Albany. The Memorial Quilt will be on display today from 9am-3pm, followed by closing ceremonies at 3pm.

(In spite of recent efforts, the number of HIV/AIDS infections continue to mount worldwide.)

Off the main page for the AIDS Memorial Quilt/The Names Project, here’s Vito’s quilt; he’s represented in the upper left, quilt number 2409. It’s simple design, and not nearly as dynamic as Vito was in life.

A Logan-inspired post

I was cleaning out old e-mail, and this thing that someone sent me in 1998 was still there!

Grammar is important

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat)
6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Contractions aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. One should NEVER generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
16. Don’t use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
23. Kill all exclamation points!
24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas.
26. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
27. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
28. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
And finally…
34. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Why I don’t shop at Wal-Mart

In honor of the release of the documentary WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price, I thought I’d tell you why I don’t shop there. I mean, NOW it’s because of all those socio-political reasons, such as them driving out small business and exploiting workers, but the ORIGINAL reason was much more prosaic.

In 1994, I was separating from a significant relationship. I needed stuff, lots of that basic household stuff- kitchen utensils, bathroom items, a few household goods. So I went to the only Wal-Mart then in the area, in something called the Crossgates Common (or Commons). I must have spent over $90. It was only after I got home on the bus that I realized that I was missing a bag of material. I immediately called the store and they confirmed that, yes, I had left a bag at the register. It was five minutes before closing, so I told the person that I’d be back the next day at a specific time. I was told the package would be in the manager’s office.

The next day, I went to said Wal-Mart, and went to the office, only to be told to wait a few minutes, which turned out to be a half hour. Then I was told that the manager would be there shortly. That turned out to be another 30 minutes. Finally, I was told that they couldn’t find the bag, and that I could just pick up the stuff again. How I wish they had said that in the first place. So I wandered through the vast store again and found most of what I had gotten before or something comparable, but it took me nearly as long as the original trip. This so annoyed me that I vowed never to go again.

Subsequently, I learned more about how Wal-Mart has interfered with their employees’ lives and whatnot. But my original complaint is that they over-promised and under-delivered. In other words, bad customer service.

Now, the only time I ever step foot in a Wal-Mart is with some relative of mine (mother, sister, in-law). One of my sisters can tell you the the best Wal-Marts within 100 miles of the NC/SC border.
But I won’t spend a dime. No, that’s not true. We got a $25 gift certificate from Wal-Mart as a present for Lydia, and the items ended up costing $25.72. So, in the past ten years, I’ve spent nearly a dollar at Wal-Mart, over seven cents per year.

Techno-links

I get an e-mail weekly from e-week magazine. Sometimes it’s a lot of technobabble for this poor Luddite, but the batch today caught my attention, and might be helpful or interesting to you:

Xbox 360 Crashes, Defects Reported

Xbox 360 Review

Ten to Avoid—the Worst Products of 2005

Firefox 1.5 REVIEW

Free Show Cuts HDTV Confusion

TiVo Handheld Device Software Draws Ire at TV Network

Supreme Court to Hear eBay Patent Appeal

Malicious Keyloggers Run Rampant on Net

Cyber-crime Yields More Cash than Drugs