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| Click to magnify. |
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
The real definition of insanity from The Wrong Dictionary
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Half a Million Secessionists Impotently Petition White House
By Will Conley
As of Tuesday night, Nov. 13, 2012, more than 500,000 Americans have signed online petitions at the WhiteHouse.gov petition portal, requesting permission from President Obama to let their states consider seceding from the Union — including a few hundred from my home state of Minnesota.
That the number of signatures on the Minnesota petition at the time of this writing is commensurate with a concurrent petition to let a university have their Injun mascot back is illustrative of the fact that the secessionists' bark is louder than their bite. Also, that apparently only racists ever petition the White House. (Not true. Joke.) (Wait, Will, how can a bite be loud? Well I suppose if it's a really gnashing, cartoony-sounding bite...)
The maps below — which I created merely to shock and frighten you — show how the United States would be carved up if the election-losing crybab- er, secessionist movement ever managed to drag their states into a civil war. The first map represents the state of the petition situation as of Monday night. The second reflects the massive surge in popularity just 24 hours later.
But don't polish your muskets just yet. The secessionist movement is little more than a temper tantrum thrown by a small minority of the roughly 314 million people whom the U.S. Census Bureau deems Americans. A few points to remember:
Conclusion: It's very, very safe to point and laugh at these clueless wannab- er, brave revolutionaries. Your comments, whether sane or idiotic, are welcome.
Sources:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57548572/states-petition-to-secede-from-union/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/12/petitions-to-secede-are-filed-for-23-states-since-/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/secession-petitions-gain-steam-article-1.1201439
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/petition-to-secede-states_n_2120410.html
http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html
Maps created with the assistance of:
Defocus Blog: http://www.defocus.net/visitedstates/generate.html
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
As of Tuesday night, Nov. 13, 2012, more than 500,000 Americans have signed online petitions at the WhiteHouse.gov petition portal, requesting permission from President Obama to let their states consider seceding from the Union — including a few hundred from my home state of Minnesota.
 |
| Click to magnify. |
That the number of signatures on the Minnesota petition at the time of this writing is commensurate with a concurrent petition to let a university have their Injun mascot back is illustrative of the fact that the secessionists' bark is louder than their bite. Also, that apparently only racists ever petition the White House. (Not true. Joke.) (Wait, Will, how can a bite be loud? Well I suppose if it's a really gnashing, cartoony-sounding bite...)
The maps below — which I created merely to shock and frighten you — show how the United States would be carved up if the election-losing crybab- er, secessionist movement ever managed to drag their states into a civil war. The first map represents the state of the petition situation as of Monday night. The second reflects the massive surge in popularity just 24 hours later.
 |
| Click to magnify. |
 |
| Click to magnify. |
But don't polish your muskets just yet. The secessionist movement is little more than a temper tantrum thrown by a small minority of the roughly 314 million people whom the U.S. Census Bureau deems Americans. A few points to remember:
► The petitions do not reflect the will of the state governments in which the petitioners reside. Governor Perry of Texas, for example, expressly does not support the Texas secessionist movement, even though in the past he has hinted at his sympathy with the movement in an effort to garner more votes.
► Anyone can start a petition. You only need one person to start a petition and thus "represent" a state.
► If a petition receives 25,000 signatures, all that means is the president is legally obligated to respond in words to the petition.
► Most of the petitions are copycats of one another and do not reflect separate spontaneous movements to secede. That means most of the secession rhetoric is bandwagoneering, and most of the petitioners couldn't have spelled the words in the petitions independently let alone comprehend the full meaning of those words.
► It's a safe bet that there's at least one These-Colors-Do-Run quitter in each state, so I guesstimate all 50 states and the District of Columbia will have petitions by the weekend. That means that if a secession movement could even remotely succeed (it can't, not in this police state), then the whole country would have to secede from itself. It would be like a kid threatening his brother to take the ball and go home — while the two were still standing in their own back yard.
Conclusion: It's very, very safe to point and laugh at these clueless wannab- er, brave revolutionaries. Your comments, whether sane or idiotic, are welcome.
