HinesSight

Our 2024 Christmas letter is partly about saber-toothed tigers

Another year, another Christmas Letter. Or as we call it, our Holiday Greetings.

Per usual, I wrote it. The key to doing that this time was an image that popped into my mind of animals going extinct. Which pretty much sums up how I look upon Christmas letters: a dying breed.

Nonetheless, I'm still alive. And I enjoy writing the Holiday Greetings. Plus, because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, I didn't feel like breaking that string this year.

Here's the 2024 letter, in PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2024 Christmas Letter PDF

I'll accept the praise of my writing, even though it's a bit over-the-top

I have to be honest. As much as I aspire to humility, in truth I really enjoy being praised. That was evident to me today when I read a comment on my Church of the Churchless blog by a regular reader of my posts, who calls himself Appreciative Reader.

An apt name, since in the comment he praised my writing on the blog in a fashion that would have embarrassed me if I wasn't so much in agreement with this Noel Coward quote.

I've shared the comment below. It means a lot to me, so I wanted to make it more visible to my future praise-loving self, rather than having it languish in the comment section of a blog post that I may soon forget about.

As a bit of background, I started my Church of the Churchless blog in late 2004 after George W. Bush was re-elected president with the aid of Christian fundamentalists. That bothered me so much, I set out to write about the dangers of religious dogmatism. 

After twenty years, 3,566 posts, 72,888 comments, and 7,236,888 page views, I'm still at it. My usual routine is to write a post for Church of the Churchless every other day, and write a post for either this HinesSight blog or my Salem Political Snark blog on the non-churchless days.

Sometimes I think that I've done more than enough writing about churchless subjects. However, after reading what Appreciative Reader had to say, I'm inspired to keep going. That's the power of praise. It energizes. 

Here's the comment. It starts off with a quote from a Church of the Churchless post I wrote last night, "Rabbi Brian's Highly Unorthodox Gospel." That's the name of a book I was sent by Rabbi Brian, who shares both my first name and a distaste for organized religion.

“This isn't a religion bashing book in the style of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, or Brian Hines. (I don't belong in the company of these noted authors; just couldn't resist seeing my name in the same sentence as theirs.)”

I’m afraid I’m going to disagree with that opinion of yours, Brian, and in the strongest possible terms! Without a shadow of doubt your name does belong squarely in that august company.

Dawkins and Hitchens and the rest of them may have sold gazillions of books, and may have influenced a much larger number of people with those books and with their lectures; and your reach, when measured in terms of those specific metrics, may well be less than theirs, sure; but it seems to me you completely understate to yourself the value of this lovely blog you’ve set up and maintained over all of these years.

This blog is a priceless resource; and in my opinion the worth and influence of the whole of it adds up to far more than any single book or even any single multi-volume set of books.

I can attest from my own personal experience how very much I’ve learned, and gained, from your blog. Given my starting point in this journey of self-discovery, I’ve found your writings perfectly aligned to help me with my exploration. Among the names you mention there, it is Richard Dawkins whom I admire the most, and whose books and lectures have guided and influenced me the most.

And yet I have no hesitation in stating unequivocally that I’ve learned from your blog, and been helped by your blog, far more than even Dawkins. (That is, it is silly I suppose to compare one person or writer with another like this; but still, if we must compare the one with the other, then that’s my personal estimate of that particular comparison.)

I suppose it is a question of where one’s at in one’s journey. I myself started out from a POV that was fundamentally skeptical (that is, I don’t think I’ve ever been given to unquestioning blind faith), but nevertheless to begin with theistic.

Given that, your (ongoing) journey resonated with me; and while I’ve always made up my own mind about things, but the discussions in your blog have played an invaluable role in helping me to better navigate and explore these waters. And I’ve no doubt that many who are situated as I have been, have been similarly helped, and going forward will continue to be helped, by this unique blog of yours, taken as a whole.

I’ve said this a few times before over the years, but now seems a good time to once more thank you, Brian, for this untiring labor of love of yours.

"On the ground" is way over-used in the news

I'm writing this blog post on the ground here in my house in rural south Salem, Oregon. Does me saying "on the ground" add anything to that sentence? 

No. Leaving it out takes nothing away that needs saying. "I'm writing this blog post here in my house in rural south Salem, Oregon" is completely accurate all by itself.

I've noticed that on the ground is being used much more frequently in news shows. And mostly for no reason. 

"We turn now to David Fleming reporting on the ground from Afghanistan" would only make sense if Fleming sometimes broadcast his segment while hovering in the air or buried in the earth. 

Otherwise, it's obvious that he's on the ground. Where else would he be? 

Take out the on the ground and we know all that's needed: Fleming is reporting from Afghanistan. Adding in that phrase seems intended to denote a sense that the reporter is right in the thick of something important, the original meaning of "on the ground." 

But today I heard a MSNBC anchor say something like this to a guest: "Tell us what it's like to be on the ground of a contentious school board meeting these days."

That's absurd.

I can accept using that phrase in a sentence such as "We're going live to our reporter embedded on the ground with a Marine force engaged in a firefight on the Pakistan border." Even here, on the ground doesn't add any information, but it conveys a sense of dangerous on-the-spot immediacy.

Whereas a school administrator relating how school board meetings are going when anti-mask parents show up doesn't deserve an on the ground. 

I'm hoping that the inappropriate use of those words has hit a peak and will soon decline. This isn't a major problem like global warming. It just irks me. 

Pleasingly, some Googling turned up others who found the phrase unnecessary for the same reasons I did.

The Community Writing Center in Salt Lake City
“on the ground”—Particularly overused in news reporting, this phrase conveys no additional information.

The Manila Times
I’d like to share with readers this rather provocative e-mail from business columnist Oscar P. Lagman, Jr., asking me to comment on the frequent use nowadays of the phrase “on the ground” by personalities in the news. He thinks that their overuse of the idiom is “inappropriate,” saying that it reminds him of my oft-said comment in my columns that “at the end of the day” is annoyingly overused by media and government officials.

Grammarphobia
Q: I’ve had my fill of the new and irritatingly ubiquitous expression “on the ground” in sentences like this: “Let’s speak about the state of charity work on the ground in Africa.” What possible meaning would be lost if “on the ground” were left out? My guess is that this phrase is of military origin, but now every pundit and reporter who wants to sound hip and savvy uses it.

A: I agree that “on the ground” is an empty, unnecessary phrase in a sentence like the one you’ve given. It’s more of a verbal tic than a meaningful usage.

A tweet.

Blog blast from the 2005 Statesman Journal past

Tonight Laurel, my wife, found a clipping from the August 12, 2005 Statesman Journal. Wow, there I was in the "Got Blogs?" story by Angela Yeager, looking 16 years younger than I do now.

Naturally my first thought was, I've got to write a blog post about how blogs were looked upon back in 2005. 

Yeager did an excellent job at capturing the excitement of the Dawn of Blogging. Below you can read her entire story, which I was pleased to capture with my halfway decent touch typing skill.

My second thought was, I wonder if Google still looks kindly on my blog post about washing lettuce that Yeager mentioned in the story. Sadly, that post has disappeared from a "wash lettuce" search. At least, I gave up looking for it after going through 10 Google search pages.

But the post lives on in all its 2004 glory. So you can still check out "American Splendor/I learn to wash lettuce." Hey, that post has faded from Internet fame, but I bet it still is the only blog post about washing lettuce to mention comic book artist Robert Crumb.

Regarding the other bloggers mentioned in this piece, www.williambragg.com still exists. Way to go, William! Hopefully college student at the time Stacy Austin is still blogging, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

Here's the Statesman Journal story.

Brian Hines has written and published several books during the past 15 years, but felt his work was disappearing into a black hole.

The Salem resident has found another way to reach a much wider audience with his words -- through his two Internet blogs, HinesSight and Church of the Churchless. 

Blogs, or web logs, started in the early 1990s as an offshoot of Web sites. Most were just personal diaries where bloggers could post their intimate thoughts and feelings.

But as Internet popularity rises, so has the use of blogs to do everything from covering political events to posting favorite recipes. The uses are endless, and the popularity of blogs is skyrocketing.

How many people are blogging is a question of debate. A site such as Technorati, a service that tracks blogging topics and trends, estimates that there are 12 million blogs worldwide, up from 100,000 in 2003.

BlogHerald, another blogging tracking site and news service, estimates there are 60 million bloggers.

Hines, 56, said his blog grew out of his growing frustration with the publishing world. He moved to Salem with his wife, Laurel, and the couple reside in a 10-acre country setting south of Salem with their dog, Serena.

His books, including a 2004 meditation on the Greek philosopher Plotinus, seemed to disappear as soon as they hit the shelves.

"The silence is deafening," Hines said over an ice tea at his home.

"With blogs, you write something that takes maybe a day and then it's gone. It belongs to others then. And unlike a novel, within minutes you have instant feedback. You realize you've touched someone."

Hines estimates he gets about 1,000 page views per day on his HinesSight blog, which is daily reflections from his life on "HinesLand," his nickname for his home.

HinesSight is where readers can go to find Hines writing about everything from the best way to get rid of yellow jackets, to the dog parade in downtown Salem, to arguments with Laurel on the proper methods of washing lettuce.

One of the big draws of blogs over a regular web site is that blogs register much higher on search engines such as Google.

For instance, type in "wash lettuce" on Google, and the second highest hit is Hines' blog on his lettuce washing debate with Laurel.

Hines' other blog, Church of the Churchless, takes on more serious subjects such as spirituality, meditation and faith, and only gets several hundred page views a day.

For a writer such as Hines, blogs are heaven sent.

"The frustration of writing books is you spend so long on one piece of work, and then you have to depend on someone else like a publisher to get it out there," he said.

"With a blog, for free or for $100 a year, you've got the whole world at your fingertips."

Citizen journalism
Frustrated writers aren't the only people who use blogs though. Bloggers were at both the 2004 Republican and Democratic National Conventions last year, writing every detail of the political parade on their blogs. This kind of citizen journalism is rising quickly -- resulting in conservative blogs, liberal blogs, blogs for anarchists, Libertarians, Greens and everyone in between.

A search on Orblogs.com, a site where Oregon-based bloggers can register, turns up hundreds of entries. Amateur film critics post their reviews of movies they've seen, music lovers list favorite songs to download or albums to check out and members of the Pacific Northwest Fiber Bloggers post pictures and tips on their latest knitting projects.

If you have an interest or political view, you are guaranteed to find a blog somewhere by someone who shares your view.

Then there are people such as Salem resident William Bragg. A traveler sho works for Willamette Academy, Bragg, 37, and his wife Jeani Bragg, moved to Salem in 1999 so she could take a job at Willamette University. He started his blog, www.williambragg.com, as a way to stay in contact with his friends all over the world.

"I'm just really bad at staying in touch with people," he said.

"I have friends and family everywhere, so it was just an easy way for people to drop in when they wanted and see what was going on with me."

Bragg said he doesn't get too personal on his blog -- the site is too easily Googled.

He posts funny articles that he thinks his friends might be interested in, and sometimes posts on his own favorite subjects -- youth issues, education and the Boston Red Sox.

His entries on the Red Sox were so easy to find that when the team won the World Series last year, he was called by East Coast newspapers to comment because they needed a fan living in the West.

Sometimes the ease of finding a certain subject can be misleading. Bragg said he commented on his blog one time about a guy participating in Klingon Karaoke who had the name Jigar Mehta. People who were searching online for a Miss Norway contestant from Iran who was disqualified for acting in porn movies ended up on Bragg's site, much to his surprise. A fellow blogger clued Bragg in -- apparently "jigar" is also a term for a sexy Iranian female.

Bragg says he also uses his blog as a way to post his photography, which has started to gain some attention. 

He said he has had exhibits at coffee shops in Salem, but also is getting nice feedback online.

Freedom of expression
While his own blog is not updated daily and is more for fun, Bragg says he has friends who are blogging professionally. Some bloggers are finding advertisers for their blogs, or ask people to donate money to them.

And some are getting co-opted by corporations. Bragg said he has a friend who used to write a daily blog about the bands he loves. That music lover still writes that blog -- but now is getting paid by a record company to talk up bands signed to that particular label.

Bragg thinks the democracy of  blogs will only continue to make them popular.

The accessibility can't be beat. Sites such as Blogger.com are free, while ones such as Typepad cost $5 to $9 per month.

"There's nothing romantic about what I'm doing and what other people are doing," Bragg said. "A lot of it is ego. But I think any new form of communication, especially one that gives access to those who wouldn't have it otherwise, is positive.

Hines said he sees a danger when people are only getting information from blogs that agree with their particular life perspective.

For instance, a self-professed liberal such as Hines can post comments on a conservative blog, but he said his comments are deleted immediately.

Staying connected
College students also have found a home on blogs, where they can post personal information, as well as write about their interests.

Stacy Austin, 21, is a political science major at Oregon State University. She writes a personal blog, as well as one related to her summer internship with PolitiCorps, a division of the progressive organization Oregon Bus Project. Austin said she has been using computers since she was 7 and sees blogs as a natural extension of the Internet.

"In the future, blogs and Web sites will be synonymous," she said.

"People always ask me, 'Why do you blog?' You can't really understand unless you blog yourself. They build a community. People who build blogs feel connected. People who read my blog tend to be female and in college. I've had fathers e-mail me and say I remind them of their daughter, that reading my  blog is like connecting to their kids."

Hines said those kinds of connections is the reason that blogs will continue to proliferate.

"In a way, it's a gamble because you're opening yourself up," he said.

"On the other hand, you see these aspects that everyone has strange ideas and no one is 'normal.' You start to realize that the weirdest thing is to be completely normal. It can be a profound experience to realize you are not alone in this world."

My Facebook ad isn't spam. Stop calling me a spammer.

Oh, the horror, the shock, the outrageous nature of what my first Facebook ad has unleashed upon some Facebook users who have called me nasty names because their news feed included...

I'd never paid for a Facebook ad, or boost, for one of my books until last Saturday. That was when I decided to fashion a Brian Hines, Author Facebook page.

Once the page was live, I made posts for three of my books that featured links to the Amazon listing. Then I forked out $100 to Facebook to boost the post for Break Free of Dogma, with the intended audience being atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers in the United States.

Since, I've gotten some really nasty comments on that post. They weren't substantive, devoted religious people arguing against my anti-dogma book. 

No, these people were outraged that my supposed "spam" had infected their news feed. Which is beyond ridiculous. 

Facebook revenues were $70.7 billion in 2019, mostly from digital advertising. Those ads aren't spam. They're how Facebook makes money. Lots of it.

My $100 ad doesn't deserve the title, "drop in the bucket." It's more like a tiny molecule in a drop of the Olympic sized swimming pool filled with $70.7 billion worth of Facebook ads. 

In my own news feed I scroll past lots of ads, sponsored posts, every day. A few interest me. Most don't. This is exactly the same as the ads in the daily newspaper I read each day, and the ads in the magazines I subscribe to.

Well, except for the fact that I don't pay Facebook for being able to use it, while I do have to pay for our newspaper and magazines. So that's more justification, not less, for Facebook ads.

Yet the outraged people who are calling me a spammer don't seem to realize that ads, for better or worse, are what keep Facebook free.

I've been deleting the nasty comments, but here's an example that just came in. 

Dave Benoit, I get it. You don't like ads. But they're a fact of life. And I readily admit that sometimes I click on Facebook ads to learn more about the product being advertised, because it looks interesting to me. Sometimes I even end up buying the product.

An ad isn't spam.

Nor is it a scam, unless what's being advertised doesn't actually exist, or doesn't do what is claimed. Dave, you can click on my ad and be led to the Amazon listing for my book, Break Free of Dogma. It's a real book, all 307 pages of it. You can use the Look Inside feature to read some sample pages.

Not a scam. 

Lastly, Dave, and others like you who call my ad spam or a scam, you should know that I'm just a guy in Oregon who has made very little money from the four books I've written. Those books are a labor of love, a love of writing.

Yes, I enjoy it when people read my books. But I don't expect to make much from them. I paid $100 for the Facebook ad because I'd like more people to learn about Break Free of Dogma. Most won't want to buy the book. A few will. And that will please me. 

I'm loving JournoPortfolio. It's a writer's dream.

I'm a long-time writer. Yesterday I easily fashioned a JournoPortfolio site to showcase a selection of my blog posts, the three books I've authored, and a few of the videos and photo essays that I've created. 

Below is a screenshot of the top of the home page. Click on "Behold!" to, not surprisingly, behold my JournoPortfolio masterpiece.

Behold!

JournoPortfolio is a unique Internet animal.

