Writing
- The only copy of a wedding video
- A master's thesis
- Twelve years of lesson plans by a middle school teacher
- Multiple instances of people's photo libraries
- A free year of a .lol domain - make your own website, hosted anywhere you like. Mine is Linkage.lol
- Membership in Social.lol - a Mastodon community based on respect for all including the LGBT community, POC and the neurodivergent. That's where I have my account and I've met some of the coolest people I've ever encountered on the Internet, and I've been online for a long time. There is also a Discord server.
- An email address - username@omg.lol, which is cool as hell anyway you look at it. Get it forwarded to an existing email account. It's so easy
- A bio page like mine - Amerpie
- A /now page like this - Amerpie/now
- A status log that can cross post to Mastodon and be embedded in a web page
- A photo gallery for sharing photos and embedding them in your web site
- Would you believe there is more? Go have a look!
The Gyro is Awesome
Zorba's Gyro is the name of the diner at the end of the street where I've been a regular customer for over 30 years. It's Greek owned, of course , and serves a variety of dishes from American and Italian cuisine as well. The signature dish though, the humble gyro, is a masterpiece. When you walk in, you can see the tower of mixed beef and lamb roasting on a vertical skewer. When I order it, I always get the "all the way" edition complete with red onions, lettuce, crumbled feta and of course authentic Tzatziki sauce.
The history of the gyro is a little mysterious, but some form of shaved meat served on bread has been served in the Mediterranean region since the time of Alexander. The Turks call it doner kebab. Arabs call it shawarma. I call it delicious. Estimates of when it first came to America, or indeed, when it became popular as a Greek street food vary, depending on who is doing the talking.
Ode to Zorba's | Living Out Loud
History of Gyro, an Ancient Greek Street Food
The History of the Gyro, With a Dollop of Serendipity - The New York Times
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
The Best Pharmacist in the World
For one reason or another, I've taken some kind of medication on a daily basis for almost forty years. I am an expert at swallowing pills. I'd hate to estimate how many I've taken over the years. Despite the attempts by my insurance company to strong-arm me into using a mail-order pharmacy, I stubbornly cling to a locally owned one that I lucked into by being hard to get along with.
I used to use various big box pharmacies. One thing I quickly learned by doing that was that the people there do not care about you. You might occasionally run into someone with a heart for people, but by and large, the pharmacists and techs there don't form relationships, and they stop seeing their customers as human beings after a while. That's been my experience. They will tell you to come back tomorrow in a minute. They will tell you that counting your own meds after they short you is your responsibility. Furthermore, they won't make the extra effort to deal with frustrating insurance companies. I pretty much would rather die a thousand deaths than deal with one.
Luckily, a local pharmacist with good business sense saw an opportunity to draw business away from them by starting his own pharmacy in a good location. He hired nice, competent people, and most of the time, you could go in there with a prescription in hand and walk out within 15 minutes with your medicine. It was glorious. Unfortunately, he had two giant TVs right behind the cash register tuned in at all times to Fox News. I was in there when they were covering a story about poor people trapped in a flood after a hurricane. The owner of the pharmacy was ranting that it was all their own fault for not leaving. I disgustedly asked him if he thought maybe they should have just driven their Maserati out of town or something.
I went home, went to the pharmacy's Facebook page, and left a scathing review, where I said they had good service but bad politics, and they weren't getting any more of my money as a result. I resigned myself to living in Big Box Hell. Some period after that, I got a message through Facebook from a name I didn't recognize. The writer, first name LeRoy, told me that he'd been a partner in the pharmacy but that he was leaving to go out on his own. He let me know that there would be no giant TVs playing Fox News in his new business and asked me to give him a chance, so I did.
These days, when I go to a doctor's visit for med refills, LeRoy has them filled before I can get out of the parking lot. If I have a question or an issue about one of my prescriptions, I can message him via Facebook or text him to get an answer or a refill. He's fought every insurance battle that's faced me for a decade. When big pharma jacked up the price of one of my meds by 400%, LeRoy figured out how to get me a better price. If I'm late picking up a refill, he doesn't put my meds back on the shelf and yell at me on my next visit; he just holds on to them for me, secure in the knowledge that I will get there eventually.