Sources:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57548572/states-petition-to-secede-from-union/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/12/petitions-to-secede-are-filed-for-23-states-since-/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/secession-petitions-gain-steam-article-1.1201439
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/petition-to-secede-states_n_2120410.html
http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html
Maps created with the assistance of:
Defocus Blog: http://www.defocus.net/visitedstates/generate.html
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Towards a Better Living Reality Through Language
All human verbal language is mental programming. When you type, write, or speak, you are causing your audience to make a copy of the message in their own minds. Some minds are more open than others to linguistic programming; others have more Byzantine spam blockers, anti-virus scanners, and password-protected firewalls. But those very security measures too are mere languages, just slightly more sophisticated. If you speak those languages and understand their contours, you can navigate or bypass them, write new programs, and rewrite existing programs.
Many of the programs we write in each other’s minds are useful and help us in our lives. Some programs are detrimental to the overall performance of the mind, or coax us to do things we otherwise might not. Others are benign or neutral. We are programming each other at all times. We all influence the direction of each other’s very will, the objects of our desire, and even the power switch on our volition. When we use language to transfer concepts, those concepts can turn to action, and thus we help to determine the fate of the human world and, by extension, the rest of the natural world.
And just what is a concept? How big is it? What color is it? The answer is concepts have no size, no color, in fact no physical attributes whatsoever. Even the printed word is merely a placeholder for concepts, which still we cannot see with our eyes or touch with our hands. From this nothingness, from this conceptual world that exists only in our minds and moves in our languages, we produce a somethingness in the physical world, the measurable world where agony and triumph and the dirt of daily doings occur. Thus language is not just programming, but alchemy. It is the dead mud from which the living, breathing, skin-slick swamp frog spontaneously generates. Language is medieval science proven correct.
Language is an inexhaustible resource. That is, you have access to an infinite amount of language and thus can influence the world infinitely by controlling the minds of others through language. One thing you can do with language is awaken the mind to itself, to show itself where it twists and turns, where its weaknesses lie, how it can be turned against itself. You can arm your audience with the self-knowledge necessary to protect itself, grow gracefully, and take such shape as can advance the spirit and the body towards a better living reality.
Is this frightening, the idea that we can control each other through language, or that we are being controlled through it all the time? Is it disconcerting to admit that language has such power and that we utilize it whether we want to or not? Not after you’ve admitted it to be true. If like X-Men‘s Wolverine you were born with a titanium skeleton and retractable knives in your hands, would you want to know it? Of course you would. And wouldn’t you want to use it to do good? Most of us would say yes.
So let’s set aside for the moment the idea of pure free will. We are all programmed zombies to some extent. Let’s try to be aware of it, and let’s try to learn as much as possible about language. Let’s see how free we can make our wills, by understanding and even celebrating the ways in which our will is not free at all, but subject to the predilections of others’ use of language. Read much. Write some. Think. Cultivate inner silence, so that we can hear the true nature of the words when they do arrive.
Language is power over others and self. I wish you good luck in your quest to master it.
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Many of the programs we write in each other’s minds are useful and help us in our lives. Some programs are detrimental to the overall performance of the mind, or coax us to do things we otherwise might not. Others are benign or neutral. We are programming each other at all times. We all influence the direction of each other’s very will, the objects of our desire, and even the power switch on our volition. When we use language to transfer concepts, those concepts can turn to action, and thus we help to determine the fate of the human world and, by extension, the rest of the natural world.
And just what is a concept? How big is it? What color is it? The answer is concepts have no size, no color, in fact no physical attributes whatsoever. Even the printed word is merely a placeholder for concepts, which still we cannot see with our eyes or touch with our hands. From this nothingness, from this conceptual world that exists only in our minds and moves in our languages, we produce a somethingness in the physical world, the measurable world where agony and triumph and the dirt of daily doings occur. Thus language is not just programming, but alchemy. It is the dead mud from which the living, breathing, skin-slick swamp frog spontaneously generates. Language is medieval science proven correct.