It's sort of a cross-fertilization between a blog and a web site. I've been blogging since 2003, and I've used several web site builders, so I understand how difficult it is to find the right balance between lots of features and ease of use.

My experience with JournoPortfolio is that it has masterfully found that balance -- with the proviso that if you're looking for a dedicated blogging service or full-featured web site builder, probably you should look elsewhere.

But JournoPortfolio excels at what it's home page bills it as: 

Create a customisable writing portfolio without branding or ads. Writing portfolios for Bloggers, Authors, Journalists, Copywriters, Content Managers.

In case you're thinking, these guys can't spell customizable, you're probably (1) an American like me, and (2) unaware that JournoPortfolio is based in Great Britain. However, this makes zero difference to those who use JournoPortfolio, aside from the fact that questions sometimes get answered in accord with a distant time zone.

Regarding questions, I had quite a few at first. JournoPortfolio has an excellent help/messaging service that's just a click away from the Dashboard where a site is created and managed.

My initial interest in JournoPortfolio sprang from a need for a platform to host a multi-author online opinion site that a group of us here in Salem, Oregon wanted to create. So I was pushing some boundaries with JournoPortfolio, since it is geared toward showcasing the work of a single writer.

Still, I was convinced that JournoPortfolio would work for us, so long as we kept the site simple. However, other members of our group wanted a more complex web site. That argued for WordPress, or something similar, so I took over our trial JournoPortfolio site for my own use.

What impresses me the most about JournoPortfolio is its intuitive look and feel. Yes, it takes a bit of time to become familiar with how articles are uploaded and arranged on a site. But help topics are clearly written, and like I said, questions are answered promptly.

Someone did a marvelous job with JournoPortfolio. If you look around my site, you'll see that I have five pages, two of which feature videos and photo essays that were easy to share via "embed codes" from You Tube and Adobe Spark. 

I really like how JournoPortfolio handles page design.

Basically, this is done by adding a content block of a particular type, as shown above. Then placement of the block can be adjusted by clicking on up or down arrows. For example, on my Video page, I'd add a video content block, then follow it with a text block where I described the video. 

Give JournoPortfolio a try.

You can do this for free. I believe a multi-page site can be played around with for a week before it reverts to a free one-page site. Believe me, given the ease of using JournoPortfolio, a week is plenty of time to decide whether you want to spring for a Pro account.

That's $10 a month, or $90 for a year if you prepay for the 12 months. Which I did, because I was confident that as a writer/author/blogger, JournoPortfolio was perfect for me.

Geronimo Tagatac's wild wonderful whimsical visions of Salem

A local man with a great name fashions some marvelous creative writing on his Facebook page. I love these vignettes by Geronimo Tagatac, a really interesting guy. This is the Salem I want to live in. 

And the great thing is, I already am. It just takes eyes like Tagatac's to see it. Here's his most recent "Salem." offerings.

Geronimo Tagatac

Salem. A woman made of wet leaves rustles into the espresso house, turning and flashing orange, yellow, red, lemon, and pale green. She carries the smell of tropical rain and visions of soundless animal silhouettes sliding through damp spaces between trees. She whispers to the barista in the language of ancient reptile. The barista stares into the woman's blurred eyes and says, "We have a selection of herbal teas."

Salem. The rain's singing to the swelling creek that forms the park's east edge. In the coffee house, a woman with a tiny, shivering dog puts the end of her thick braid of hair into her mouth and hums. The man at the next table stares at her and remembers a sister with whom he hasn't spoken to in twenty three years. She had a voice like falling rain.

Salem. The shrinking group of retirees at the coffee house table lean in toward each other. Above them, a ghostly octopus drifts, its tentacles weaving a cephalopodic signal that draws tiny phosphorescent creatures that paint a glow on the aging men's faces. "What's this about the war on coal?" one of them asks.

Salem. The cool air pulses into the espresso smell each time someone pushes through the coffee house door. A dark-faced old man with mahogany colored hands sits at an outdoor table, remembering the sudden sound of gunfire in his family's village, 75 years ago. And the gun powder and burning thatch smell as his father lifted him and ran.

Salem. The sidewalk's decided to have a cup of espresso after the morning rush. It pulls itself through the coffee house door and smiles at the barista, who gives him the once-over and smiles, because his expansion lines and stains remind her of her ex-boyfriend who played in a band called The Resilients. She remembers the basement rehearsals and the mattress-on-the-floor nights where she felt adrift with him on a gritty sea.

Salem. In the espresso house, the laptops have shut themselves down. Their keyboards and USB ports emit a pink goo smelling of smoked apricots. A gray, monitor lizard raises itself on its hind legs, puts its front paws on the counter, and hisses, "What have you got for conversation." The barista stares at him for a moment and says, "How about a triple shot with dexedrine?"

Salem. The coffee house floor is singing about its long-ago days as a tree. The light remembers its journey from the sun and stars. The woman at her laptop recalls her father raking leaves on a fall day, a month before he died. Her laptop stares back at her and can't recall anything but a switch going on, and a sudden storm of algorithms.

Salem. Flaming hail and asbestos-clad frogs bedevil people on their ways to work. The paint on parked cars blisters and runs, leaving the smell of over-done sympathy. At the retirees' table, phrases bubble up. "Then guns." "Sixty-four year old." "I thought automatic weapons were illegal." A woman walks past the window trying to beat out the flames consuming her umbrella.

Salem. In the park, the sound of rain falling on the grass and trees is the anthem of salamanders taking back the land. In the early morning light, they worship the gray skies of their ancestors with bowed heads and creekside tracks in the mud. Downtown, in the coffeehouse, customers stop to listen to the voice of a homeless man in damp clothes, who tells them that the day of the salamander is at hand.

Salem. The morning breeze is mood music commemorating the passing of an old woman's hazy memory, of warm waters and quiet afternoons, in a far-off place. In those days, she shed her name and wore brighter colors. She hid her moods behind dark glasses, and forgot about the people she'd left behind. Sometimes, she walked along a beach of no regrets, drank five-shot reggae cocktails, and her singing voice was the envy of everyone.

Salem. In a tree along High St., the smaller birds are getting up their nerve to mob a lone crow on a tree branch. They're all egging each other on, screeching tribal chants, while the crow curses them, hoping for friends to show up in a flurry of black wings.

Salem. A man made of vegetables and smoke hesitates outside the coffee house door. He looks down at the dog tethered to the parking meter and leaves him his last summer squash. He walks across to the counter, trailing the aroma of burnt copper and marzipan. "Aah, espresso," he says in a voice of dark mist. The barista stares at him and says, "Are you on TV or something?"

Salem. Under a pregnant sky, a gray-haired woman walks with her head down. Perhaps she's counting the sidewalk meridians, on the way to a far-off coast where the air smells of coffee and kelp. Around her, the trees sway softly in an unseen current. A man in full scuba gear swims past her, up toward the distant surface of memory. When he gets there, he'll wonder at the woman he saw, walking along the bottom.

Salem. A vertical line appears above the sidewalk outside the coffee house. It wavers, widens, gathers substance, and becomes a slight, Asian man with an expensive looking leather bag hanging from his shoulder. Glances both ways and steps out of the haze surrounding him, on shiny black loafers. He glances at the large green beetle on the shoulder of his black blazer and walks into the coffee house. "കോഫി," he says. "Oh, hey, where I can get one of those?" asks the barista nodding at the beetle.

Salem. The man made of rain sips his coffee in the espresso cafe's far corner. No one will look at him for very long. His clothes smell of damp vegetation, and his eyes are muddy gray. His vine-covered boots are impatient with the floor, and his dark hands are veined with small streams. When he sighs, the light grows dim and everyone in the place has the same vision of salamanders on a forest floor.

My unfriendly advice for blog comment spammers

Hey, spammer dudes and dudettes, wherever you may be, which pretty obviously isn't in this country given the fractured English you use...

I am not at all thrilled when you try to leave comments on my blog posts in order, I assume, to get a better search engine ranking when your spammy URL is included with the comment.

But if you're going to pretend to be leaving a cogent observation about one of my posts, I really wish you'd put some effort into it. How about at least taking a quick glance at what I wrote, and attempt to say something vaguely relevant to it? 

And isn't there anybody your Spam Bosses can hire who speaks passable English?

Since I'm going to take a quick glance at your spammy compositions before I send them off to delete-land, I'd appreciate it if a little more effort was put into this bottom-of-the-bucket literary genre.

I mean, come on... you can do better than these recent attempted submissions:

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Hey, spambots, some of which of you may even be quasi-human, I do appreciate the fawning compliments. Not enough to publish the spam, of course, but on some extremely minimal level.

If I ever suffer a debilitating mental illness marked by a complete loss of self-esteem, its good to know that I've got some spam supporters out there who are unfailingly positive about my blog posts.

Your names, though, make it tough for me to picture you as potential friends.

So here's another tip: if you expect a blogger to believe that a spam comment is coming from a real person, don't use names like "omega juicers" or "actual new car price" or "singapore residential property." 

Lastly, I have never, ever, published an obvious spam comment on my blogs. I moderate every comment. So if there's some Spam Central HQ out there, do yourself a favor and take my blogs off of your attempted spam list.

You're wasting your time, and you're wasting some of mine. Though I do get a tiny bit of amusement from your pathetic efforts.

Reality is respected on this here blog

Reality is a wonderful thing. Actually, the only thing. Show me something that isn't real, and I'll say "You've shown me nothing."

And that's what some commenters on this blog want to do: pretend they've got a fact in their hand when all they possess is an empty palm of subjectivity. 

Which, I'll admit, is something real.

But reality comes in two main varieties, communal/objective and individual/subjective. Both are wonderful, admirable, essential, inescapable. It's when an attempt is made to pass off one as the other that I, as moderator of this blog, rule "No way!"

Global warming and Obama's birth certificate are a couple of examples. Human-caused global warming is a fact. So is President Obama being born in Hawaii. 

These sorts of facts are communal. They can't be hijacked by anybody. Or at least, they shouldn't be. Politicians, almost always right-wing in this country, do try to proclaim what a fact is without demonstrable evidence to back up their assertion.

Such as...North Carolina legislators hope to pass a law requiring that global warming science be ignored when calculating the future sea level on the state's shores. Crazy.

I'm not interested in contributing to that sort of disrespect of our communal reality.

So that's why I don't publish comments that are clearly at odds with the facts. If a commenter has solid evidence that human-caused global warming isn't happening, publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. Maybe you'll get a Nobel prize. Likewise, if a commenter has solid evidence that Obama's birth certificate is fake, release it. Maybe you'll guarantee Romney's election.

But if all you have are links to some crazy non-factual web sites, forget about using this blog as your soap box. 

Because what the world needs now (and always) are people willing to agree on basic facts, even if they disagree about what the facts mean. This is how political discourse moves from meaningless name-calling to reasonable debate.

The Earth is warming. Because of what we humans are doing. These facts have to be agreed upon before we can discuss what this means. Maybe you think global warming will benefit people. OK, I disagree. Let's each bring out our arguments.

But if you want to ignore the scientific consensus about global climate change, there's no basis for an intelligent discussion. 

If we each have seen a movie, we can talk about what we liked and disliked about it. However, if I demand that you seriously consider my opinion about a movie that I'm clueless about, you have a right to say, "You're acting crazy."

Craziness can be fun, but not when it is masquerading as reality. That way lies madness, when someone demands that other people embrace their unreal view of the world. If you like country music, fine. I don't. We can agree to disagree about our likes. 

Opinions are different from facts. You're entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. Sometimes the line is blurry between them. With issues like global warming and Obama's birthplace, the line is clear. 

Which is why I won't allow comments on this blog that try to pass off opinion as fact, when the facts are crystal-clear. Yes, facts can change. Until this occurs, though, a fact is a fact, and an opinion is an opinion.

Human-caused global warming is a fact. So is Obama's U.S. citizenship. If you want to say otherwise on the WWW, do it someplace other than this blog.

 

Cranky old man gripes about social networking

Growing old sucks.

As a 63 year old, I can tell you that the best thing about becoming Social Security eligible is getting monthly money from the government, paid for by the hard labor of people still working. Thank you, daughter!

Otherwise, I'm still trying to figure out what's so great about the "Golden Years."

Yes, I get a 10% senior discount at LifeSource Natural Foods here in Salem. That's one thing. Just about the only other obvious benefit of my geezer'ness is feeling freer to be a cranky old man, something that comes pretty naturally to me.

So I might as well vent about social networking gripes that have been building up in my not-quite-yet-senile psyche since I started blogging, Twittering, and Facebooking.

I started to blog back in 2003, which is about a hundred years in Internet time, given how fast things change in cyberspace. Blogging was cool back then. Now it's mostly the province of, well, cranky old men (and a few women) who write lengthy rants.

Five hundred words. Maybe a thousand words. Wow, that could be more than 5000 characters! Who's going to read something 35 times longer than a Twitter tweet? 

Me.

And other brilliant, intelligent, thoughtful, literary, cultured people who understand that not everything in the cosmos can be described in 140 characters. Nonetheless, daily I peruse my Twitter and Facebook feeds, even though I'm not really into these trendier forms of social networking, blogging being my primary passion.

Here's some reasons WTF? echoes so often in my brain when I fire up the Twitter and Facebook apps on my iPhone.

-- I don't get Foursquare. Or the whole deal of telling people what you're doing and where you are at the moment. I don't give a shit if you're at Joe's Bar and have just become the "mayor" of the place, or whatever it's called when you irritate more Twitter followers than anybody else who belongs to Foursquare and tweets "I'm at Joe's Bar." 

-- I also don't get it when someone fires off 35 Twitter tweets in a row, describing in 140 character bursts what's happening at a news conference, sports event, or whatever. Hey, get a free Blogger account and write a thousand word description of whatever you're so excited about. Twitter is supposed to be about brevity. 35 tweets is 34 too many in a thirty-minute time span. Send me one tweet saying "I'm live blogging X at URL Y." I probably don't care about X anyway, so this makes it a lot easier for me to ignore what you mistakenly believe your Twitter followers want to know about in excruciatingly tweety detail.

-- I'm not sure what I've done wrong with my Facebook account, but I'm sure it's Mark Zuckerberg's fault. For some reason I have no idea who most of my "friends" are. When I started up with Facebook I was desperate to have some friends, so I promiscuously sent out invitations to whoever Facebook suggested I should befriend, and I accepted friend requests from complete strangers. Now I scroll through my Facebook feed and think, "I'd care about your kid's birthday party if I had some clue who you are." I don't know how to unfriend people. I'm also afraid to in case this is a horrible social networking faux pas and they'll find out about it. Of course, since I don't know who you are, I guess I shouldn't care if you hate me.

-- Along this line, everybody who sends me LinkedIn invitations: STOP! I have no idea what Linkedin is, other than it has something to do with business networking. I'm retired. I don't even like to think about working, much less get involved with somebody else's actual working. Unless you can give me free Apple products I have no interest in furthering your career. What's especially irritating is that I continue to get Linkedin emails for months, reminding me that I haven't responded to a request from somebody I don't know to get involved with a social networking service that I don't care about. 

Well, I'm almost up to 700 words of griping. I lost the Twitter crowd about 650 words ago, so I'm probably only talking to myself now. But, hey, that's what blogging is all about.  

I give TypePad a low approval score

Today I saw that TypePad, my blogging service, is asking its bloggers to give them some feedback. "Tell us how likely you are to recommend TypePad."

I jumped right on that request.

I was disappointed to see that comments on the feedback post were disabled, which doesn't convey the message that TypePad is genuinely open to discussion about how their blogging platform can be improved.

But after giving TypePad a "2" out of "10" on the recommend question (meaning, I'd be unlikely to recommend TypePad) I felt better after utilizing an open-ended comment box to tell TypePad what I've been saying -- over and over -- for many years.

For years I and other bloggers have been asking, and waiting, for improvements to the core TypePad system. Very few have manifested. As I've noted in comments/advice repeatedly, my 99 cent iPhone apps get new features much more often than TypePad does.

This is frustrating. You seem to have given up on improving the core TypePad platform, focusing instead on rolling out new themes (whoopee) and telling us bloggers how to code our own "improvements" in a complex RSS or whatever fashion (useless to me).

Yes, I'm happy that TypePad no longer crashes on me and it works quite reliably. But I can't remember the last time I thought "Wow, this is a great new TypePad feature!" It just seems like you take your subscribers for granted and aren't dedicated to continual improvement as, again, us Apple product users are accustomed to.

So I'd tell aspiring bloggers to look elsewhere. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with TypePad. Having been blogging regularly since 2003 on two blogs, I have a very large Google search presence and it would be disturbing to start over with a new URL. (But believe me, I've thought about it.)