We are social media friends, and both of us are big baseball fans. I've followed his son's career from club ball through our local high school and summer ball. He now plays for the university where I work, which has one of the nation's best NCAA D3 baseball programs and a legendary coach. LeRoy's wife is a nurse practitioner with her own clinic, and she's treated me for everything from multi-day hiccups to a sliced finger.
In a day and age where so many businesses seem as though they exist only to extract money from you, LeRoy and his pharmacy are a total exception. He gives unfailingly polite service and always makes me feel welcome and cared for. He inquires about my wife, asks about my job, and tells me about his last baseball trip. Everyone should be so lucky.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
Should You Eat at Chick-fil-A?
LGBT Activist # 1
If a restaurant was taking the money they make and giving it to organizations trying to dissolve your marriage and take your kids away from you, you wouldn't give a shit if they"have really good lemonade."You wouldn't eat there. - FAITH NAFF
LGBT Activist # 2
"If gay rights advocates permanently withhold our business from Chick-fil-A, we'll send the message that stepping away from hateful causes was a mistake, and companies will be less likely to listen to our demands in the future."Nate Morris (CAS '27)
I don't eat at Chick-fil-A. I like chicken sandwiches OK, but I prefer the ones from Bojangles. Hell, I eat the ones they sell in gas stations. Every Chick-fil-A I come across is always super crowded. They have a reputation for dealing well with crowds, but you have to go be part of a crowd to find out if that's true. No thanks.
The biggest reason I don't eat there though is their reputation for being homophobic. Someone in my area had a Chik-fil-A Support Day a couple of years ago and lots of ostentatious Christians that I know made a big deal out of going their and posting it on social media just in case they hadn't done enough in their lives to be shitty to LGBT people.
In doing some basic research for this post, I found that the hate-chicken people quit giving money to homophobic organizations a few years ago. The owner doesn't even use his personal fortune that way any more. Most people think the motivation behind that is to stave off boycotts and bad press and they are probably right. Right-wing organizations accused Chik-fil-A of caving the the Gay Agenda, if you can believe that.
I know some principled leftists who patronize them now, partially because out of all the fast food chains, they offer more for people with celiacs. Since I don't personally have celiacs, I'll keep on eating at Bojangles though.
VIEWPOINT: Stop Asking Us to Boycott Chick-fil-A – The Hoya
Chick-fil-A and LGBT people - Wikipedia
Chick-fil-A “woke” controversy: Why conservatives are calling for boycotts | Vox
[Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇](#upvote-form)
Online Communities of the Past and Present
Although I used a local BBS and AOL chat rooms back in the day, the first online community I ever found a home in was at Epinions, a dotcom company that paid you to write reviews of commercial goods, including books and albums. You could use HTML to dress up what you wrote, so there was a small but satisfying thrill in learning how to be good at that. As usual, they had an off-topic category too, where you could write about whatever you wanted, and I contributed there all the time. People could follow you and send you private messages. I eventually outgrew it, but I tried to find a guy from there recently, after 27 years, and I succeeded because he's still using the same unique username.
When I had a Geocities website, part of it was dedicated to Vietnam veterans and their kids. I corresponded with quite a few men and women who were eager to have someone to talk with about their experiences. I live near a giant army base, so all the vets I know have comrades-in-arms everywhere they go, but the 18-year-old who got drafted from Iowa in 1967 and did his year in hell didn't always have that, and I was glad to hear them out, publish their stories, and generally just be as supportive as I could.
I was in some great bicycling forums around the turn of the century, one of which still sends me birthday greetings every year. I went as far as Georgia to meet folks from there for an organized ride.