Language is an inexhaustible resource. That is, you have access to an infinite amount of language and thus can influence the world infinitely by controlling the minds of others through language. One thing you can do with language is awaken the mind to itself, to show itself where it twists and turns, where its weaknesses lie, how it can be turned against itself. You can arm your audience with the self-knowledge necessary to protect itself, grow gracefully, and take such shape as can advance the spirit and the body towards a better living reality.
Is this frightening, the idea that we can control each other through language, or that we are being controlled through it all the time? Is it disconcerting to admit that language has such power and that we utilize it whether we want to or not? Not after you’ve admitted it to be true. If like X-Men‘s Wolverine you were born with a titanium skeleton and retractable knives in your hands, would you want to know it? Of course you would. And wouldn’t you want to use it to do good? Most of us would say yes.
So let’s set aside for the moment the idea of pure free will. We are all programmed zombies to some extent. Let’s try to be aware of it, and let’s try to learn as much as possible about language. Let’s see how free we can make our wills, by understanding and even celebrating the ways in which our will is not free at all, but subject to the predilections of others’ use of language. Read much. Write some. Think. Cultivate inner silence, so that we can hear the true nature of the words when they do arrive.
Language is power over others and self. I wish you good luck in your quest to master it.
-----
All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Innocuous Tweet Ignites Raging Twitter Controversy
Note: These tweets were embedded using SocialDitto, a really cool service created by WebProNews partner and PHP developer (and nice guy and professional) Dale Smith of iEntry, Inc. but that I trashed a few posts ago. Hey, I always promise to be honest; I never promise to be correct! :)
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
In Memoriam, Ann Conley, Jan. 14, 1942 - Jun. 18, 2012
My mother died yesterday morning, June 18, 2012 at 8:10 a.m. The world was unworthy of her. Please read this tribute I wrote yesterday evening, and please feel free to share or re-post this elsewhere if you are so moved. I want everyone to know what kind of a woman my mother was. I want everyone to know she existed. I want everyone to know what she was up against.
In Memoriam, Ann Conley, Jan. 14, 1942 - Jun. 18, 2012
My mother was raised at knifepoint — or might as well have been. My mother's mother once chased my mother through the house with a butcher knife. My mother hid under a neighbor's porch until her mother's psychotic episode passed.
My mother also saw her father "bloody the walls with" her mother.
The rest of my mother's 70 years as a physically manifested human were an epic war against the demons that forever and ever laughed in her beautiful child face.
She wasted little time. At age 18 my mother escaped from Upstate New York to New York City and held secreterial jobs throughout the 1960s, back when they were still called secreteries. My mother's favorite companies to work for were advertising agencies.
She drank a lot. Married a lot. Four husbands, all told. Had a son and a daughter in Connecticut with her first husband. She didn't believe herself fit to raise them, so she abandoned that family when her son was 12 and her daughter was 8. That ate at her forever.
Later my mother married an engineer — brilliant by all accounts — and they drank and rode motorcycles together.
In 1976 my mother had a vision. She saw the ghosts of her dead relatives, including her mother and grandmother, as well as Jesus and maybe the Virgin Mary. I'm not sure about the details. The ghosts asked my mother whether she wanted to live or die. My mother chose life, and never had the desire to touch alcohol again.
She moved to Michigan and joined A.A., which became her religion and her family. There she found her purpose: helping drunks get sober and stay sober, or, barring that, giving them her time and support and physically sheltering them from harm. A.A. gave her a sense of belonging, the feeling that she was needed, and a made-in-America theology that she could accept. It also gave her her third husband, and that man became my father in 1980.
My mother and father moved to Upstate New York. The two of them loved madly and argued terribly. In 1981 my mother kidnapped me to Minnesota and disappeared under an assumed name. Her stated reason was always that she was afraid of my father, although even she admitted he had never harmed her in any way. As far as the little girl inside her knew, everyone my mother ever met had a butcher knife for her, and wanted to bloody the walls with her.
Starting with a junker of a car, one hundred dollars, and an ornamental feeding spoon, my mother cobbled together a vast Minnesotan support system for the two of us over the years. She navigated the social services for single mothers, established A.A. connections, and eventually cultivated friend circles throughout the Twin Cities metro area.