Ommwriter is a cool Zen'ish word processor for blogging

Does this post of mine seem more Zen-like than usual? It should.

I'm composing it on Ommwriter, a minimalist word processor that I came across today via one of the blogs I follow which keep track of what's happening in the oh-so-cool world of Apple.

I was intrigued by the mention of a text editor which starts you off with a utterly blank screen. A few clickable options appear to the right when you stop typing and move your pointer outside of the (resizable) writing box.

You've got a few font options, a few type size options, some choices about what sort of screen to stare at while you write (I'm looking at a solid background which slowly changes colors in a relaxing manner), a variety of choices for both background sound and keyboard-press sound (I've turned off the background sound so I can better hear the chirp that accompanies each character I type, much like the old days of a clickety-clack typewriter), and some options for saving what you write.

This morning I first downloaded a free version of Ommwriter. After playing with it for a while I decided to fork over a few PayPal bucks for the Dana II version, which has some extra options.

The Ommwriter folks want a minimum payment of $4.11, saying that monetary gifts which end in a "1" are auspicious, so they ask that whatever you give them, make it end with "1."

I semi-generously sent them $5.11.

 I appreciate what they've created, and the intentions behind Ommwriter. Technology can be complicatedly overwhelming, even when fashioned by Apple. Ommwriter takes me back to my high school and college days when I wrote (a lot) on a typewriter -- a manual at first, then an electric.

Without, of course, the frustration of having to get out Whiteout or correction tape when I made a typing mistake. But with the appealing memory of looking at a plain page that gradually filled with my thoughts, no special formatting required (or, possible).

For a blogger like me, there are pluses and minuses to Ommwriter. Based on this initial writing experience, Ommwriter is more pleasant to use than the TypePad text editor where I usually compose my posts.

I like the ever-changing color of the "paper" I'm writing on, and the intriguing sounds I hear as the rhythm of my typing changes. (When you're in the flow of writing, you can tell by the sound as well as by the sight of characters materializing on the computer screen.

But I'll have to copy this text, paste it into the TypePad text editor, and then add some formatting (links, boldface/italics, maybe a photo).

I usually do this as I go along, but it does interfere somewhat with my train of thought -- which has been known to come to screeching stops. Plus, I always proofread my blog posts before clicking "publish," so this time I'll do my formatting thing at the same time.

If you're a Mac user, check out Ommwriter. It's a good buy at free or $4.11. (Reportedly a Windows version is in the works.)

I Googled around to see how other people liked Ommwriter. Mostly, a lot. You can read their thoughts here, here, here, and here.

And here's a You Tube video that shows Ommwriter in action.

 

Self-publishing loses its stigma. So...write a book!

Ah, the times they are a'changin, just like Bob Dylan said they would. What was shameful not so long ago has come out into the open, standing tall and proud. And I'm not talking about homosexuality.

Rather, self-publishing.

My print on demand (POD) loving soul was thrilled to read in a recent issue of Newsweek, " Who Needs a Publisher?"

Until recently, reviewers and booksellers looked down on self-published authors the way Anna Wintour scorns Dress Barn. Now new writers and established authors alike are increasingly taking publishing into their own hands, and the publishing establishment is paying attention.

According to a recent Bowker report, the market for “nontraditional books” in the United States grew by more than 750,000 new titles in 2009—a 181 percent increase over 2008. Five of the top 100 bestsellers in the Kindle store—which now produces more sales than Amazon’s hardcover list—are currently self-published.

Which shows that my soul is behind the times, because when I think "self-publishing" POD comes to mind (with print on demand, books are printed...surprise!...on demand, one at a time; this makes publishing much easier to accomplish on a minimal budget).

Yet the rise of e-books means there's another way other than POD for a writer to self-publish his or her book. Back in the old days, 2004, when my book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus was published in a print on demand fashion, e-books were just a speck on the publishing radar.

Even when I got back the rights to the book and published it via Create Space, an Amazon subsidiary, I didn't think about making "Return to the One" available in an e-book format. Now, I am.

However someone self-publishes a book, it's all good. As the Newsweek article says, "in the DIY [do it yourself] era, putting out your own book is no longer an act of vanity."

Well, I don't think it ever was.

But that was the bad rap self-publishing had back when my first book was published in 1996, and it persisted until recently. Irrationally, because a painter wouldn't be considered vain if she sold her work by some means other than exhibiting it in a major gallery.

Are all the creative types who set up booths at art fairs engaging in "acts of vanity" because they choose to distribute their work themselves, rather than trying to get stores to buy their stuff at wholesale and sell it at retail?

This is a big advantage of self-publishing: cutting out the middleman to a large extent. I used to only get $1.25 or so from the sale of a "Return to the One" copy. Now I get $5.26. And I have the satisfaction of being my own publishing house, Adrasteia Publishing.

I came up with that name (adrasteia means "inescapable" in Greek) when my first POD publishing service thought we needed to disguise the self-published nature of my book. At that time most reviewers wouldn't look at a "vanity" title. And most bookstores wouldn't stock it.

Again, that's ridiculous.

My wife is an avid earring connoisseur. She doesn't care where she finds an attractive pair of dichroic glass earrings. If it's a rickety table at an art fair, great; if it's a fancy display case in a department store, also great.

So what difference does it make if a well-written book is distributed by the author, or printed and marketed by a publishing house? Sure, a lot of self-published books are crappy. Yet a lot of books published through traditional channels also are crappy.

There's nothing like seeing your book in print. Holding the first copy in your hands makes all the work put into it seem more than worthwhile. Viewing a nicely formatted e-book undoubtedly brings its own satisfaction, albeit less physical/sensual.

If you've got a book idea in mind, this is a great time to make it a reality. With the rise of blogs and other means of Internet self-expression, self-publishing increasingly is viewed as just another way of expressing one's creativity.

Once in a while I get emails from people who want to know if I'd recommend Create Space as a self-publishing option. I tell them, absolutely. I like Create Space a lot. But there are other POD and e-book services to consider, such as Lulu.

Just do it. (Living in Oregon, I've got Nike on my mind.)

If seeing your book in print is a dream for you, make it a reality. For $500 or less, it can happen. Write what you want, then publish how you want. There's a whole new world of books now. Become a part of it.

I win my own 2009 blog post awards!

This is why I love to blog. Winning awards is so much fun! Sure, I've awarded them to myself, but isn't this what blogging is all about, self-absorption?

Appropriately, I'll answer my own question. Yes, Brian, you're right. As always.

So after browsing through my 2009 blog creations, I declare the following winners. I've included excerpts from my prose to justify, if only to me, why these posts are champions.

Best Human-Related Question
"A rose cleavage tattoo: to stare or not to stare?"

Given a choice between being helped by a busty young thing with a rose tattoo showing in her cleavage, and -- gosh, just about anybody else -- you can guess where I'm more likely to take my return business.

Best Animal-Related Question
"Do dogs try to cover or spread their poop?"

When I told my wife that today's blog topic was dog poop, she said, "You're lucky that this is all you have to worry about." Since at the time she was vacuuming the kitchen floor while I was perched at the counter with my laptop, sipping a cup of coffee and using Google to delve into the depths of dog poop behavior, I have a feeling that her comment had an ironic quality to it.

Best Truest Truth About Salem
"Salem is a tourist draw? Only for bland lovers"

That said, I've no doubt that Travel Salem will be able to attract conventioneers to the area. Groups such as the Bland Lovers Association and People for the Abolition of Excitement will come here like moths drawn to gray. Also, the Watching Paint Dry discussion circle.

Best Urging That Happened, Thankfully
"Keep resorts out of the Metolius River basin"

This should be a no-brainer: preserving a uniquely special place in Oregon -- the Metolius River Basin recreation area -- that is threatened by two large destination resorts. But brains are in short supply among some who approve of this potential travesty.

Best Statement That Too Many People Disagree With
"I love taxes! They do so much good"

Today is tax day. I feel happy. Giving, like they say, is better than receiving. Well, at least equal. Each year, paying our taxes is the biggest gift that my wife and I offer to other people.

Best Premature Survivor Conclusion
"Coach -- the biggest jerk ever on Survivor"

I was so happy Coach (real name, Benjamin Wade) got voted off Survivor Tocantins this week. My wife and I have watched every episode of Survivor over the years. We've seen some real jerks, such as the infamous  Jonny Fairplay and Randy Bailey. But I've never screamed so often at the TV, Vote him off! Get rid of him! Don't trust him!

Best I'd Spoken Too Soon Survivor Conclusion
"Survivor Samoa champions incivility with Russell Hantz"

Regardless, deceit is part of the Survivor game. Every hard-core fan of the show knows this. And applauds it. I love watching a good liar. However, Russell Hantz elicited other feelings in me. Disgust. Irritation. Anger. And not just at Russell. At the producers of Survivor also. They're promoting the heck out of his evil'ness.

Best Grandfather Pride Post
"More granddaughter photos -- can't help it"

OK, I've hit the blog post trifecta: three consecutive days of Maui granddaughter photos. Each evening I sit down at my laptop and think, "Really should write about something significant." Then a voice inside my head screams, "What's more significant than an oh-so-cute two year old girl who is the one and only offspring of your one and only child?"

Best Naked Aging Hippie Photo
"Oregon Country Fair photos -- the '60s live on"

There's loads of attractive semi-nudity at the Oregon Country Fair. This couple simply was semi-nude.

Best Post My Wife Heartily Disagrees With
"A scooter will change your life! Here's why"

I'm approaching the one-month anniversary of getting a Suzuki Burgman 650 Executive scooter. I can predict pretty well how Burgie and I will celebrate: by going for a ride! As you can tell by the exclamation marks in this blog post title and first paragraph, I'm enjoying my new scootering life even more than I thought I would. Yes, I am!

Best "Who Knew Brian Was Like This?" Post
"I become a fearsome ground squirrel killer"

Hopefully the California ground squirrels who have been driving us nutty have an Internet connection and read my blog. Because if they do, they'll realize that this mild-mannered PETA-applauding animal-loving long-time vegetarian has been driven over the "aren't they cute?" edge into a kill the bastards! dark hole.

Best Creative Use of Philosophy
"Sartre, scootering, and sensuality"

I've been re-reading John Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness." And I ride a scooter. There's got to be a connection between existentialist philosophy and the joy I feel zipping around on two motorized wheels.

Best Evidence Of Ego Loss
"A real man will call a plumber"

When he arrived, after having told his scheduler that we had three other minor plumbing problems that needed fixing, the first words out of my mouth after "hello" were... "We've got some small jobs that shouldn't take you too long. I called you because my handyman skills are such, I can turn a small problem into a big one with amazing ease."

Best Proof That I Can Still Hang With Young Guys
"Beer frisbee as it's meant to be played"

I came to Beer Frisbee late in life -- two days ago, in fact -- but I've been ready for it since intense training during my California college days in the 1960's. Not by drinking beer, since this substance wasn't cannabis or a psychedelic. Hence...boring! But by spending countless Flower Power hours stoned on various substances and throwing frisbees with my brothers and sisters in altered consciousness.

Best Why Men Should Dance Post
"Ballroom dancing restores yin-yang balance"

Guys, if you need a reason to take ballroom dance lessons, here it is: the woman has to do what you want. You lead. The woman follows. End of story. Until you get off the dance floor. Then your relationship goes back to normal.

Best Movie Review
"Life lessons from Michael Jackson's This Is It"

Over on my other blog I opined that "This Is It" is a great movie. Also, a terrific philosophy. We're always waiting for It to arrive in the future, or wondering what happened to It in the past. Meanwhile, life -- It -- keeps yelling "Here I am! Here! Now!" in the present moment. But often we don't have ears to hear it. This is the main message that I got from the movie. Your results may differ. Side effects may vary.

Best Post Whose Question Should Be Answered With "A Lot!"
"How disappointed should progressives be about Obama?"

With Obama our president for the next four years, wouldn't we get the change that we'd be wanting for the past eight? The way things have turned out so far, mostly not. Nothing Obama has done to date excites me the way his campaign did.

Best Prediction That I Won't Be Able to Brag About If It Comes True
"Hope our Samsung nano-particle washer doesn't kill us"

Oh, she's beautiful. But there are reports she could be deadly. Still, we've brought this high-tech Samsung washer into our laundry room, along with her non-malevolent dryer sister.

Why I transferred domain names from GoDaddy to Dotster

This morning I noticed a Twitter Tweet from Blue Oregon's uber-progressive, Kari Chisholm, which said in part:

GoDaddy CEO is GOP activist. Try Dotster.com, local (Vancouver WA)

For many years I've used GoDaddy for domain name registration and web site hosting. I've been satisfied with the service, but the GoDaddy style has bothered me.

So Kari's suggestion pushed me to transfer four domain names to Dotster today. Before describing how that went, here's what rubs me the wrong way about GoDaddy.

(1) Over commercialization. Take a look at the home pages of GoDaddy and Dotster. Over the top sales promotions versus clean and simple advertising. This guy calls GoDaddy's approach "brainless marketing."

What he means, I think, isn't that the GoDaddy CEO (Bob Parsons) is brainless, but his web site often implies that users of his services are -- given the incessant offers to upgrade, buy more stuff, and such.

That gets irritating when you just want to do something simple, like purchase a domain name. I found that Dotster has a few "would you like to also buy..." enticements on its site, but to nowhere near the same degree as GoDaddy.

(2) Sexist marketing. More accurately, crude sexist marketing. I'm fine with having gorgeous females presented as mindless objects of desire. That's a great way to grab the attention of a male mind.

But Parsons and GoDaddy are notorious for the "enhanced" Super Bowl 30-second ad. (A lengthier and more revealing version is on the GoDaddy web site, along with other videos of the buxom GoDaddy girls.)

I don't find the commercials clever or entertaining. However, they do indicate what sort of company Bob Parsons is running, and something about his view of the world.

(3) The GoDaddy CEO is a right-wing Republican. Nothing wrong with that. Ordinarily I don't choose what to purchase because of the politics of a company president. But when Kari reminded me of Bob Parson's GOP activism, I took a look at some of the many videos on Parsons' v-blog.

Watching the September 4 video post for a couple of minutes, I felt good about having just transferred my domain names to Dotster. Parsons holds forth with a couple of his GoDaddy babes wearing a Marines "semper fi" t-shirt.

The guy defended torture at Gitmo. Doesn't sound to me like he truly represents the proud Marine tradition. 

For these reasons, with some trepidation I clicked Dotster's "transfer domain" link earlier today and started the process of moving my domain registrations away from GoDaddy.

An hour or so later, I came away feeling that if our nuclear arsenal has security procedures as tight as what's involved in shifting a domain name to a different registrar, there's no need to worry about an accidental WW III.

On the Dotster web site I typed in the names of the four domains, such as "brianhines.com", that I wanted to transfer from GoDaddy. Then the "fun" (quotation marks added for irony) began. I'd read:

Due to a change at the com/net registry, transfer regulations have changed for all .COM and .NET domain names. Authorization codes will now be required to transfer domain names to Dotster.

To obtain an authorization code, you will need to contact your current registrar. You will be required to provide this authorization code to complete the domain transfer process with us.

I headed over to the GoDaddy site. Searched the Help files. Found that an "authorization" link supposedly was on the domain name page, once I logged in with my user name and password. Except, the link wasn't there. I looked everywhere. Couldn't find it.

Phoned GoDaddy support. Got a nice lady. Fantasized that she looked like the girls in the Super Bowl ad. Almost certainly didn't. But she was competent and helpful.

Told me that I needed to turn off the domain name locking feature. Walked me through the process on my laptop. Reached the page where the registration info was shown. Told me, "the authorization code will be sent to your email address," which she read off.

"But that isn't my email address now," I said. "Then you need to edit the info under domain name administrator. Be sure not to change anything under registrar, or you won't be able to request a domain name transfer for 60 days."

Good advice.

That 60 day policy seemingly goes against ICANN rules, as this irritated GoDaddy customer says in his tale of a frustrated domain name transfer. (That post is on an anti-GoDaddy site, NoDaddy: "Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.")

I dutifully entered my new email address into the "administrator" section of each domain name registration. Then I clicked the authorization links, which had appeared after doing the unlocking thing.

In fairly short order four emails arrived from GoDaddy, each containing a lengthy authorization code for a domain name transfer. Then I logged into my new Dotster account, wondering how the transfers were going from their end, since I hadn't gotten an expected email telling me what to do with the authorization codes.

I saw that the email already had been sent. But, not surprisingly, to the email address shown on the administrator info -- which I'd just changed. Luckily (this must happen fairly often) Dotster had an option to resend the email.