For a few years, believe it or not, I took part in the local newspaper's community forum, which was mostly a cesspool of name-calling and ad hominem attacks on liberals. I'd write outrageously provocative stuff about W. Bush and his wars just to stir up the flag wavers. They doxed me regularly, and the woman I was married to absolutely hated me going on there. After a while, it wasn't fun anymore, so I stopped.
When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I kept an online journal every single day and posted to a website called Trail Journals. As a result, I had people up and down the East Coast who wrote to us and visited us on the trail. It wasn't unusual to meet trail groupies who knew all kinds of our fellow hikers from reading their journals. More than a decade later, I am still in touch with people I first met through that journal.
Then we enter the long dark winter of the soul—Facebook was all there was. I never really used Twitter for anything other than news, so I didn't find much social about it. My Facebook experience is much the same as many folks. In 2008, it was a place to keep up with friends and family and to reconnect with people from the past. Today, it's the same toxic hellscape for me as it is for everyone else. I mostly stay there to see pictures of my grandkids. In 2017, I had a viral post that caused me to get literally thousands of friend requests, many of which I accepted for the hell of it. I met plenty of cool people, including a friend I eventually met in Derry, Northern Ireland.
My experience on the IndieWeb since I joined micro.blog in January has been my favorite experience out of all of them. In 10 months, I've posted more on Mastodon than I did on Twitter in 15 years. I have three accounts on different servers. I closed my Twitter account too, not wanting to send any traffic to what is essentially the Nazi Bar of the Internet. I am a happy customer of OMG.LOL, 500.social, and Onephoto.club. Aside from Micro.blog, I also use Scribbles and BearBlog.
I have accounts on Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, Pinterest, Nostr, Pixelfed, Farcaster, and Tumblr, but I use them mostly to syndicate what I write on my blogs.
I do love Reddit, where I've had an account for nearly 19 years, despite its checkered past. Syndicating AppAddict there has driven lots of traffic to my website. Earlier this year, I volunteered to become a moderator of r/macOS, a subreddit with over 300K members. That's been interesting. I get a chance to help out newbies and to stamp out some toxicity, so what it lacks in actual fun, it makes up in satisfaction.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
Visiting Colonial Virginia
Virginia, just north of my home state of North Carolina, is a wonderful place to visit. Although I am partial to the mountains, there is something to be said for visiting the colonial historical sites closer to the coast. Whether it's Jamestown, one of the first settlements in the new world, Yorktown, site of the American victory in the Revolutionary War or the extensive and richly restored town of Colonial Williamsburg, you won't be disappointed. Thankfully, the exhibits in Williamsburg include ones dedicated to Native American and African American history. It's quite an experience to walk the streets and see people in colonial dress, gardening with period tools and making the same type of crafts that were common in the 1700s. It's a fun and affordable way to spend a day. If you are a cyclist, bring your bike. The 23-mile Colonial Parkway between Yorktown and Jamestown is a road you'll want to add to the miles you've traveled while pedaling.
History of Colonial Williamsburg
Colonial Parkway - Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)
Plan Your Visit | Historic Jamestowne
Plan Your Visit - Yorktown Battlefield Part of Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
The Culinary Misadventures of the Long Distance Hiker
The year Wonder Woman and I hiked the Appalachian Trail, we were away from home for 156 days, from early May to mid-October. At the beginning of our journey, I weighed around 230 pounds. By the end, I had dropped to 180 pounds and was wearing medium-sized clothes for the first time since high school. For most long-distance hikers, the two overriding feelings are ravenous hunger and fatigue. The trail involves over 400,000 feet of climbing, stretching from Maine to Georgia and covering just shy of 2,200 miles. It’s almost impossible for hikers to carry enough food to sustain their weight, though some manage better than others for physiological reasons I can’t quite grasp.
In preparation for our hike, we spent a lot of time packing boxes of food for my daughter and son-in-law to mail to us at various hostels, outfitters, and general delivery post offices along the way. We bought cases of oatmeal, Pop-Tarts, energy bars, corn chips, and other pre-made food. We also dehydrated large quantities of sweet potatoes, black beans, and several London broils to make beef jerky. Since Wonder Woman has celiac disease and can’t eat wheat, we were concerned about finding adequate food for her along the trail. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have worried—or prepared so much food. We ended up giving away large portions of it when it became monotonous. To our surprise, finding gluten-free food wasn’t as challenging as we had anticipated.