That A.A. club was my family and my church. Angels helping angels rise up from rock bottom. I attended A.A. meetings with my mother until I was 11, old enough to stay home by myself. My mother's various boyfriends — half of whom were of the hippie persuasion, the other half military and law enforcement — all served as male role models for me. I believe she chose each one based on what she thought I needed at the time, rather than what she wanted.
Realizing she needed to expand her social horizons, and wanting to help the world as much as she could, my mother ran for local office on an environmental platform of saving some trees from being cut down. She was active in the parent organizations in the schools. She designed the t-shirt mascot (Tigers) for one of my two middle schools. Her drawing style was graceful. Delicate. Angelic. I never saw a more darkly expressive roll of toilet paper than when she drew one in black chalk for an art class she took in 1992.
The arts were not optional in our household. They were a mandatory part of daily life, just like breathing. We freely sang and whistled along to classical music, classic rock, and classic country. Legend has it her opera singing was the best in the state back when she was in high school. She could also play piano, which I saw her do on a number of occasions, whenever we would together happen upon a piano.
She took me to choir practice and band practice. She once spent all her savings on a euphonium (a kind of smallish tuba) for me so I could pursue my own musical path.
We laughed ourselves to the floor over Bill Cosby tapes, which we would play over and over on a vintage stereo system.
When I was 6, she woke me up before dawn and led me down the hallway to stand on the balcony and watch aurora borealis, the northern lights. They flashed all the colors of the rainbow. "Isn't it beautiful?" she whispered. The awe in her voice made me realize I was witnessing a special kind of magic: the kind that anyone can watch but not everyone deems important.
For my mother, love was about helping each other to see such wondrous things. But love was also guardianship and blind, reckless self-sacrifice. Once, a couple of older boys were ganging up on me on the basketball blacktop across the street from one of the apartment buildings she raised me in. Mom saw this from our kitchen window on the third floor and strolled out to the scene, lazily swinging my aluminum baseball bat in one hand and grinning maniacally. She took one boy by the ear, placed the bat gently but firmly against his skull, and intoned into his ear softly and clearly through clenched teeth, "I'm not afraid to go to jail for my son."
Sometimes the battle and the beauty fused into one thing. In 1996, my mother and I went to see a performance of Man of La Mancha with Robert Goulet as the title role at the Ordway in St. Paul. The final scene featured Don Quixote on his death bed, accosted mercilessly by knights in blinding platinum armor, all bearing giant gilded mirrors instead of shields, advancing on the old man, white lights screaming off the surfaces everywhere and showing Don Quixote his weaknesses and the futility of his valiance.
I broke down crying ten minutes after my mother and I left the theater. I didn't know why I was crying. I would find out later.
I saw my mother spontaneously relive and act out her childhood violence on at least two occasions, once in 1988 and once in 1997. She threw her body against walls and cried out in pain and begged whoever was doing it to stop it. I was powerless to help; I could only watch. She referred to these episodes as flashbacks or "remembrances".
We always loved each other very much — she was all I really had, and I was all she really had — but we often argued just as fiercely as she and my father had argued so many years earlier. I had yet to meet that father.
When I turned 18, my mother moved back to Upstate New York to try to reconnect with her family. On Father's Day in the year 2000, I received a letter from my mother, included in which was my father's current phone number, which unbeknownst to me she had kept track of for the entirety of the previous two decades. She suggested that I might like to give my father a call. And so I did. He and I really hit it off. When I first visited him that summer in 2000, my mother drove to join me at the house where he and my step-mother lived. My father and mother made ammends.
My mother had some success in her effort to reconnect with her own family, but her mind and body were already deteriorating. Don't ask what was wrong, exactly; I gave up trying to keep track of it all a long time ago. Administrative records in my possession show a woman desperately seeking solutions to the monsters that wanted to claw her to pieces from the inside out. She waged full-scale conflagration on them, trying every drug known to psychiatry, and every physical therapy that might have helped her failing body to recover or at least plateau.