Which soon arrived at my current email address. Then I just had to re-visit the Dotster web page and copy in the authorization codes sent to me by GoDaddy. After a mere 20 email messages from GoDaddy and Dotster, I got the happy Dotster news:

Good news - Transfer of the following domain(s) is now complete.

So now my domain names won't be serviced by a company known for its chesty "enhancements." But I'm expecting that Dotster will fulfill me in other more Internet-meaningful ways.

What oral sex teaches about blogging

For some (obvious) reason this Twitter tweet by "rawprincess" caught my eye:

14 things oral sex taught me about blogging
http://762ot.th8.us

Pretty true. Check them out.

I liked an addition suggested by a commenter on this post. A lot of blogs and web sites, not to mention talk radio, sure take this advice.

25. Keep the windows down and make them scream really loud so that the neighbors know what you’re up to.

Twitter -- my path to enlightenment

Some people consider my new found Twittering to be a useless waste of time. By "some people" I mainly mean my wife.

She hasn't realized yet, as I have, that Twitter is much more than an easy means for me to cast 140 characters or less of what I'm doing into cyberspace on a whim.

Clearly, it is my path to enlightenment.

I say this after having pursued daily meditation, vegetarianism, and other spiritual practices for some forty years (longer, if one considers that being almost continually stoned on pot or psychedelics in college is a spiritual practice).

Now, of course, I tweet about my meditation. Plus other minutia of daily life, such as the mystery of dog pooping behavior.

Thus I have embraced the Zen emphasis on here and now. Which, updating a famous aphorism, may be stated as "Chop wood and carry water -- then tell your Twitter followers: Just chopped wood and carried water."

Well, some people (let's name them Laurel) might say that simply doing something is more Buddhist'ly present in the moment than doing it and also telling the Twitter world what you've done.

Perhaps. But this presumes a distinction between (1) reality and (2) 140 character or less descriptions of reality.

Does not the Heart Sutra tell us that emptiness is form, and form emptiness? So how is posting a tweet about my life different from my life? Eventually I am confident that a Twitter satori will lead to a realization: My Twittering is me, and I am my Twittering.

Additionally, I am learning humility and furthering ego-loss. Currently I have six Twitter followers on OregonBrian. John McCain has 334,591.

Yet only a few times a day, around a couple of dozen (before noon, I mean; more times later), do I lament how few followers I have, and wonder why my pleadings to almost everyone I come in contact with ("paper or plastic?" "I don't care, just follow me on Twitter") have fallen on such deaf ears.

Like a prophet who is unrecognized in his own land, but continues to preach to the empty desert, I send a daily tweet out into the barrenness of my Twitter realm.

I scoff at John Mayer's assertion that "Twitter is silly and dumb." Especially this quote of his:

"If you really think that Twitter is the pathway to spiritual enlightenment, well...It’s one step away from sending pictures of your poop."

Ah, Mr. Mayer, I have been so close to taking that step. (When I wrote that post I toyed with the idea of posting an image of the inside of my colon, the source of my poop, but ended up deciding against it -- though if I hear a chorus of demands, I'd be glad to reconsider.)

So apparently I'm just the sort of person who will be able to achieve enlightenment through Twittering.

Which reminds me...I've got to put up a tweet about this blog post!

Oh, my god, I'm twittering!

The devil must have made me do it. Or, the Grand Lord of Why Not? Because a mere three days ago I had blogified about how Twitter didn't interest me.

And now I have a Twitter page. An Emerson quote comes to mind:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

What turned the corner on tweeting for me was a moment when, in the course of pondering the pros and cons of opening a Twitter account, and thinking "this craze is useless," I realized:

Yes! That's the point! Uselessness!

Such was one of the themes in my "The Tao of Paris Hilton" post, the popularity of which made it possible for this blog to surpass a million page views in a relatively short time. (Tip: to generate web traffic, put up photos of semi-naked famous female cultural icons.)

Once I appreciated the Taoist beauty of Twitter's uselessness, where most communications are 140 characters of less of inanity, my fingers raced to the sign-up page.

I worry about what I say on my blog posts. I try to make sense in my email messages. But with Twitter... fuck it! How wrong can I go in 140 characters? Plus, who's going to read my crappy tweets anyway?

At the moment, hardly anyone. So my first goal is to attract some followers.

This is one of the things I like about Twitter. On other social networking sites you have friends. With Twitter, you have followers. Cool. (Even better would be "acolytes," or "fawning admirers.")

At the moment my following is precisely zero. If you're concerned about the state of my fragile ego, as you should be, head to my Twitter page and click on "Follow."

Don't worry about whether there is any good reason to do this. There isn't. Remember the mantra: uselessness. Gaining a follower will make me feel better, and it won't make you feel worse.

Otherwise, I'm not promising much from this whole Twitter thing. Basically, it's fun -- another opportunity for me to play with my iPhone.

It's a kick to be able to take a photo and easily have Tweetie upload a compressed version to Twitpic, and embed a URL in my tweet. I also like watching the 140 character counter count down as I one-finger type an iPhone tweet, putting a stopper on my usual writing verbosity.

Since ego-loss isn't one of my personality characteristics, I've done some research into how to gain Twitter followers.

Given that I have no idea what purpose Twitter serves in the cosmic scheme of things, it was encouraging to read:

This is the first thing you need to know: It’s not really about how you tweet, what you say or who you talk to but who you are.

Excellent.

First off, Paris Hilton is my second cousin. Seemingly this should gain me some reflected Twitter glory. OK, not much. But since I have zero followers at the moment, my Twitter trajectory can only go up.

Second, I've written a best-selling book about Plotinus. Granted, it is only "best-selling" in comparison to other books about a Greek mystic philosopher hardly anybody has heard about. But there's got to be some author-groupies who would be delighted to find a tweet from me sailing onto their cell phones.

Third, I'm a blogger. So I'm hoping that at least a few of those who visit my HinesSight and Church of the Churchless blogs will take pity on my follower-less soul and click on that Follow button.

I promise to tweet some family dog photos. And when I next see my granddaughter, for sure some super-cute two year old photos.

Along with a whole lot of uselessness -- the main draw for Twitter followers.

Twitter doesn't interest me. Do I need to tweet that?

Since I have two blogs, a web site, several laptops, and an iPhone, I keep wondering why Twitter hasn't tweaked my interest.

Everybody seems to be twittering, or "tweeting," these days. Well, nobody that I actually know. But I've been reading about The Twittering Class.

Which makes me wonder, should I join the Twittergentsia? I don't want to be left out of a cool social movement, especially when it involves technology. So I tried to convince myself that I needed to start tweeting.

First stop: a couple of important people's Twitter pages. First impression: yawn.

John McCain has over 254,000 followers of his tweets. I can't see why.

Ditto with George Stephanopoulos' Twitter page. The only tweet that seemed to have any interesting content was mostly incomprehensible. This isn't going to replace a New York Times story:

Early read on Geithner plan from plugged in investment source asset managers he knows just won't play until sure WH can control Congress

I then journeyed to Twitter itself, seeking to learn its mysteries from the source of all things Twitterish.

Not surprisingly (given Twitter's limit of 140 characters on tweets), I found conciseness under "Why?"

Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.

Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.
Partying? Your friends may want to join you.

Well, my mother is dead. I'm retired. And this sixty year-old's idea of a party is a hot bath, the latest issue of People magazine, and a glass of wine. I'd invite people to join me, but it's a small bathtub.

Here's my main problem warming up to Twitter: clicking on the main page's "Watch a video!" link led me to this bit of questionable philosophy.

Real life happens in between blogs and emails

Hmmmm. For one thing, I don't like this putdown of blogging and emailing, both of which I do a lot of. I feel that these are very much part of my "real life."

And I'm not convinced that adding Twitter tweets to my other electronic communications would enhance the real life that, presumably, I'd be telling people about.

Mark Morford had a clever column recently, "I Twitter for you!
Too old/busy/jaded to 'social network,' but still want to seem hip? Call now!"

Allow me introduce you to my groundbreaking new company, Geekamania.com. I created it to meet the needs of smart but also slightly bewildered, overwhelmed, angry, out-of-touch, nervous or otherwise increasingly irrelevant people, just like you!

The concept is very simple. Who needs Facebook and MySpace and the like? You do! But who the hell has time for such pathetic digital hoo-ha nonsense when there's dishes to be washed and gardening to be done and kids to be driven around and thorny little roses to be stopped at and smelled? No one!

That's where Geekamania comes in. Let us do the annoying but necessary-evil social networking crapola for you! For a small monthly fee, we'll keep you connected and relevant, even vaguely respectable/marginally noticeable to the jaded, spiteful, easily distracted ADHD youth of today, whether you think you want to be or not. It couldn't be easier!

Quite a few years ago, before all this social networking stuff became fashionable, I used to visit the Governor's Cup coffeehouse in Salem fairly often.

Almost every time I'd go there, I'd see the same group of people ensconced in a prime seating area near the front windows. Not all of the kaffeeklatsch'ers would be present every day, of course, but some of the regulars seemed to be full time Governor's Cup inhabitants.

After a while I began to wonder what they talked about. If you have a life outside of a coffee house, then you can share stories about it over an expresso.

But if most of your life involves talking about your life, won't there come a time when you run out of outside stories and all there is to say is something about the saying you've been doing?

So I'm going to pass on Twitter for now. Maybe, for ever. The dog is bugging me to go for a walk.

If I had a Twitter page, I could put up a tweet whenever she did that: "Dog is bugging me to go for a walk." 

Does anyone care?

And wouldn't I eventually end up saying stuff like, "Now I'm thinking about putting up a tweet about the dog bugging me to go for a walk"? Probably followed by, "I'm wondering if I'm putting too much time into thinking about putting up a tweet about the dog bugging me to go for a walk."

Hell with it. I'm going for a walk.

Anonymous commenting vs. revealing who we are

Since I've been actively blogging for over six years, I've seen the best and worst of people when they're able to leave anonymous comments on blog posts -- a practice I've always allowed.

It bothers me when someone hides behind a made up name -- "slugface99"-- spewing venomous insults, idiotic falsities, and profane rants into an otherwise mostly courteous blog conversation.

It warms my heart when someone reveals an intimacy about themselves -- a deep fear, longing, forbidden lust, or whatever -- that would have been impossible to share with a real name attached to it.

In a previous post I took TypePad, which hosts my blog, to task for failing to recognize sufficiently that people choose to connect on the Internet in various ways.

Some see the web mostly as a means to fashion social networks. They belong to Twitter, My Space, and Facebook. They want to have their identity recognized by those with whom they come in contact -- friends, work associates, strangers.

The push to establish profiles that carry across various web sites and networks (such as Open ID) assumes that people want to have a consistent identity in cyberspace.

Many, though, are wary of revealing too much about themselves. Like the characters on Lost, one of my favorite TV shows, they revel in the potential of being able to recreate themselves by casting aside their previous history.

So, good Libran that I am, my attitude is: let's have it both ways. Personally, I always use my real name, "Brian," when I leave a comment on a blog post or discussion group. But I understand why others don't want to.

Yesterday, columnist Mark Morford opined that anonymous commenting is destroying meaningful online dialogue.

But the coherent voices are, by and large, increasingly drowned out by the nasty, the puerile, the inane, to the point where, unless you're in the mood to have your positive mood ruined and your belief in the inherent goodness of humanity stomped like a rainbow flag in the Mormon church, there's almost no point in trying to sift through it anymore. The relentless nastiness is, quite literally, sickening.

Sure, sometimes. However, there's also a lot to like about being able to express your views anonymously, as "How Important are Nameless and Faceless comments?" points out (focus of this article is on the workplace).

Posting anonymous comments supports candid dialogue, protects individual opinions, and can increase the number of comments.

I've had terrific conversations with people I've just met, and would never see again. I could say things that I wouldn't reveal to friends or family with whom I have a history and a future.

Raw honesty is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in everyday life. Each of us puts on a persona that masks, to either a large or small degree, who we are when we're not busy pretending to be who we're not.

Too much of a good thing, though, becomes a bad thing. Occasionally I urge commenters on my blogs to speak to each other as if they were sitting together in a coffeehouse.

Even if other people didn't know who you were, you'd still treat them courteously -- just as you'd expect to be treated. You wouldn't scream, swear, or stomp off in a huff.

You'd share a moment with some fellow human beings, recognizing that expressing differing opinions doesn't require a Nuke Em! mentality.

Today I called Sid "crazy" in a comment I left on my blog post about evolution. But I would have said the same thing if I was face to face with him, and he'd claimed that God created humans just as they are, instantly -- no natural selection required.

Speak online as you'd talk to someone in person. To my mind, that's just about the only communication rule needed on the Internet.

My TypePad Connect review: thumbs down

Blogging is a big part of my life. Thus so is TypePad, the service that hosts my HinesSight and Church of the Churchless blogs.

By and large, I'm happy with TypePad. But not with their TypePad Connect service, which I tried out for a week before shutting it down when it seriously screwed up my blogs.

I've spent quite a bit of time communicating with TypePad staff about what they need to do to improve both TypePad Connect and their basic blogging service (actually, I'm a "Pro" member, several steps above "Basic").

Invariably I get a prompt, friendly reply along the lines of, "Thanks for the feedback. We're working on the problem."

That's nice. However, it'd be nicer if the problems actually were solved.

So this post is sort of an open letter to TypePad, written with the hope that a more public airing of my gripes will result in more action than I've seen so far. Likely it'll be fairly lengthy, because I've got quite a bit to say.

(If this subject is already terminally boring you, I'll reward your interest in getting this far into the post with links to some Sports Illustrated 2009 Swimsuit Issue photos, here and here, before you head off to more interesting ports of call in the blogosphere.)

I'll begin with my qualifications: my first TypePad post dates from January 2003, so I've got more than six years of mostly-daily blogging experience. My two blogs are approaching 1,800,000 page views. They average about 1,000 page views a day.

I write about all kinds of stuff, leaning toward serious (or semi-serious) subjects. Meaning of life. Current affairs/politics. Oregon land use issues. The etiquette of staring at a rose cleavage tattoo (hey, that's an semi-serious topic to me).

Now... my gripes and what I hope TypePad will do about them.

TypePad Connect (TPC) isn't ready for prime-time.
I figured that the commenting features in TypePad Connect would be an improvement over the current system, which has its flaws. After trying TPC for a week on my Church of the Churchless blog, I found that this beta release is a step backward, not forward.

Now, TypePad keeps reminding me about the "beta." Meaning, TPC is still in testing, with bugs being worked out. OK, yet TypePad is marketing TPC like crazy, urging not only TypePad subscribers to sign up for it but also people using other services (like Blogger).

I waited more than two months after the beta release before trying out TypePad Connect, figuring that the most serious problems would have been fixed by then.

Wrong.

Blog visitors couldn't read the most recent comments on posts where the comments stretched over more than one page (TypePad allows only 50 comments on a page). The sidebar on my blog wouldn't show up. Lengthy comments would be "previewed" in a small box with scroll bars that didn't look at all like the final posting. There was no way to edit a comment after it was posted, even by me.  Replying to a comment via TPC's emailed notification led me to the original post, not the comment I wanted to reply to, which I had to find on my own. Comments weren't visible to Google and other search engines. Etc.

Worst of all, my blog clearly was becoming much less stable than before. TypePad Connect was like some sort of alien presence that threatened the existence of my dearly beloved Church of the Churchless.

It felt great to uninstall TypePad Connect last night. Cleansing.

Thankfully, the reversion went smoothly. I'd copied 42 pages worth of comments that had come in during the frustrating week of dealing with TypePad Connect problems before clicking on "the get rid of TPC" button. So far, it looks like none of those comments have been lost.

That's good. But I still fault TypePad for releasing TypePad Connect when it is so flawed. Others agree, having made the same complaint on a customer service blog. For example, Rosangel Valenti said:

From information that we've seen on other blogs hosted by Typepad, this issue has been raised before by some of your customers, as far back as October of 2008. It's staggering that it's still going on now. Also unbelievable that your company dared to roll out the new software not only without warning or consultation, but still containing four-month-old problems.

TypePad needs to focus on improving its current service
For years I've been telling TypePad staff, including the head honcho, about relatively simple improvements that need to be made. After all, blogging isn't rocket science.

A blogger like me needs to be able to compose posts smoothly. He then wants blog visitors to be able to share comments easily, and learn what other commenters are saying. Both his words and those of his visitors have to be visible to Google and other search engines, so people looking for info on a subject that's been written about can find a pertinent blog post.