A guy my size, carrying a 25-pound backpack and climbing mountains all day in hot weather, can burn upwards of 5,000 calories a day if he hikes long enough. We typically woke up around 5:00 AM to eat and pack our gear. My breakfast usually consisted of two large honeybuns thickly covered with peanut butter or Nutella. Occasionally, I’d indulge in a bagel. I drank instant coffee boiled over the beer can alcohol stove I packed. While hiking, I’d consume a Snickers bar or a couple of Nature Valley granola bars every hour. I also ate quite a few Clif bars, but I found they tasted progressively worse the more I had.
For lunch and dinner, I often wrapped my meals in a big flour tortilla. My fillings included tuna, cheese from a block I carried, dried beef or Slim Jims, hot sauce, and maybe some crumbled Fritos. I always had a second tortilla with peanut butter. For dessert, I enjoyed candy, usually Whoppers or dark chocolate. I also devoured countless bags of pork rinds—they weigh almost nothing and pack a whopping 900 calories per bag. Sometimes I’d eat a couple of family packs of instant mashed potatoes or instant rice or pasta dishes from Lipton. I’m proud to say that, unlike most of my fellow hikers, I didn’t eat any ramen noodles. I like them just fine, but they simply didn’t appeal to me at the time. After returning home, I discovered that I had royally messed up my electrolyte balance by not getting enough sodium, so maybe some ramen would have been a good idea after all.
Hiker hunger is truly on display at restaurants in the towns along the trail. Every few days, hikers need to find a place to buy supplies, wash their clothes, and grab a shower. However, they don’t do any of that until they’ve filled their bellies at whatever establishment they can find. There were times when I’d order a meal, quickly finish it, and then order a second meal before feeling even slightly full. Alongside the food, I’d drink entire pitchers of Coke, or, when we were in the South, sweet iced tea. We were always on the lookout for any AYCE (all you can eat) places, although I was asked to leave a Chinese buffet in Pittsfield, MA, after my sixth plate. In New Jersey, there’s a stretch of trail that allows you to hit quite a few delis in a short span, and I certainly took advantage of that. In New England, I savored a delicacy we don’t have in North Carolina: gigantic full-belly clams. Of course, in Maine, I enjoyed fresh lobster during a memorable meal in Millinocket, the town near the northern terminus of Mount Katahdin.
Most of the weight I lost came back within a year. To this day, I haven’t had another Snickers bar, and I went a decade without eating a honeybun. I’m not a Nutella fan anymore, although I still enjoy a fair amount of peanut butter. Whenever we travel to trail towns during hiking season, I always nudge Wonder Woman if I see a hiker come in, so we can watch them order the prodigious amount of food they typically get. It brings back such fond memories.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
Make Your Internet Better Today
Make Your Internet Better Today - A free service can block ads and malware before it ever gets to your computer. Start using it today. I did. - linkage.lol/make-your…
Make Your Internet Better Today
I'm going to be that guy who finds something cool and then wants everyone to join in. The ad blocker that I use, Ublock Origin, is in danger of being neutered by Microsoft, the company that makes my browser, Edge, which I use for some very specific reasons. If you use Google Chrome (and most of you do), your ad-blocking capabilities have been seriously dampened by Google's decision to implement new standards for browser extensions. Don't panic though. There is a solution that is free and will make your computer more private and your browsing faster. That solution is NextDNS, a free service that blocks ads and malware from ever loading on your computer in the first place. If you set this up, you can even stop whole domains from ever loading. Imagine having Twitter never polluting your presence ever again. Not only that, but you can be protected from all kids of Internet bad guys, like those who use domain name typos to trick you, or from known bad actors, over 100,000 known domains are blocked by default.