My mother stayed active in A.A., continuing to find some solace in helping others, at least as far as they wanted to be helped, which was, more often than not, very little. And yet she continued as long as she was physically and mentally able to do so. And she kept up her belief in a higher power.
She spent her final months in a nursing home here in New Hampshire. This morning, the torture device that was her mind and body could no longer hold her. The beautiful, innocent, precious, perfect little girl that had held onto life by her fingernails for seventy years finally slipped free.
The tenacious woman that saved the lives of countless people through her A.A. work has completed her mission impossible. The mother who infused my heart with an aurora borealis has finally risen up and flown away.
Fly, Mom. This world was never worthy of you. Fly.
(Written by Will Conley and originally posted publicly on Facebook.)
In Memoriam, Ann Conley, Jan. 14, 1942 - Jun. 18, 2012
My mother was raised at knifepoint — or might as well have been. My mother's mother once chased my mother through the house with a butcher knife. My mother hid under a neighbor's porch until her mother's psychotic episode passed.
My mother also saw her father "bloody the walls with" her mother.
The rest of my mother's 70 years as a physically manifested human were an epic war against the demons that forever and ever laughed in her beautiful child face.
She wasted little time. At age 18 my mother escaped from Upstate New York to New York City and held secreterial jobs throughout the 1960s, back when they were still called secreteries. My mother's favorite companies to work for were advertising agencies.
She drank a lot. Married a lot. Four husbands, all told. Had a son and a daughter in Connecticut with her first husband. She didn't believe herself fit to raise them, so she abandoned that family when her son was 12 and her daughter was 8. That ate at her forever.
Later my mother married an engineer — brilliant by all accounts — and they drank and rode motorcycles together.
In 1976 my mother had a vision. She saw the ghosts of her dead relatives, including her mother and grandmother, as well as Jesus and maybe the Virgin Mary. I'm not sure about the details. The ghosts asked my mother whether she wanted to live or die. My mother chose life, and never had the desire to touch alcohol again.
She moved to Michigan and joined A.A., which became her religion and her family. There she found her purpose: helping drunks get sober and stay sober, or, barring that, giving them her time and support and physically sheltering them from harm. A.A. gave her a sense of belonging, the feeling that she was needed, and a made-in-America theology that she could accept. It also gave her her third husband, and that man became my father in 1980.
My mother and father moved to Upstate New York. The two of them loved madly and argued terribly. In 1981 my mother kidnapped me to Minnesota and disappeared under an assumed name. Her stated reason was always that she was afraid of my father, although even she admitted he had never harmed her in any way. As far as the little girl inside her knew, everyone my mother ever met had a butcher knife for her, and wanted to bloody the walls with her.
Starting with a junker of a car, one hundred dollars, and an ornamental feeding spoon, my mother cobbled together a vast Minnesotan support system for the two of us over the years. She navigated the social services for single mothers, established A.A. connections, and eventually cultivated friend circles throughout the Twin Cities metro area.
That A.A. club was my family and my church. Angels helping angels rise up from rock bottom. I attended A.A. meetings with my mother until I was 11, old enough to stay home by myself. My mother's various boyfriends — half of whom were of the hippie persuasion, the other half military and law enforcement — all served as male role models for me. I believe she chose each one based on what she thought I needed at the time, rather than what she wanted.
Realizing she needed to expand her social horizons, and wanting to help the world as much as she could, my mother ran for local office on an environmental platform of saving some trees from being cut down. She was active in the parent organizations in the schools. She designed the t-shirt mascot (Tigers) for one of my two middle schools. Her drawing style was graceful. Delicate. Angelic. I never saw a more darkly expressive roll of toilet paper than when she drew one in black chalk for an art class she took in 1992.
The arts were not optional in our household. They were a mandatory part of daily life, just like breathing. We freely sang and whistled along to classical music, classic rock, and classic country. Legend has it her opera singing was the best in the state back when she was in high school. She could also play piano, which I saw her do on a number of occasions, whenever we would together happen upon a piano.
She took me to choir practice and band practice. She once spent all her savings on a euphonium (a kind of smallish tuba) for me so I could pursue my own musical path.