I've told TypePad staff that they should bow down to the Apple model each day. Apple products -- like my iPhone, iPod, and MacBook -- are aimed at letting people do what they want to do without technology being an impediment.

That is, with Apple products I'm usually not aware of software and hardware whirring away. I just do something, almost always without much fuss. With TypePad though (and especially TypePad Connect), I frequently think, "Why the heck is this happening?"

Such is a sign of bad design.

Examples: (1) Blog visitors want to read the most recent comment on a post. TypePad makes them click their way on a "more comments" link, 50 comments at a time, through page after page on heavily-commented posts. (2) Blog visitors want to read the most recent comments on all posts. No way to do that, since TypePad only shows ten comments in the sidebar and there's no way for a blogger to modify that number. (3) Blog visitors want to edit a post after they notice a typo or mistake. They have to email me with a request to make the change, since TypePad doesn't allow editing by the person who wrote a comment. (4) Blog visitors want to read one of the ten comments shown in the sidebar. Clicking on it doesn't lead to the comment, but only to the post, where they have to maneuver their way through hundreds of comments, potentially, to find the one they're looking for.

Over and over, for years, I've asked TypePad to make changes that would fix these problems. This should have been done before a brand new (and flawed) commenting system was rolled out in the form of TypePad Connect.

It's the Microsoft Windows mentality at work. When I was a Windows user, before moving to a Mac, all I wanted was a stable, easy-to-use operating system that didn't crash on me.

Instead, Microsoft would release upgrades with more fancy bells and whistles -- Vista! -- instead of getting existing software right. By contrast, I've found that with Apple products often you don't have a whole lot of choices, because Apple knows what you want to do and makes that possible in a direct manner.

(The Time Machine back-up software, to offer an example, has an extremely minimalist control panel. Apple knows that what you want to do is back up your files, not have the ability to screw things up by choosing how to back up your files.)

TypePad, emulate how Starbucks listens to customers
I've told TypePad staff that they should check out how Starbucks solicits and responds to customer suggestions on My Starbucks Idea. Very nicely done.

You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What's your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple-we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people's ideas and join the discussion. We're here, and we're ready to make ideas happen. Let's get started.

There's a four step process:

Share. Post your Starbucks Idea - from ways we could improve to things we've never even thought of.

Vote. Check out other people's ideas and vote on the ones you like best. The community votes. The community decides.

Discuss. Talk about ideas with other customers and our Starbucks Idea Partners and help make them even better.

See. This is the proof. See which of your ideas were the most popular and watch as we take action.

Given that TypePad Connect (and TypePad in general) supposedly is about fostering a sense of bloggish community, it's sort of strange that a coffee purveyor has a better feel for how to relate to its customers.

Again, I find TypePad staff to be wonderfully responsive, open, and friendly. However, somehow this doesn't translate into needed changes being made.

Somewhere in the organization there's a blockage between hearing from subscribers about problems, and the problems being resolved. There isn't a seamless Share - Vote - Discuss - See flow between suggestion and action as there is with Starbucks.

So I keep on griping, TypePad staff keep on telling me that the issue is being worked on, nothing happens, so I keep on griping. And so we go. Not the most effective way of spending time for either the staff or me.

One problem, and its a significant one, is that active, long-term bloggers such as moi are pretty much locked-in to their blog service. The Great God Google treats me quite kindly, given my lengthy commitment to making daily wordy offerings to the blogosphere.

To shift all my posts elsewhere, thereby leading to countless "URL not found" messages: almost unthinkable.

So TypePad and me are wedded for now. We've got to make the best of our relationship, because I don't see how I can walk out the door no matter how much I feel neglected.

(On the flip side, I feel for TypePad staff. They have to deal with bloggers, who are some of the most outspoken people in the world. TypePad employees often must feel like they're herding cats who are equipped for megaphones that allow them to loudly meow, "Hey! Not this way! And I want my salmon kibble now!")

I'll end by reiterating that I like TypePad. It's an excellent blogging service. No one would go wrong signing up for it.

TypePad just needs to get its act together a bit more. It should focus on improving basic blogging features rather than rolling out flashy buggy non-improvements like TypePad Connect.

And do a better job of listening to its customers, who are fully capable of pointing in the directions the company needs to move.

Look at me, I'm a publisher!

Well, more of a publisher.

Before, my best-selling book (in the admittedly rather narrow "Greek philosophers: Plotinus" genre) had the Unlimited Publishing name and logo on the cover and title page.

Now it's just me, me, me -- in the guise of Adrasteia Publishing, which is tasty little me with an assumed business name sprinkled on top.

In the photo I'm holding a proof copy of the Adrasteia'ized "Return to the One" that arrived today from Create Space.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I decided to cut my ties with Unlimited Publishing, a print on demand publisher that looked attractive to me back in 2003 in part because UP didn't accept every book manuscript with a $500 check attached.

Five years later, things look different.

With Create Space I'll make more on each book sale through Amazon or wherever; I'll have more control over pricing and publishing; and I've already gotten the satisfaction of seeing "Adrasteia Publishing" become the sole name on the cover and copyright page.

Charles King of Cox-King Multimedia, my highly competent book designer, found a typeface with a cool looking "A" -- now I'm a publisher with a logo! (note the loopy connection with Return to the One)

So far I've been happy with how Create Space has treated me. Their web site's process for uploading book cover and interior files is clean and easy to understand.

This cartoon encapsulates the reason so many writers are choosing to go the publish-it-yourself route with Create Space and similar services even if they could hook up with a "real" book publisher.

On my way to Create Space publishing

In the old days, writing a book and getting it published was a crazy, frustrating, time-consuming, and often expensive proposition.

Now, much less so.

Especially if a writer comes to grips with reality (not the easiest thing to do) and gives up the fantasy of his or her work of literary art being picked up by a major publisher. Then, becoming a best seller.

The chances of that happening range between zero and next to nothing.

I know. I've had three books published. Each was better than average. None were accepted by a publisher in a traditional way.

I've become a believer in print on demand publishing -- where an author keeps as much control as possible over his book, spends a minimal amount, and accepts that online sales via Amazon, et.al. (plus his own web site) is how people will buy the book.

No, it won't be featured in a display at Borders. But it'll be available for sale anywhere in the world someone has an Internet connection.

I'm in the midst of changing how my most recent book, "Return to the One," is published. I'm canceling my agreement with Unlimited Publishing and moving to another print on demand service.

Probably Create Space. It was suggested by my book designer after I told him that I was thinking of shifting to BookSurge, another Amazon subsidiary.

Create Space is a no fee service. An author/self-publisher doesn't share a royalty with Create Space. You get what's left after subtracting the cost of printing a book and a book seller's discount (40% with Amazon, I think, but I could be wrong).

I'll earn considerably more from a sale after moving to Create Space, because I've been on a 50-50 royalty agreement with Unlimited Publishing.

Amazon is to online book selling as Microsoft is to operating systems: the big gorilla that many people love to hate. Well, personally I have much better feelings about Amazon, so I've got no problem with jumping to its Create Space service.

I suspect that Create Space books are treated a bit better on Amazon than books published via another print on demand company.

This theory is borne out by a piece by someone who, like me, moved to Create Space after having a book published elsewhere.

I remember reading an article about Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, which stated that the original name of Amazon was to be “Abracadabra”. Well I was soon about to see why. I went online and OK’d my proof at CreateSpace and as fast as you could say “Abracadabra” the Ingram/Lightning listing was gone from Amazon and replaced by the CreateSpace listing.

Poof, the listing was changed, although they left the review. They were a little overzealous with this change because they also bumped me off the site as the publisher and changed it to CreateSpace even though I was the publisher and owned the ISBN. While there is never any human contact with anyone at Amazon I complained, via email form letter on the CreateSpace website, and the publisher was corrected within a few days.

Of course I do not know this because anyone contacted me to apologize for the mistake. The computer probably couldn’t figure out which form letter response to send so it sent none. I found out by going back each day and seeing for myself.

Meanwhile, the minute I saw the listing change, I ordered another copy from Amazon just to see who printed it. I forgot to mention that the availability changed from available in 2-4 weeks to available immediately in that same split second. I was able to order with my free 2 day shipping so the book showed up not too many days after the first book I ordered.

A quick glance confirmed that the book was definitely not a Lightning produced book. In the blink of an eye, my book changed from POD non-returnable printed at Lightning Source to POD returnable printed by Book Surge. Which do you think that Amazon prefers? Should Ingram/Lightning and all the non-returnable short discount POD publishers be worried? You tell me.

After I get my book uploaded to Create Space at the end of the year I'll share how things are going. Hopefully, smoothly.

Wow! I created a web site. Macs rule!

Ever since I flew the Windows coop and embraced a Macintosh again, I've been drawn to extol the virtues of my beloved MacBook (here, here, here, and here).

And now I'm doing it again, with two exclamation points in a blog post title.

That reflects how thrilled I am to have put up a revamped BrianHines.com web site -- something I've been meaning to do for a long time, but kept putting off owing to how tough it's been for me to find easy-to-use web site creation software for a PC.

I've tried quite a few programs, such as WebEasy (doesn't really live up to its name) and FrontPage (a mediocre Microsoft offering). I could manage to get a web site up and running with them, but it sure wasn't fun.

Then I entered the magical realm of Apple, where a smile is on every computer user's face and software flowers bloom with each keystroke.

I explored the Macintosh web site creation possibilities with the aid of my reliable cyberspace guide, Google. Eventually I settled on Sandvox. Karelia software had a nice video introduction and I got to try out a demo download before buying.

Sure, I used one of their stock templates for my site. And I haven't tried to do anything fancy.

But that doesn't take away from a simple fact: I got BrianHInes.com designed and uploaded in just a few hours, enjoyably. Things go more smilingly on a Mac, for sure.

Whatever problems I encountered were of my own making, pretty much. Figuring that now I should have the site hosted by a Macintosh friendly company, rather than GoDaddy, I signed up with MacHighway.

Their support team has answered my questions promptly and competently. I got a bit confused about the process of changing my domain Nameservers to point to the new site. Tyler cleared things up for me.

I'm going to enjoy fiddling with my web site, since that's so easy to do with Sandvox. This morning I decided to add a page view counter, which already is showing "57."

A bunch of those views are mine, checking to see how many views I have. (Ooh! Make that 58!) Well, like I say on a freshly added item on the sidebar of my two blogs:

Take a look at my web site, which contains information about a subject of great interest to me: me.

Blogging is more fun with Google Docs

I like to write blog posts. What I don't like is: (1) Losing part (or all) of my brilliant musings when a word processor crashes, or the Compose Post screen of a blog hosting service decides to do something weird.

(2) Wasting time on formatting a post because the above-mentioned Compose Post editor is based on buttons that must be clicked to italicize, boldface, underline, or whatever, instead of using keystroke controls like word processors do.

A couple of days ago I decided to help get the economy back on track, and also soothe my financial crisis'ed soul, by purchasing a freshly redesigned MacBook.

I love it so much, I can't count all the ways in this post. So that'll have to wait for another day.

One of the few worries I've had about my new Macintosh relationship is the effect it'll have on my blogging. I've been writing posts in Word 2007 on a PC with Windows XP. 

There's a lot not to like about Word 2007 -- such as the new and not-improved menu system -- but one feature is marvelous. You can write fully formatted blog posts in it, then publish them with a single click (either as a draft or "live").

The only down side has been how buggy the blogging feature  has been on my computer. I haven't had problems with normal word processing. Only with blog posts does Word 2007 crash, which happens with distressing regularity.

Sometimes even after I've clicked "save," but before the saving.

So I've learned to copy into memory what I've written before I save a post, just in case Word decides this would be a good time to test my Buddha-nature by losing my carefully crafted prose. (To its credit, Word 2007 has a generally reliable crash recovery feature; that's good, considering how often I've needed it.)

The Macintosh version of Word doesn't offer this blogging feature, I'm pretty sure. Anyway, Office 2008 for the Mac has gotten such atrocious reviews, I decided to skip it and go with Apple's iWork suite.

Good move, but now I was stuck with using TypePad's Compose Editor on my new MacBook. I gave it a try last night and found it frustrating for reason (2) above. It took me much longer to write a post that way, compared to using a real word processor.

That led me to Google and a further search for some way to easily write and publish formatted blog posts. I'd already learned about the usual Macintosh suspects in this area: MarsEdit, Ecto, Qumana, and a few others.

I'm sure they're good programs. And I resonated with the opening MarsEdit sales pitch:

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online to use them. While your blog's web interface struggles to perform the simplest of tasks, MarsEdit uses the power of your Mac to provide an amazing blog editing experience.

Well, right now I'm online using Google Docs to write this post. I don't see that as a big downside, since I need to be online to publish to my blog and with DSL there's no penalty to being connected to the Internet (admittedly, with dial-up there usually is).

On the plus side...

-- Google Docs is free.

-- It's basically a scaled down Word, with undo and redo, plus all the other features I normally use in blogging (italics, boldface, quotation indent, insert URL, spell check, and such).

-- It saves the document automatically, and often. Nice. I've had zero glitches while writing this fairly lengthy post, but it's good to know that I wouldn't lose much if a problem occurred.

-- Publishing to a blog with Google Docs is easy (caveat below). Here's how you do it.

I ran into the caveat because TypePad, the blog service I use, isn't one of those on the Google Docs drop-down list. However, after I contacted TypePad support I learned the secret  to making Google Docs work for me. 

All another TypePad user has to do is substitute their personal info in the "Existing Blog Settings" boxes. If you have more than one blog with TypePad, be sure to include the exact name of your blog you're posting to. 

Like life, the Google Docs way of blog posting isn't perfect. So far as I know, there's no way to publish a draft. Thumbnailed photos and HTML code (needed for a YouTube video embed, for example) need to be inserted after the post is published. 

That's no big deal, if you attend to it right away to avoid making your readers wonder where the stuff is that you mention in the post. And a category also has to be inserted via a visit to TypePad.

On the whole, though, I'm happy with Google Docs. It's much easier to write a post with it than to fumble my way through TypePad's Compose Editor. The line spacing between paragraphs is a bit larger than it was in Word, but maybe there's a way to fiddle with this. [Update: well, maybe not.] Again, no big deal.

So bloggers, give it a try. I bet you'll like it as much as I do.

One million page views…so what?

Given the self-referential nature of the blogosphere, it seems obligatory for me to put up a blog post about a blog post milestone – namely, TypePad having informed me that today HinesSight passed the one million page view milestone.

Congratulations to me, from me.

However, the question to me, from me, is "so what?" A embarrassingly high proportion of those 1,000,114 page views came from people looking for photos of Paris Hilton.

So whoop-de-do, I'm serving humanity by including some photos from other web sites that got ranked high on a Google Images search for "Paris Hilton," thereby generating thousands of page views a day for a while.

Even though I called my all-time most popular post "The Tao of Paris Hilton," I have a suspicion that visitors to my blog were more interested in her physical attributes than the deep philosophical implications of her seeming vacuousness.

Still, a million page views for any reason is cool. And many of my posts lie higher on the social value scale that my Paris Hilton musings.

For example, "Corporation Compliance Recorder scam."

Since I dashed off this expose of a mailing that tries to con corporations (non-profits included) into forking over $95 to $125 for submitting annual meeting minutes that don't need submitting, I've gotten almost three hundred comments from people who are thankful that a Google search turned up my post and saved them the money.

I figure that I helped these folks alone save over $30,000. And this doesn't include all the others who learned about the scam and didn't leave a comment.

In the end, blogging isn't about numbers. It's saying what you want to say, whether or not anybody pays attention.

Three years ago, this guy estimated that of five million or so active bloggers, 100 averaged 150,000 hits daily per blog; 2,000 averaged 1,500 daily hits; and 18,000 averaged 500 daily hits.

The rest were virtually hitless. But the way I see it, how many people does it take to have a great conversation with? Answer: one.

And that person could be me. So I'm pleased to consistently get over 600 page views a day on this blog – now without much help from the Paris Hilton post.

The most satisfying emails and comments I get, though, come one at a time. Whether it's a "thank you" or "you're an idiot," I know that I've made contact with someone.

That's what blogging is all about.

Bloggers, you’ll love Word 2007

Oh, my god, I'm in love. At first blog post. I just installed Word 2007, which I bought at Amazon for a reasonable $90 (upgrade price). Right away I wanted to see if the blog publishing feature worked as promised.

It did. Appropriately, my first Word 2007 post was about Shakira's "Hips don't lie" Grammy performance last night. She's beautiful. So is Word's new blogging capability.

I write my posts in Word. I don't like to use TypePad's online editor. One glitch and all your writing can disappear. Plus, I like to have a backup of posts on my laptop.

But it's been frustrating to have to reformat the Word 2003-generated post after I copied it into the TypePad post editor. Italics, boldface, hyperlinks—all that stuff had to be manually put back in, because of some incompatibility between Word and the HTML TypePad expected (I'm vague on the technical details).

Now, though, what I write in Word is what appears on my blog. I can publish directly from Word 2007.

The setup was simple, once I figured how to get the blog post ball rolling (strangely, Word's Help wasn't much help in this regard—I discovered on my own how to click on the circle thingie in the upper left, then select "publish," followed by "blog").

Here's some set-up tips from another happy Word 2007 blogger.

This is going to change my blogging life. I'll have more time to cruise YouTube for Shakira videos, now that I don't have to fuss around so much with the TypePad text editor.

Except for photos, it seems. I had no problem inserting a photo into my post, but it was full-sized. It'd be nice to be able to use TypePad's thumbnail feature directly from Word. For now, it looks like I'll have to add photos from the online text editor, along with indenting quotes, perhaps.

"Well, let's try a test. Can I indent the left side of this fake quoted paragraph? Yes, I can. But whether it can be indented on the right side also, that is another question. But I can highlight it!"

Aside from its blogging feature, Word 2007 looks much improved in other ways. The "menus" now are tabs, laid out in a pleasing writer-friendly fashion. Microsoft does a lot of things wrong. With Word 2007, though, I give the often evil software empire a big thumbs up.

[Update later in the day: Well, here's one downside to Word 2007. If you buy it singly, like I did, you'll find that now you can't compose email messages in Word with Outlook 2003. You're confined to using the Outlook email editor, which doesn't do spell checking and some other stuff.

So, okay, I'll play the Microsoft game and fork out another $90 to get Outlook 2007, even though I didn't really want or need it. A bit frustrating, though.]

Blogs or books, it’s cool to comment

These “Pearls Before Swine” comic strips humorously address the sad state of the blogger who doesn’t get comments. I know just how the goat feels.

It’s cool to get blog comments. Or, reader reviews. Last month Boudewijn Koole of The Netherlands made my day when I noticed his lengthy Amazon review of my book about Plotinus. The ending made me smile:

Altogether this is a very valuable introduction into the original philosophy of Plotinos. Not difficult to read, nor does it reduce to meaninglessness the sometimes profound or complex questions that can be posed. On the contrary, this book is often elucidating and inspiring. Very much recommended.

Thank you, Boudewijn. We’ve connected across two continents, which is the beauty of the Internet. You also have inspired me to get off my lazy commenting/reviewing butt and do more connecting of my own.

For someone who loves to get comments on my blogs, I don’t leave many on other peoples’ postings. Usually I don’t even think about it. My mouse finger clicks on another link and, zip, I’m off to somewhere else in cyberspace, having lost the opportunity to say what touched me about the post I just read.

I vow to change my ways. Tomorrow, when I next venture into the blogosphere, I’ll leave a comment or two. I’ll remember how much I enjoyed a brief eleven words from someone who left a comment yesterday about “My grocery list system, a gift to the world.”

Darn good list. I’m a list man myself and I’m impressed.

My friends, pass on praise (or criticism) when it is deserved. Writers will love you for it. A few minutes ago I began to atone for my dearth of Amazon reader reviews by submitting a 5-star review of Linda Hess’ “The Bijak of Kabir.”

Published in 1983, mine is only the second review. I’ve read the book twice and have enjoyed it immensely. I’ve quoted from it on my Church of the Churchless weblog, yet until now never thought of sharing how much I like it.

I’m pretty sure that one day Hess will read my words. I hope she smiles.

Wenn Gott flüstert, donnert es in der Schöpfung

If you can understand the title of this post, then you should buy the recently-published German translation of my first book. Heck, even if you can’t understand it, go ahead and buy the book with the same name anyway.

Currently Amazon is selling it at a generous discount. So for $10.17 plus shipping you get 300 pages of either comprehensible or incomprehensible German. Either way, that’s a great deal.

Kudos to Matthias Schneider-Marfels, who I know as “Matt,” for having the linguistic fortitude to translate a revised version of my “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” which has been out of print for quite a while. Matt lives in New Zealand. We’ve only communicated by email, but I feel like I’ve come to know Matt well. He’s become a friend.

Working on a complicated book project that spanned many months brought us close together. Matt wanted to make my book available to German-speaking readers. So we agreed that he’d contribute his time and energy, and I’d contribute whatever else was needed to get the book in print.

I ended up publishing it under the aegis of my own imprint, Adrasteia Publishing. It’s a print on demand title that gets produced one copy at a time through Lightning Source, an Ingram subsidiary.

One day I’ll write about the benefits of writers setting up their own “publishing house.” It’s not as good as finding a big name commercial publisher for your book, but it’s a heck of a lot better than signing up with a print on demand firm like IUniverse, XLibris, or Trafford—who are going to charge you for the privilege of keeping a good share of the profits from your book sales.

Getting this book successfully published, with the invaluable aid of ace book designer Charles King, has given me the confidence to get the English version of my shorter, simpler, and less preachy “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” back in print. In my utterly biased opinion, it still is one of the best treatments of how the old mystics and the new physics relate.

“Wenn Gott flüstert, donnert es in der Schöpfung” is available on Amazon Germany, but for reasons known only to Lightning Source, Ingram, and Amazon, at the moment the umlauts are messed up on the book’s listing. This is just one of those many things in the book distribution process that drives writers/publishers/translators crazy.

[Next day update: naturally, after writing the previous paragraph the title now looks fine. I can only wish that every time I blog about some gripe, the world will change according to my wishes.]

Of course, anyone who goes through all the trouble to write, publish, or translate a book that likely will sell only a few hundred (or, if you’re lucky, a few thousand) copies is already demonstrably crazy. So a little more post-publication craziness isn’t bothering Matt and me all that much.

I’d like to close with some profound phrase dragged out of the memory bin of my four years of high school German, but all I can remember is the beginning of the record that I was given my freshman year and listened to so many times it is forever burned into my brain cells.

Guten tag, Luisa. Wie gehts?
Sehr gut. Und dir?

(my apologies to the Germanic world for any spelling errors; 1962 was a long time ago)

What I’ve learned after 500,000 page views

Today my HinesSight blog passed the 500,000 page view mark. In celebration of this milestone I’ll reveal what people look for most in my corner of the blogosphere. Can you guess?

Three choices: (1) Cogent political analyses, (2) Profound philosophical insights, (3) Photos of sexy women.

No big surprise here. I should have said: “three choices, and the first two don’t count.”

My “The Tao of Paris Hilton” post accounted for a large share of those half a million page views. After Google Images put several of the photos in that post on the first page of a “Paris Hilton” search I began getting over 10,000 visits a day from Paris fans.

Another popular post, not surprisingly, is my “Most beautiful woman in the world” offering that features Aishwarya Rai. After a link was included on a Pakistani newspaper web site, the post became a forum for passionate debate about which country—such as India or Pakistan—has the most beauteous babes. The comments got so nasty I eventually decided to shut them down.

Other posts with at least a toe in the prurient interest water that attracted quite a bit of attention include “Shocked!—I discover my wife’s late-night Internet lusting,” “Lust and longing at the dog park,” and the innocuously titled “The clouds speak to me” (the Sky Goddess photo spoke to lots of Google Images searchers).

Every blogger wants gobs of visitors. The question becomes: to what extent are you willing to sell your blogging soul in return for page views? Do you write about high-minded important subjects that, by and large, generate a “yawn” from Internet surfers? Or do you give people what they want?

These are important questions that deserve my careful consideration. Which I’ll get to after I post a few photos.

Cool! I’m a Diogenist

I was admiring Keith’s remodel of his Word Shadows blog when I noticed that his link to HinesSight now was in a “Diogenist” category.

Wow! My heart fluttered. Diogenist sounded so cool.

At first. Then I started to wonder if it meant what I thought it did: someone who, like Diogenes, searches for an honest man or, more broadly, truth.

Maybe it’s really an insult, something bad, like misogynist. I rushed to my dictionary.

And couldn’t find it. “Diogenes,” yes. “Diogenist,” no.

Clicked on to Google. Found a mere 36 entries. None seemed to be informative.

Keith, man—I think you’ve come up with a new word. Congratulations!

In hopes that the search engines will find this post, I hereby declare that Keith, a.k.a. Imaginary Keith, a.k.a. the Garden Poet, has revealed a new word to the world: Diogenist.

Of course, he might have stolen it from someone else. In which case I take back what I just said.

In any event, a Word Generation Prize will soon arrive in Keith’s mailbox. It may look a lot like payment for a Garden Poet tree-cutting and pruning bill that I’ve had for a while, but it should be considered a literary prize.

In Imaginary Keith’s mind, at least.

Blogging fame proves easy to handle

A day after my blogger self was prominently displayed in the Salem newspaper, complete with not one but three photos of my blogging face, I’m finding it easy to handle my new fame.

I’m handling it in the same way I handle the leprechauns in our garden, since managing something non-existent doesn’t require a lot of work.

But before I realized that those who say “fame is fleeting” are vastly overstating the duration of my local blogging notoriety, I wasted quite a bit of time yesterday fretting about how to deal with the repercussions of the newspaper article.

I wanted to buy three more copies of the Friday paper. I planned out the best way to do this without looking like an egomaniac. If I went to a convenience store and plopped the papers down on the counter, a front page facing the clerk, he could glance at the photo in the upper left corner, match it up with the guy buying all the papers, and think to himself, “What an egotistical asshole.”

I thought of wearing a ski mask, but that didn’t seem like a good idea given that it’s August and I’d be walking up to a 7-Eleven cash register. So my preferred plan was to find six quarters and an isolated Statesman-Journal paper box.

However, when I went into town in the afternoon I needed to get gas and figured that I might as well venture into the station’s mini-mart and scope out the newspaper supply. “Praise Allah!” I said to myself, even though I’m not a Muslim, when I saw that (1) there were exactly three papers left in the display rack, and (2) there wasn’t a clerk visible anywhere in the store.

So I plunked $1.50 down on the counter, held the copies so my photo wasn’t showing, and walked back to my car with a “I left a buck fifty inside for the papers” to the attendants. Mission accomplished.

My next worry was how I was going to run a bunch of errands without getting engaged in lengthy conversations about the story with people who knew me. I rehearsed witty repartees to the expected “So, how are you dealing with your fifteen minutes of fame?” I practiced humble expressions in the rear-view mirror.

More wasted time. First, I had to drop off our neighborhood group’s checkbook at the treasurer’s house. He and his wife were pruning their extensive garden. I chit-chatted longer than the occasion demanded, waiting for them to bring up the subject of the blogging article, how I look younger in person than in the photo, and so on.

I waited. And waited. Either they hadn’t read the paper, or the blogging story didn’t catch their eye sufficiently to match up the featured blogger with the human presence standing right in front of them.

It turned out that this either-or hypothesis was going to be repeated in my mind quite a few times. Like, at the Animal Clinic; at Oak Tree Pharmacy; at Office Depot; and at the Courthouse Athletic Club.

Some of these were long shots for recognition, but I had high hopes for the athletic club where I’ve been a long time member, copies of the Statesman-Journal are scattered all over, and you spend quite a bit in a room with fellow exercisers, thereby allowing sufficient time for them to make a connection between the fascinating article that they had read only that morning and the graying man on the Stairmaster or Nautilus machine.

Realizing that many people are reluctant to intrude upon a celebrity’s privacy, in both of the exercise rooms I used at the athletic club I listened carefully for any hint of a whispered “Is that really him? The guy whose photo was on the front page of the paper today? I think it could be. He’s better looking in person, though.”

I listened. And listened. The either-or hypothesis made its appearance again. Sigh…

So far only my friends Patricia and Keith have commented on my blogging story glory. Patricia via a phone call, and Keith via his weblog, where he cries in his beer (or, rather, tofu) about not being featured in the story himself. Hey, like I said in my previous post, I tried to get the reporter to contact Salem bloggers Keith and Trey along with William (who did make it into the story).

Oh, yes, I should add my sister to the “Wow! That’s cool” feedback list. She just posted a comment saying, “I knew one of us would be famous! I'm glad it's you.”

Um, not quite.

Local blogger featured in Salem Statesman-Journal

Namely, me. I pulled our paper out of the box today and saw a graying, grizzled, plaintive face peering from the top left corner of the front page next to a “Local blogger likes instant feedback” caption.

It didn’t take me long to realize, “Aaaagh, that’s me! I look horrible.” Well, at least I got some instant feedback from myself. Fortunately, the larger photo in the Life Section article “Got blogs?” cast my quizzical look in a broader context and, thankfully, reduced the focus on my face.

Unfortunately, Serena (our dog) was crouched just out of sight. She had popped up just before the photographer snapped the picture, but ducked down too quickly to be included in the photo. I shall remedy this slight with a link to her oft-linked Wonder Dog portrait that was posed on the banks of the Metolius River.

Speaking of slights, when I wrote to the Statesman-Journal suggesting that they do a story on local bloggers, I said that the paper should buy us coffee at a local café and have a roundtable discussion about our blogging lives. I certainly didn’t expect that one blogger, moi, would be the central focus of an article about blogs. But reporters and editors do what they do, a fact I learned long ago when I was a publicist for a statewide health organization.

Salem blogger Keith of WordShadows and Scrine is much more literary and creative than I am. Plus he uses Expression Engine to design his weblog, which requires hugely more expertise than tinkering with a preset TypePad layout, like I do. And Salem blogger Trey of The Rambling Taoist is much more progressive and politically active than I am. He also contributes to Blue Oregon, a blog that I visit daily.

On the corrections front, I’m pretty sure that I told the reporter it was Trey who said that he, a self-professed liberal, “can post comments on a conservative blog, but he [Trey, not me] said his comments are deleted immediately.”

And a statement by the reporter that my books, “including a 2004 meditation on the Greek philosopher Plotinus, seemed to disappear as soon as they hit the shelves,” could be misinterpreted as meaning that the books were best-sellers (I only wish). Actually, I think she means that after a book is bought by a reader, the author rarely gets any feedback about what he or she wrote—which is absolutely true.

I’m pleased that my post, “American Splendor/I learn to wash lettuce,” was mentioned in the article. Google has this highly ranked in the “wash lettuce” results, but like the article says, my theme wasn’t so much about how to wash lettuce as how men and women relate in the kitchen (and elsewhere). I can report that my lettuce washing tutoring continues episodically, Laurel being ever vigilant to preserve the Right Way of Doing Things, which is a sacred wifely duty that I heartily endorse.

Up to a point.

Nice review of my book, but...

I really appreciate an Amazon reader review that's titled, "All my life I've been looking for a book like this."

But I do wish that the "suck" in the first sentence could have read "such." That is a typo, I hope.

Rejection letter humor

There's a lot of rejection letter humor on the Internet. The best of it is put there by people who reject the rejection letters rather than letting the letters drag them down into drunken despair, which is just what the bastards who sent them want.

I came across this classic today. It's probably been circulating in cyberspace for a long time, but I hadn't seen it before.

And I like this rejected writer's sardonic reply style.

I'm still waiting to hear back from Beacon Press about my query concerning my own ultimate rejection letter. I'll keep checking the mailbox.

Blogging retrospective

I’m in a look-back mood today…

The position I took in “Religious zealots run amok in Terri Schiavo case” has been proven to be absolutely correct, now that the results of Schiavo’s autopsy have been released. Schiavo was brain-dead and blind when Frist and other Christian fundamentalists were claiming that she could recognize people and follow a moving balloon with her eyes. Memo from God to Earth: Science, including neurology, is how you learn about creation—faith is a crock of shit when it comes to knowing reality. (When She speaks through me, God likes to use earthy language to get Her Point across).

I appreciated the comments I got on “Corporation Compliance Recorder scam” from people who found my post via Google and had their suspicion confirmed that sending $95 off to these rip-off artists would be a complete waste of money. Now the Oregon Department of Justice has launched a probe to determine whether the mailings violate the Unlawful Trade Practices Act. Way to go, you 280 people who complained to the Department about this scam (I was one of them).

It’s still outrageous that “Oregon’s climatologist denies global warming,” and I haven’t backed away from my view that George Taylor has fringe views on global warming that are at odds with the consensus of the scientific community. But I will admit that Taylor was right on the money with his prediction of a wet spring. His short-term forecast was good; it’s his long-range outlook on the world’s weather that continues to bother me.