We laughed ourselves to the floor over Bill Cosby tapes, which we would play over and over on a vintage stereo system.
When I was 6, she woke me up before dawn and led me down the hallway to stand on the balcony and watch aurora borealis, the northern lights. They flashed all the colors of the rainbow. "Isn't it beautiful?" she whispered. The awe in her voice made me realize I was witnessing a special kind of magic: the kind that anyone can watch but not everyone deems important.
For my mother, love was about helping each other to see such wondrous things. But love was also guardianship and blind, reckless self-sacrifice. Once, a couple of older boys were ganging up on me on the basketball blacktop across the street from one of the apartment buildings she raised me in. Mom saw this from our kitchen window on the third floor and strolled out to the scene, lazily swinging my aluminum baseball bat in one hand and grinning maniacally. She took one boy by the ear, placed the bat gently but firmly against his skull, and intoned into his ear softly and clearly through clenched teeth, "I'm not afraid to go to jail for my son."
Sometimes the battle and the beauty fused into one thing. In 1996, my mother and I went to see a performance of Man of La Mancha with Robert Goulet as the title role at the Ordway in St. Paul. The final scene featured Don Quixote on his death bed, accosted mercilessly by knights in blinding platinum armor, all bearing giant gilded mirrors instead of shields, advancing on the old man, white lights screaming off the surfaces everywhere and showing Don Quixote his weaknesses and the futility of his valiance.
I broke down crying ten minutes after my mother and I left the theater. I didn't know why I was crying. I would find out later.
I saw my mother spontaneously relive and act out her childhood violence on at least two occasions, once in 1988 and once in 1997. She threw her body against walls and cried out in pain and begged whoever was doing it to stop it. I was powerless to help; I could only watch. She referred to these episodes as flashbacks or "remembrances".
We always loved each other very much — she was all I really had, and I was all she really had — but we often argued just as fiercely as she and my father had argued so many years earlier. I had yet to meet that father.
When I turned 18, my mother moved back to Upstate New York to try to reconnect with her family. On Father's Day in the year 2000, I received a letter from my mother, included in which was my father's current phone number, which unbeknownst to me she had kept track of for the entirety of the previous two decades. She suggested that I might like to give my father a call. And so I did. He and I really hit it off. When I first visited him that summer in 2000, my mother drove to join me at the house where he and my step-mother lived. My father and mother made ammends.
My mother had some success in her effort to reconnect with her own family, but her mind and body were already deteriorating. Don't ask what was wrong, exactly; I gave up trying to keep track of it all a long time ago. Administrative records in my possession show a woman desperately seeking solutions to the monsters that wanted to claw her to pieces from the inside out. She waged full-scale conflagration on them, trying every drug known to psychiatry, and every physical therapy that might have helped her failing body to recover or at least plateau.
My mother stayed active in A.A., continuing to find some solace in helping others, at least as far as they wanted to be helped, which was, more often than not, very little. And yet she continued as long as she was physically and mentally able to do so. And she kept up her belief in a higher power.
She spent her final months in a nursing home here in New Hampshire. This morning, the torture device that was her mind and body could no longer hold her. The beautiful, innocent, precious, perfect little girl that had held onto life by her fingernails for seventy years finally slipped free.
The tenacious woman that saved the lives of countless people through her A.A. work has completed her mission impossible. The mother who infused my heart with an aurora borealis has finally risen up and flown away.
Fly, Mom. This world was never worthy of you. Fly.
(Written by Will Conley and originally posted publicly on Facebook.)
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
On Passing Carefully Folded Notes
Every one of those little folded rectangles was a light about to be flicked on. You never knew what could be in there. Some new escalation of infatuation? Some drama about lunch? A funny joke? An unfunny joke?
You opened it and there it was - whatever it was. You'd have this moment with the note all alone, just you and the paper, even if you were sitting in science class surrounded by other kids.
You could smell the paper. If it smelled like her perfume, your heart sang. If the note was folded neatly, corners meeting corners, you knew some extra time and effort had been put into it. Maybe the sender was afraid of rejection, or maybe she just wanted it to be right. She cared.