Watching TV last night I saw a report about a machine that may be the solution to the anxieties I expressed in my “Oh, God, I’m shrinking!” post. In China “stretching machines” are being advertised that claim to increase a person’s height. I just noted that the claim is that it can “boost young people’s height,” but I’m willing to, um, stretch the definition of young to include 56 years old. I had been thinking about building a medieval rack torture machine similar to what Mel Gibson found himself on at the end of “Braveheart” (I’d be screaming “taller!” instead of “freedom!”), but this machine looks to be slightly less tortuous.

We’ve learned that the nearby Measure 37 claim that I wrote about in “Measure 37 hits close to our home” has been denied by a Marion County hearings officer, Ann Gasser. Gasser concluded that “It is not clear who the current owners of the subject property are and who should or should not sign the measure 37 compensation claim application form. Under current zoning regulations the subject property cannot be subdivided.” That’s good news. However, the Oregon legislature is considering Measure 37 “reform” bills such as HB 3120 that would make the state’s land use problems worse rather than better. Laurel has testified against HB 3120 and, along with 1000 Friends of Oregon, we urge others to express their opposition.

Lastly, I’ve still got my broadband hopes pinned on “WildBlue satellite internet, my backup to Lucy Liu.” It’s becoming apparent that not even a crazed band of samurai sword-wielding Yakuza would be able to convince the S.O.B.s at Qwest to extend DSL service to our area. So I’m patiently waiting for WildBlue to rescue me from my deathly slow dialup connection. WildBlue installed its first customer early this month, who unfortunately wasn’t me. They keep saying that a Salem-area dealer will be announced in June or July. Before it was the “second quarter.” They’d better not keep slipping on the date or I’ll have to sic Lucy Liu on them.

Political blogger bumper sticker quiz

Here’s a can’t-miss quiz for you. Match this blogger’s car with the political weblog that he or she contributes to. Is it (A) The Oregon Republican Party’s Journal, or (B) BlueOregon? (enlarge the photo by clicking on it to read the bumper stickers).

Answer is here.

Yes, this car belongs to Trey Smith, BlueOregon contributor who was the Socialist Party candidate for Governor in 1998 (I like Trey’s statement in the election guide under “Prior Governmental Experience: none”—to my mind that’s an excellent qualification.) Trey is someone who definitely doesn’t need to go to a How to feel free to publicly express your views workshop.

Laurel and I met Trey and his wife, Della, yesterday afternoon for some tea/lattes at a Salem coffeehouse. I’ve come to know Trey through his The Rambling Taoist weblog, but previously we’d only met in the blogosphere, not in three dimensional reality. We had a good time talking about all sorts of progressive and philosophical subjects.

When I saw “The right-wing blogger aristocracy” post on Daily Kos this morning, I recalled that Trey talked about the fact that the conservative blogs he frequents don’t allow him to post truly independent opinions. He said that they’ll let him agree with a right-wing viewpoint, or mildly disagree, but if he marshals forceful progressive arguments—especially if combined with links that support his conclusion—then his comments get deleted.

That’s precisely the point of Chris Bowers’ political blog analysis, “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating,” that was summarized in the Daily Kos post. Bowers says, “The anti-community nature of right-wing blogs has resulted in a stagnant aristocracy within the conservative blogosphere that prevents the emergence of new voices and, as a result, new reasons for people to visit conservative blogs.”

I don’t regularly visit right-wing blogs like Trey does, but recently I came across a mention of a post on the Benton County Republicans blog about the outrageous attempt by House Republicans to defy the will of Oregonians and allow counties to authorize hunting cougars with dogs and bears with bait (of course, the Benton County folks' take was that Democrats were “blocking local management of bear and cougar populations.”

I’d written about this subject myself and wanted to comment on the Benton County Republicans post. However, I found that you have to prove that you’re a registered Republican who lives in Benton County before you can leave a comment. This assures that few dissenting views will be expressed. It also assures that I won’t return to the Benton County Republicans weblog, just as Chris Bowers said, since they only are interested in preaching to the right-wing choir and don’t want to hear any other voices.

The moribund state of conservative blogging in Oregon is reflected in the above-mentioned Oregon Republican Party’s Journal, whose most-recent post is dated April 19. As several people commented on a Blue Oregon post about the site, this blog is horribly designed.

I guess they figured that since President Bush gives most of his speeches in front of a backdrop festooned with the theme of the day—such as “Making America Stronger”—having a conservative blog wallpapered with rows and rows of Oregon Republican Party symbols would be really cool.

It really gives me a headache, as appears to be the case with right-wingers also, given the blog’s death-bed status. R.I.P., Oregon Republican Party’s Journal. You won’t be missed.

PostSecret, a confessional blog

A NYTimes.com article, “Bless Me Blog, for I’ve Sinned,” pointed me to the PostSecret weblog where anonymous 4x6 confessional postcards are displayed. They’re wonderfully creative and moving.

You need to see the artwork pasted on most of the cards to get the full impact of the PostSecrets. But here’s a sampling of words:

“My older sister has tried to kill herself three (3) times. Sometimes I wish she’d succeeded.”

“I make up fantasy stories because my real life sucks. And now my fantasy life is starting to suck, too.”

“Sometimes I think that other people are reading my thoughts so I think to myself ‘stop reading my mind,’ just in case they are listening.”

“I know that sending in a stupid postcard to share a secret with a bunch of strangers won’t do a damn thing to change the daily loneliness and unhappiness in my life. And I sent this anyway.”

Here’s another article about PostSecret from The Telegraph of Calcutta, India. People from all over the world are sharing their secrets. Most of the comments at the bottom of the PostSecret page are positive, though one questions the weblog creator’s motivations.

A PostSecret traveling exhibit exists now; a stage production is in the works; a book surely will be published. But I don’t begrudge the creator, Frank, from publicizing the secrets beyond the Internet.

That’s what the people who sent in their secrets want: to not have them be secret anymore.

Blogmobile

Here's a depiction of the Blogmobile concept car, courtesy of the April 4, 2005 The New Yorker. The driver kind of looks like me. Given how much time I spend on my weblogs, my wife probably would say "It is you!"

Ultimate rejection letter

Last month I was excited to receive an ultimate rejection letter from Beacon Press. Like most writers I’m a connoisseur of rejection letters. Since I’ve received so many, I figure I might as well appreciate them.

I’d sent a copy of my book, “Return to the One,” off to Beacon Press, The University of Chicago Press, and the State University of New York Press. I told them that on Amazon it was currently the #1 best selling title about the Greek mystic philosopher Plotinus. And this was with very minimal publicity/promotion.

I candidly admitted that I’d probably been wrong to publish “Return to the One” in a POD (print on demand) fashion. As good as the book is, most reviewers won’t even consider reviewing it because it’s tainted with the dreaded POD Mark of the Beast: Unclean! It's self-published! Quick, cast this work of the literary devil into the trash!

Most rejection letters include boilerplate language like “Although your work would no doubt be of interest to many…” (U of C Press) and “Your project seems to us to be an important one…” (SUNY Press).

Gee, guys, if it’s interesting to so many and so important, why don’t you publish it?! Oh, I forgot. You’re just trying to soften the smack of the rejection letter.

Beacon Press, on the other hand, didn’t mess around with any niceties. They sent me this postcard.

Which, when I turned it over, contained this message.

So beautiful. Nothing. A marvelous rejection letter literary device. I could make up my own rejectory language:

“Mr. Hines, we have read every word of your book with great enthusiasm. Truly, you have written a masterpiece. Sadly, we consider Beacon Press unworthy to publish such a work of genius. You deserve so much better than us. We could never live with ourselves if our acceptance of ‘Return to the One’ prevented it from being published by the most prestigious book company in the world. Hopefully you won’t mind that we have forwarded your book to ________ with our highest commendations, whom we expect you’ll be hearing from soon.”

Of course, another possibility is that Beacon Press’ rejection card printer ran out of ink at an inopportune moment. And it could even be that the back of the card was intended to say, “We are very much interested in publishing your book. Please contact us immediately to discuss the terms of our generous agreement.”

I suppose I should write Beacon Press and ask them to send me a non-blank card. But I’ve gotten attached to the nothingness of what I now have. I don’t think that I’m ever going to get a more Zen rejection notice. Maybe it’s time to quit while I’m behind.

Icon envy?

If you have a weblog or web site, do you have icon envy? When your beloved cyber-creation loads in a web browser, does the address bar just show a bland generic icon next to your URL? Have you ever thought to yourself, “I’d be so much happier if I had an icon of my own?”

Until recently I answered “yes” to each of those questions. Now you likely can see (if you’ve got Firefox) that I’ve got my own HinesSight “H” favicon (favorites icon) proudly displayed. With a few fairly easy steps, you can have your own favicon just like me, CNN, and Google.

If an HTML-ignoramus such as myself can get a favicon up and showing, just about anyone can. The kind folks at Chami.com make it pretty easy. I just added a favicon to my Church of the Churchless weblog and I didn’t even need a triple latte to get me through the process.

Step 1. Come up with a image for an icon. All you need is a graphic of some sort that will be recognizable when it’s teeny-tiny. I took the easy way out and simply used the first letter of each of my weblogs: “H” and “C” Today I made a JPEG file of the Church of the Churchless “C” and saved it on my computer.

Step 2. Then, using the Chami.com tool, I browsed to that image and clicked on the “generate FavIcon.ico” button. Don’t worry if you have no idea what an “.ico” file format is. The tool takes care of that worry for you. If you’re like me, you don’t have a way of saving an image file in that format on your own, so Praise Chami.com.

Step 3. I now had a favicon.ico file that I downloaded to my desktop. I then uploaded that file to the folder on my weblog where files are kept. TypePad conveniently has a button that gives you the path to a file. I jotted down that path: http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/files/favicon.ico

Step 4. All I had to do now was plug a little bit of HTML code somewhere into my weblog. I chose the “Welcome” section, using Method 2 described on the Chami page. The code in between the angly things, < and > (see, I really am an HTML doofus) looked like this: link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/files/favicon.ico"

And then came the big chills-up-the-spine moment (my life isn’t very exciting, so adding a favicon to my weblog is a pretty big deal, right up there with throwing caution to the winds and having two handfuls of Kettle Chips as a midnight snack inside of just one).

I clicked on the Church of the Churchless bookmark. And voila, there my “C” icon was. In Firefox, at least. I haven’t had any luck getting the favicon to show up in Internet Explorer 6, but that doesn’t break my heart. I hardly ever use IE anymore. Plus, my IE browser doesn’t even show a icon for CNN (or any other site, for that matter), piece of junk that it is.

You can validate your favicon work here. Somewhat strangely, I didn’t get a very positive validation. The validator said it couldn't recognize the HTML code and apparently just found the old generic TypePad icon. Yet every time I check, I’m able to fondly gaze upon my personalized “H” and “C” in the address bar (and in the Firefox Bookmarks list).

Go figure. The ways of the Internet are passingly strange, and I’ve spent more than an hour on a sunny late afternoon trying to unravel the strangeness. All for a 16 x 16 bunch of pixels. (Looking upon them makes me happy though, so it’s been worth it).

“Return to the One” reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Soon after my book about the Greek mystic philosopher Plotinus was published, I sent a copy off to the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Since I managed to write “Return to the One” without any formal education in the classics or Greek philosophy, I figured it would be cool to even have a chance of being reviewed by an entity that “publishes timely reviews of current scholarly work in the field of classical studies.”

Yesterday I decided to see if a review had been posted. My timing was excellent. A review by Dr. G.S. Bowe of Bilkent University had just appeared. You can read it here.

I’m fairly happy with the review. Applying editing techniques similar to those used in writing movie ads, I’ll be able to make good use of Dr. Bowe’s positive comments: Written in a fresh and accessible style…surprisingly sane, clear-headed, and well-written. Well, maybe I should leave out “surprisingly,” which Bowe apparently threw in because of my “idiosyncrasy of presentation” and “jarring insistence of naming all 43 sub-sections with alliterative subtitles.”

Hey! I should get extra credit for those subtitles (God is the Goal, Love is Limitless, Beauty is Beyond, and so on). You can’t believe how long it took me to find alliterations for every one of those 43 subjects. My dictionary was exceedingly well-thumbed by the time I got to the final “Vision is Veracity” chapter.

I could also quibble with some other critiques in the review. I might send off a response to the Bryn Mawr folks on a few points where I feel Dr. Bowe, well, missed the point. Most notably, he doesn’t appreciate my emphasis on looking upon Plotinus as a mystic who urges us to experience the metaphysical truths described in the Enneads, as opposed to intellectually understanding them.

Right on p. xvii, before the book even starts using regular numbers on the pages, I said: “I do believe that it is possible to know the spiritual truths that Plotinus knew, but only if we inwardly become our true selves, which will be found to be identical with Plotinus’s true self. This obviously separates my approach from most scholars, for they poke and probe Plotinus’s teachings as if they were external objects of knowledge akin to fossils excavated from an ancient riverbed, which is exactly how Plotinus says we should not consider his philosophy.”

So when Dr. Bowe laments that I fail to discuss how Plotinus’s teachings were influenced by Aristotle, Parmenides, and other philosophers, I don’t feel that I failed to be true to the heart of Plotinus’s mystical message. Plotinus doesn’t want us to think our way to wisdom, but to intuit our way to union with the One—the ultimate source of all that is good, true, and beautiful.

All in all, though, I’m pleased that Dr. Bowe took the time to read and review a book by a non-scholar. I entirely agree with him that my approach limits “the text’s usefulness to Plotinus scholarship.” I never intended that “Return to the One” be a scholarly book. It is a book aimed at those who want to really return to the One, not just think about returning.

Google God, your blessings overwhelm me

As the saying goes, “Be careful of what you wish for, since you may get it.” Previously I have prayed that the great Google God would grace me with a multitude of hits, allowing me to know that my weblog labors are bearing fruit in the garden of the blogosphere.

And now, ever since Google Images indexed some photos that I included in a “The Tao of Paris Hilton” post, my Google cup runneth over. Whereas previously daily visitors to HinesSight typically numbered in the hundreds, now my weblog statistics reveal that it is in the thousands—today, over eight thousand, most of them interested in an image of Paris and Nicole provocatively posing with a pole.

I’m happy to be providing so many people with something they want. Which, clearly, isn’t my profound musings about Greek philosophy or the other posts where I reveal how the mysteries of the universe appear to my HinesSight vision. Google and the other search engines reveal what humanity is actually interested in, not the high-minded and largely hypocritical assertions that we publicly proclaim.

“Man seeking woman for long walks on the beach at sunset.” Yeah, right.

I am not asking for the Google God to withdraw her blessings. Yet I do miss the days when I could peruse my Typepad statistics and see the full range of what led visitors to this weblog. Now I click from page to page on the referral list and observe a endless stream of “images.google.com/imgres,” the link leading to the much-desired Paris Hilton photo.

On the plus side, my sense of being connected to the international community—more precisely, the community of Paris Hilton-obsessed human beings, many of whom are female, judging from weblog comments—soars as I scan the countries the Google image search originated from: Italy, France, Spain, Great Britain, Germany, and many others.

We are one world when it comes to interest in Paris Hilton. Now I must turn my Google prayers to making the world interested more metaphysically in how to “Return to the One.”

Anxiously analyzing Amazon’s text stats

Just what I didn’t need the first “work” (using that term in a writer’s sense, extremely loosely) day after a relaxing vacation in Maui. In the course of checking on my book’s miniscule sales status, I discovered that the geniuses at Amazon.com have added some new features to their already filled-to-the-gills web site that can make an author anxious:

Readability statistics for books included in their Search Inside the Book program (where authors/publishers send Amazon a book to be scanned, after which every darn word can be searched for and sample pages perused). Plus a concordance of the 100 most frequently used words in a book. And a statistically improbable phrases feature helpfully described by Amazon in a pop-up window:

“Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or ‘SIPs’, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.”

I was thrilled to see that “Return to the One” garnered five SIPS: mystic philosophy, mystic philosopher, intuitive intelligence, first emanation, inward contemplation. I would have been disappointed if there weren’t any interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases in my book.

I also enjoyed looking at the graphically enhanced concordance (elsewhere on the page linked above). Of the 100 most common words in a book, Amazon apparently puts the most common of the common in a larger, bolder font. So I could quickly see that my book talked a lot about soul, Plotinus, spirit, and spiritual—which is absolutely true.

It wasn’t quite as much fun to anxiously analyze the readability statistics. At first I fantasized that my score of 14.6 on the Fog Index sounded admirably low. But then I saw that 7-8 is considered ideal, and anything over 12 means the book is difficult to read. OK, I’ll admit to “Return to the One” being more or less guilty as charged.

Yet let’s see the developer of the Fog Index write a really easy to read book about one of the densest and most profound philosophers of all time. (Oops, make that “mystic philosopher”—might as well use my special Statistically Improbable Phrases as much as I can.) So I decided to check out some of the related competition, a few of the Books on Related Topics that Amazon lists on my book’s page.

Yeah, baby. Let’s go head to head with Pierre Hadot’s “Plotinus or the simplicity of vision,” which is one of the most popular (in the sense of both best-selling and easy to read) books about this Greek philosopher.

Fog Index: Hines scores 14.6 and Hadot 17.5. Yay, a point for Hines!

Flesch Index (90-100 appropriate for 5th-6th graders, 0-30 means you need a college degree to understand the book): Hines scores 51.5 and Hadot 44.0. Boo, a point for Hadot.

We’ve got a tie, one point each. It all comes down to the Flesch-Kincaid Index, a refinement of the Flesch Index that relates the score to a U.S. grade level. You would think that Hadot would win out again here, but no…

Flesch-Kincaid Index: Hines scores 11.5 and Hadot 14.2. Yay, another point for Hines! He wins 2-1! If you just made it halfway through your senior year in high school, you can still enjoy “Return to the One”—no need to plow onward into the junior year of college just to be able to understand Hadot’s book.

Plus, take a look at Amazon’s Fun Stats: with my book you get a whopping 10,324 words per dollar; with Hadot’s book you just get a measly 2,755. Where can you get 10,324 of anything for just a buck? And here you get 10,324 words of profound mystic philosophy for your $1 (to work in another SIP; by the way, Hadot only managed to come up with two SIPS, “total presence” and “our true self”; you get five in my book.

Sure, you could get your philosophy from the “Tao of Pooh” and only need a 6th grade education to understand it. But come on: the concordance shows that you’re going to read “Pooh said” over and over and over. For about $4 more you can get almost 100,000 additional words in “Return to the One” and learn about a mystic philosopher who wrote that the nature of God, the One, can’t begin to be expressed in language.

To get at the root of that paradox you’re going to have to buy the book.

Blogging about Nightline's blogging program

If you missed it, here’s a recap of last week’s Nightline program about bloggers and blogging. True to the blogging spirit, I’m working from my middle-aged memory. I didn’t take any notes while watching the program, nor do I want to take the time to review it—though it still resides on my digital video recorder.

This is my take on the program. Take it or leave it.

Bloggers, said Nightline, are wonderfully opinionated. Well, if you are on the wrong side of their opinion, then it won’t seem so wonderful. But the subjectivity of weblogs is what makes them so appealing. And, to some, dangerous. A blogger was asked if she feels that she should be subject to journalistic conventions such as having at least two sources for every significant news item. “No,” she said. “I’m not a newspaper.”

And yet she is. Nightline showed two computer screens, one with the New York Times online home page and another with a weblog home page (I’ll use BlueOregon as a nicely designed example). To compete with the New York Times newspaper you’d need many millions of dollars, printing presses, distribution channels, and lots of employees. However, anyone can become a blogger, With minimal expertise and $$$, in a few minutes you can have a weblog that can be read worldwide. And it can look just as good as the New York Times web presence.

Bloggers spoke enthusiastically about their love of blogging. How blogs are interactive, allowing readers to click on links that lead to more information about the subject, which lead to even more information, and so on ever deeper into the blogosphere. By contrast, traditional media are one-way streets where news and opinion are transmitted, but rarely permit responses by readers, viewers, or listeners.

Blogs create communities. They allow people with common interests to congregate in cyberspace, people who otherwise never would have been able to find each other. Amen. Whenever I peruse the TypePad statistics for my weblogs, I get a warm feeling as I see that someone from India, say, has used a search engine to find a post that I wrote on some esoteric subject. I realize that just a few people in the world care about my subject. But that person did. And I do. Two makes a party when it comes to weblogging.

Nightline featured a woman who was aghast that a state legislator was sponsoring a bill requiring that miscarriages be reported to a government agency. This wasn’t the main intent of the bill (which I can’t clearly remember), yet it would have been an unintended consequence of the way it was written. She fired up her weblog and began writing about the bill. Soon her posts got the attention of expecting mother’s groups and the like. Emails started flooding into the legislator’s inbox.

He withdrew the bill. And he wasn’t happy about becoming the brunt of a blogger’s righteous indignation. “Why didn’t she talk to me first?” he asked. When Nightline asked her the same question, she said, “I didn’t feel like I had to. He is a public official. The proposed bill was a public record. I have the right to express my opinions on my weblog.”

I side with the blogger, though I commiserate with the legislator. As bloggers become more visible and influential, they need to be increasingly careful that opinions are clearly separated from facts. In the blogosphere, these lines can easily become blurred. The anti-bill blogger spoke of how her original posts opposing the legislation got more and more garbled as other web sites passed on her words. Like the game where a message is whispered from ear to ear around a circle of people, errors accumulate with repetition.

All in all, though, watching the Nightline program left me standing prouder as a blogger. Blogging is helping to restore a sense of balance to media outlets that have gotten way too big, too corporate, too powerful, too unfair and unbalanced.

One of the most memorable images I remember from the program was when the moderator spoke about the above-mentioned woman pressing the “post” button on her weblog. Nightline showed a Formula 1 race and a voiceover something like, “Bloggers, start your engines.”

This is the power of weblogging, they said. One person’s opinion can become amplified into a powerful howling mass of supercharged outrage. If you’re standing on the track watching the energized blogosphere speed toward you, it can be an awesome experience.

Just ask Dan Rather.

Blogging focus of "Nightline" tonight

Bloggers and those who love them will want to watch "Nightline" tonight (ABC, 11:35 pm on our local Portland station). The scheduled subject is blogs and their effect on society. Here's an excerpt from today's Nightline email:

Tonight's piece is a fascinating one. Turns out that as John and producer Elissa Rubin were conducting interviews with bloggers, they were being blogged. The bloggers had some interesting opinions, to say the least. And as this program airs (and this e-mail is read by viewers), there's no doubt that bloggers will blog about it.

Yes, they got that right.
(See post continuation for the full Nightline email about this program).

I feel your Google pain

Burnside skateboard park blogger, via Orblogs I noticed your “Google can kiss my …” post where you complained that the Great God Google had dropped you from page 1 to page 23 on a “burnside skatepark” search.

I feel your pain, my friend. I’ve also written about how “Google hath forsaken me.” I too have wandered in the search engine wilderness, wondering if I ever would be found again.

Hearing of my difficult times, several Oregon bloggers took pity on my poor weblogged soul and linked my site to theirs. Eventually I returned to Google’s good graces, though the reason for my temporary exile seems different from yours. Still, though the ways of Google are deeply mysterious, we do know that links are loved.

Clearly, it is an affront to all that is good and Googley to have a blog called Burnside Skatepark so far down in the "burnside skatepark" search engine rankings. I hope this mention helps. Maybe some other bloggers will similarly give your blog a Google charge.

Skate on. At the end of the day, Google (and everything else in the world) will do what it has to do and you’ll do what you have to do. That’s the only way for you, or me, to stay sane.

I'm 56 years old and have never skateboarded. But some 46 years ago I used to attach roller skates to my shoes and zip around our flat concrete California carport. Different times; a lot different technology; hugely different topology.

Majnun, madness, and blog writing

Bloggers want to know that people read what they write. I’ve followed with interest Betsy’s (“My Whim is Law”) passionate call for comments on her posts, and Michael’s (“Michael J. Totten”) desire to have an accurate count of how many visits are made to his blog.

I too am happiest when I am noticed. Every morning I peruse the daily statistics TypePad keeps on my two weblogs, my spirits rising when a post reaps lots of clicks and falling when the world fails to beat a path to my HinesSight and Church of the Churchless doors.

And yet…the madness of blog writing cuts two ways. There is the lesser madness (as in “angry”) of not getting the reader responses that you want. Then there is the greater madness (as in “crazy”) of not caring a whit about how anyone responds to what you’re saying.

I wish I had more of the latter madness, and less of the former. What I love most about blogs is coming across a post that is written from the heart: raw, open, honest, unfiltered. This sort of writing flows from a passion to speak, not to be heard.

I’ve only taken one writing workshop in my life. I don’t remember a thing about it except a question I asked the workshop leader while we were eating lunch together: “How do you decide what to write about?” She looked at me as if the question was so ridiculously easy to answer, I was a fool for asking it: “Why, you write about what you feel passion for.” End of discussion.

“The Story of Layla and Majnun” by Nizami is the tale of a classic Persian love story dating from the seventh century and retold many times in various forms. I often think about Majnun when I click the “post” button and send something I’ve written off into the blogosphere.

There are many twists and turns in the telling of the star-crossed love between Majnun and Layla. They come together, and then are parted. When Majnun is unable to be with Layla, he wanders around the wilderness composing love songs to her:

Desperately longing to speak to Layla, but unable to reach her, he engaged the wind as his messenger, and many were the verses he sent to her. The wind obligingly carried his lines away, but response there was none. Bitter is the wine of lonely love, yet, if sometimes in his grief Majnun doubted Layla, his own passion did not abate. So he went on singing.

Sequestered, Layla doesn’t hear him directly, and can’t speak to him directly. But Nizami tells us:

Yet her lover’s voice reached her. Was he not a poet? No tent curtain was woven so closely as to keep out his poems. Every child from the bazaar was singing his verses; every passer-by was humming one of his love-songs, bringing Layla a message from her beloved, whether he knew it or not.

The Internet always has existed, though only recently in electronic form. Passionate voices from the heart will be communicated by a network of people who pass them on; no power can stop them. It isn’t necessary to force the hearing; simply speaking will suffice.

Layla secretly collects Majnun’s songs, memorizes them, and composes her answers. She writes them down on little scraps of paper and entrusts them to the wind—the ancient equivalent of the info-breezes that blow today through the atmosphere of cyberspace.

It happened often that someone found one of these little papers, and guessed the hidden meaning, realizing for whom they were intended….And true enough, there was no veil which could hide his beloved from Majnun. He answered at once, in verse, and whoever received the message saw to it that Layla should hear it at once. Thus many a melody passed to and fro between the two nightingales, drunk with their passion.

Whenever I hear from someone who comments on, or expresses appreciation for, a scrap of prose that I released into the blogosphere, I feel good. But I also feel good just from the releasing itself, whether or not I learn that the message has been received.

Such is the love of writing: when requited, it is wonderful; yet even when unrequited, it is still as strong.

Laurel gets published

“I’m at LifeSource and I can’t believe it!” So began Laurel’s cell phone call to me this afternoon. I immediately thought that, for the second week in a row, our regular “save us a loaf” order for Alpine Bakery’s 2 Seed Sourdough Whole Wheat bread hadn’t come in (great bread, by the way).

But no, it was good news. Laurel had picked up the January issue of Salem Monthly from a stand outside of the store and her “Religion Should Unite, Not Divide” article had been published! This was a surprise, as the Salem Monthly folks had never responded after Laurel emailed in the article, so we assumed that the article had been rejected.

It’s fun to see your name in print, so I could share in Laurel’s excitement—especially since my name also got in at the end, along with a plug for my Church of the Churchless weblog. The title of her piece was changed to “Fearing Fundamentalism” and several paragraphs got cut, but such is par for the writer’s course.

Salem Monthly is on its way to becoming a valuable Willamette Week-lite countercultural asset for our overly staid community. Congratulations to the paper’s staff, plus whoever redesigned their web site, which is much improved. I found Laurel’s article without any trouble using the site search engine (though the unformatted format leaves something to be desired: paragraphs).

Speaking of search engines, I got the Google bug yesterday morning and managed to figure out how to install a search capability for HinesSight. Now, I realize that any HTML competent person reading this would have been able to get a Google search capability up and running in a few minutes. For HTML challenged me, it was much longer.

Yet when I finally got the search box in the left column to more or less fit in 200 pixels, I felt as excited as Laurel was today. “I’m searching my own weblog and I can’t believe it!”

Wanting to be prepared with a response in case my daughter thought of this, my first two searches were on “Celeste” (23 relevant results) and “Serena” (56 relevant results). And my response is: This doesn’t mean that I love our dog twice as much as I love you, my daughter. Serena simply lives with us, and you don’t, so she gets more press.

But when you and Patrick have your first child (which, gosh, I guess would be my first grandchild—but don’t let this fact put any pressure on you) I guarantee that your HinesSight Google ranking will go way up.

I’m losing all sense of proportion

While clearing blackberries today with my new best friend, a cordless chainsaw, I thought about how I’m losing all sense of proportion.

Thank heavens. I just hope I can keep going until every last bit of proportionality is lost. I feel like I’m halfway there, but the fact that my mind can spit out an expression like “halfway” shows how far I have to go.

This afternoon I took a break from the blackberries to eat some lunch and get the mail. A letter had come from a book reviewer to whom I had written a plaintive query: “Why haven’t you reviewed ‘Return to the One’ when it is so obviously an important book that your readers should know about?”

He told me that his editor wants him “to keep his column confined to basically ‘general audience’ books” and that he wouldn’t be reviewing my book. I spent a few minutes rehearsing eloquent counter-arguments until I realized that I’d never talk with this reviewer, nor his editor.

If they don’t think there is an audience for one of the best-written books about one of the most important Western mystic philosophers, to hell with them. And to hell with all of the other reviewers who have ignored “Return to the One” so far. That’s the attitude I took with me as I returned to my blackberry labors.

Ever since Christmas, when I got the chainsaw as a gift from myself, I’ve been spending a lot of time clearing blackberry brambles. There’s a lot of other things I could be doing, and indeed should be doing, but I’ve been ignoring them. I like getting dirty (and bloody). I like freeing willows, ferns, and other oppressed vegetation from their blackberry prisons.

As it was getting dark today I finished clearing this rotting stump from a tangle of vines. I felt really good. I like to imagine that the ferns felt good too.

It can take hours to clear a small blackberry-infested area on our newly-acquired five acres. I have no idea what the cost-benefit ratio is of what I’m doing. I don’t think there is such a ratio. What is the worth of revealing a marvelous mossy log that we will enjoy looking at every time we walk by?

I don't know. Nature makes me lose all sense of proportion. When I’m pulling blackberry vines off of a tree, at that moment it strikes me as the most important thing in the world to do. And so it is.

Often I’m embarrassed to tell the truth when people ask me, “How long did it take you to write your book?” I mumble something like, “Oh, a few years. It was a lot of work.” For some reason I don’t want them to know how much time I put into the book, and how little I’ve gotten back—in terms of money, sales, recognition, that is.

I looked in my thick “Return to the One” correspondence file just now to remind myself of when I started pondering Plotinus. It was June 1996. Eight years from vague idea to concrete published reality. I didn’t work full-time on the book, but my labors deserve a grander description than “a lot of work.” Words fail me. Let’s just say, “It was more work than you can imagine.”

So, today I’m clearing blackberries and thinking about what I put into the book and what I’ve gotten out of it. Input: eight years, thousands of dollars, dozens of manuscript drafts written and rewritten, dozens of scholarly books read and analyzed. Output: a few hundred books sold, a few obscure reviews published.

And would I do it all over again? Of course. Those “inputs” and “outputs” are bullshit. They don’t begin to describe what I put into the book and what I’ve gotten out of it. Even more: really, there isn’t any difference between the two. Input, output. Cost, benefit. Cause, effect.

I have no idea where one begins and the other ends.

Somewhere in the midst of those crazy, unproportioned eight years I made a vow. To Plotinus, and to me. To a long-dead Greek philosopher and to a still-living Oregon writer. I vowed that I would write the best, the truest, the clearest book about Plotinus’s teachings that I could.

If other people liked it, fine. But I cared a lot more about whether Plotinus liked it. And whether I liked it. I’m not sure about Plotinus; I am sure about me. Eight years of work, two readers to please in the end. The work and the pleasing—they all blend together. There’s no way to tell how proportional something is when you can’t tell one side from the other.

I took a photo of my blackberry clearing area today. The setting sun was behind me. I could see a shadow of me taking a photo of my shadow. It struck me that I’m as unsubstantial as that one-dimensional Brian projection. Fifty years, five years, five months, five days, five minutes, or whenever from now the blackberry clearer is going to be no more.

Where is the proportionality in that? I’ve spend a lifetime working on being me, and then…what? The known of my life bears no proportion to the unknown of my afterlife.

Compared to that (there I go again, still trying to hold onto proportion), it doesn’t matter whether I’m writing a book or clearing blackberries. Whether anyone reads the book or if the blackberries grow back. Whether what I’m saying right now makes sense to anybody else or if it sounds like gibberish.

There’s freedom in losing all sense of proportion. Maybe the only real freedom.