If the note was roughly constructed, the contents were probably dashed off frantically. An urgent matter. "I need to know if you're a Pisces or an Aquarius?!"
You read the contents again. Stared at it. Folded it back up the way it was, handling it by the corners to avoid staining it with palm sweat and smearing the ink. Keep it safe. The little tab was such a thing of engineering ingenuity; you marveled at it.
You learned how tightly to crease the folds so the note would spring into itself; crease it too sharply and it would lose structural integrity.
A really choice note - one that made you dizzy - you kept in your pocket for days before storing it in a shoebox. Months or years later you'd look at it again and wax nostalgic, or you'd wince with regret. That new note scent faded as age and dust took over.
Dead trees, man. Dead trees and ink.
Image via some Facebook post I saw.
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Famous Fake Quotes - Jane Goodall
Via FamousFakeQuotes.com
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Friday, June 1, 2012
SocialDitto Not Ready for Prime Time?
[Update: The primary developer for SocialDitto contacted me this morning to address the concerns I enumerate in this article. He and I are in the midst of a congenial discussion about what he can do better and what I in fact got wrong. I'll add another update to this post based on that discussion as soon as possible. - Will]
SocialDitto aims to be a simple online tool that lets you embed individual Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus posts in HTML documents (such as your website or blog.) You just copy the URL of a public post, paste the URL into a box at SocialDitto, and grab the resulting code.
The embedded posts are fully functional, displaying the user's avatar, a link to the post, and accompanying links. In some cases embedded posts include photo thumbnails, video stills, and link previews. In all cases, posts must be public to embed them; this is a good thing, as it protects users' privacy.
Here's one of mine:
What's It Good For?
I was planning to play around with SocialDitto as a blogging tool. I wanted to hand-select and embed some of my best tweets and Facebook posts as new blog posts elsewhere, to perhaps lure new, similar-minded people into my social media universe. I might also have used the service to collect some of my favorite posts by others around certain themes.
Unfortunately, SocialDitto just isn't ready for prime time. Either that, or I don't know how to use the Internet as well as I thought I did.
Commence the Tedious Litany of Problems
SocialDitto is not without its kinks; it's still a new-ish product as of June 1, 2012. Every embedded post relies on a huge chunk of script and HTML. Tweets are a visual disaster. If an embedded tweet comes from a profile that uses a tiled background image, you get an ugly two-tone border. Even when you can get the preview to look right, it might not resolve properly when actually embedded. I managed to embed the above tweet and make it legible by turning my own Twitter profile completely white, but how many other profiles are like that? Not many.
Line breaks in Facebook posts disappear when embedded with SocialDitto, leaving you with one run-on paragraph. Google+ posts work great with SocialDitto—including line breaks—but link previews don't appear. And after my experience with the Twitter aspect, I didn't bother trying to embed either a Facebook post or a Google+ post. (You can try, if you want. Let me know how it went, in the comments here.)
The post URL box at SocialDitto appears to be all-in-one, but you really need to click the Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ logo above before pasting the URL into the box. Even then, you might get an error message; refreshing the page and trying again sometimes helps.
What SocialDitto Needs to Work on Right Now
SocialDitto was created by WebProNews—the same company that produced Twellow (awesome service) and LinkNotify (I've never tried it.) So I do have some faith in the company.
Maybe I'm doing it all wrong. That's highly possible. Right now, I think WebProNews needs to either simplify SocialDitto's embed code into one neat line of script, or eliminate all script and use plain HTML to standardize the way embedded posts appear. I recommend the latter, as script doesn't work in certain blogging platforms like WordPress.com. (It does work in Blogger, sort of.)
FINISH HIM!
Lots of bloggers seem to think SocialDitto is the bee's knees, but I think it's just an awesome idea, hastily executed.
Flawless Victory.
SocialDitto aims to be a simple online tool that lets you embed individual Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus posts in HTML documents (such as your website or blog.) You just copy the URL of a public post, paste the URL into a box at SocialDitto, and grab the resulting code.
The embedded posts are fully functional, displaying the user's avatar, a link to the post, and accompanying links. In some cases embedded posts include photo thumbnails, video stills, and link previews. In all cases, posts must be public to embed them; this is a good thing, as it protects users' privacy.
Here's one of mine:
What's It Good For?
I was planning to play around with SocialDitto as a blogging tool. I wanted to hand-select and embed some of my best tweets and Facebook posts as new blog posts elsewhere, to perhaps lure new, similar-minded people into my social media universe. I might also have used the service to collect some of my favorite posts by others around certain themes.
Unfortunately, SocialDitto just isn't ready for prime time. Either that, or I don't know how to use the Internet as well as I thought I did.
Commence the Tedious Litany of Problems
SocialDitto is not without its kinks; it's still a new-ish product as of June 1, 2012. Every embedded post relies on a huge chunk of script and HTML. Tweets are a visual disaster. If an embedded tweet comes from a profile that uses a tiled background image, you get an ugly two-tone border. Even when you can get the preview to look right, it might not resolve properly when actually embedded. I managed to embed the above tweet and make it legible by turning my own Twitter profile completely white, but how many other profiles are like that? Not many.
Line breaks in Facebook posts disappear when embedded with SocialDitto, leaving you with one run-on paragraph. Google+ posts work great with SocialDitto—including line breaks—but link previews don't appear. And after my experience with the Twitter aspect, I didn't bother trying to embed either a Facebook post or a Google+ post. (You can try, if you want. Let me know how it went, in the comments here.)
The post URL box at SocialDitto appears to be all-in-one, but you really need to click the Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ logo above before pasting the URL into the box. Even then, you might get an error message; refreshing the page and trying again sometimes helps.
What SocialDitto Needs to Work on Right Now
SocialDitto was created by WebProNews—the same company that produced Twellow (awesome service) and LinkNotify (I've never tried it.) So I do have some faith in the company.
Maybe I'm doing it all wrong. That's highly possible. Right now, I think WebProNews needs to either simplify SocialDitto's embed code into one neat line of script, or eliminate all script and use plain HTML to standardize the way embedded posts appear. I recommend the latter, as script doesn't work in certain blogging platforms like WordPress.com. (It does work in Blogger, sort of.)
FINISH HIM!
Lots of bloggers seem to think SocialDitto is the bee's knees, but I think it's just an awesome idea, hastily executed.
Flawless Victory.
-----
All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
How I Saved a Real Princess—A Nintendo Story
When I was a kid, I made some mad money by selling personalized stationery door-to-door in my various neighborhoods. At age 8, I used some of the sales proceeds to buy a Nintendo Entertainment System. I played Super Mario Bros. until I could save the princess every time, almost with my eyes closed.
I bought a few other games, too—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a couple of others. But Mario was where it was at.
At first, my mom barely tolerated having the Nintendo in the house. She said it was rotting my brain. But I wanted her to understand why I liked it so much, so I coaxed her and coaxed her to try playing Mario until she gave in and tried it.
To my delight, my mom actually enjoyed playing Mario. I was amused and pleased that she had finally come around to seeing things my way. We even played it together sometimes. It was fun at first.
A few weeks into her newfound interest, I noticed my mom would sometimes play Mario for hours. Sometimes I would try to get her attention, and she would get angry at the interruption. Other times, she could barely even hear me. There was Mario on the screen, doing his little back-and-forth dance, jumping on a Goomba, hitting a flag pole—and there was my mom staring at it.
My mom was disappearing. The princess needed saving. By observing her, I realized how pathetic I must have looked to her before she herself got sucked into the game. How vacant. It became clear what I had to do.
So at age 10 or so, I took it upon myself to sell that whole piece of shit—Nintendo, games and all—to a video game shop, and I never looked back. I got my mom back, I got myself back, and I had an actual childhood.
Today, I'm grateful for actual memories. Memories that smell like a rotten knothole holding up part of my fort in the woods, that grease my skin like baseball sweat at dusk, that take my breath away like the time I landed on my back while doing a double flip off a swing set.
I'm writing this in front of a computer screen. Hmm.
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All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.
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