You con't have to be super technical to get this set up. There is plenty of documentation and help available. Go sign up today!
NextDNS - The new firewall for the modern Internet
[Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇](#upvote-form)
Civic Duties
In North Carolina, where I live, early voted started this week. On the first day, we set a record for voter turnout. Even in the western portions of the state where a recent hurricane destroyed roads and where many people still don't have power, the number of people who turned out exceeded the numbers from four years ago when conditions were not impeded. Wonder Woman and I always try to vote early, partly to get it out of the way and partly out of excitement.
This year we went to a recreation center located about three miles from our house. My kids went to dances there when they were in school, and I have taken my grandchildren there many times to play on the playground. Today I went to defend democracy from the fascists trying to take over my country. Donald Trump recently called people like me "radical left lunatics" and said we are "the enemy within."
We were met by campaign volunteers from various candidates, who are allowed to approach voters as long as they stay 50 feet or more from the front doors. I gratefully accepted a voter guide from a guy who had a list of all the Democratic candidates and offered polite "no, thank yous" to everyone else who wanted to hand me literature. I usually try to research all the obscure races ahead of time, but I was glad to have the guide nonetheless. We used to be able to do straight party voting here, but the Republicans eliminated it because they thought it would help them.
Most of the people in line were younger and there were lots of POC. One dumb ass showed up in full Trump rally regalia and people were staring daggers at him. I wanted to catch his eye and mouth "I'm canceling your vote" but he kept staring at the floor, too embarrassed, I hope to feel like he could hold his head up amongst his perceived enemies. In my mind, whenever I am in line to vote, the happy people are always Democrats and the sour pusses are Republicans. Unfortunately, 60% of white men are probably going to vote for Trump, citing many different reasons but the primary one, I am convinced is to perpetuate white supremacy. Yeah, screw that. Not this white guy.
We had one extremely stupid constitutional amendment to vote on, one that would make excluding everyone under the age of 18 who isn't a US citizen from voting. If you thought there was already a law in place that did that, you would be right, but you underestimate the idiocy of the Republican Party who wants to plant the idea in their pitiful voter's heads that the Democrats are getting ready to allow children and illegal immigrants to cancel Bubba's vote. These people are pitiful.
I will be glad when the election is settled. I expect there to be all kinds of controversy and dirty tricks from the other side. Another insurrection is certainly a possibility. They are losers but they don't lose gracefully.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
For the Sake of All that is Holy - Back Up Your Computer
In my 30 years in the IT business, I have been approached by people with tears in their eyes many times, always because of lost data. The things I have been asked to restore include:
I have been successful in a few cases and I've struck out in others. I preach backing up your stuff to everyone I care about. In this day and age, doing so is relatively easy and straight forward.
If you have a Mac, you should be using Time Machine, even if you have a laptop. All you need is a cheap external drive. Everything else is built in to you computer.
Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support
If you have a PC, you can back up your data and settings to the cloud (but not your whole hard drive) with built in tools.
Back up your Windows PC - Microsoft Support
To back up your entire hard drive, you need a third party tool. Here are some options.
Best Windows backup software 2024: Free and paid options reviewed | PCWorld
Everyone should use some sort of cloud solution like One Drive, iCloud, Google Drive or Dropbox to back up anything that wouldn't want to lose if their house burnt down. If you don't know how to sign up for these solutions, all of which have a free tier, get some help or pay some one. It's that important. I have been able to keep track oof some of my files since the 1990s, through multiple computers, jobs and houses. Don't lose your important information or memories because you didn't back them up properly.
(Note - if you aren't 100% sure that your photos on your phone are backed up, get someone you trust to verify it for you.)
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
Shooting Down Stereotypes
I'm not going to pretend that I don't make assumptions about people from time to time because, as much as I try not to, I fall into the trap occasionally. I'm glad that, for the most part, plenty of other people and I seem to be less inclined to do it these days. We are learning not to assume that when someone is married, it's necessarily to someone of the opposite sex. We aren't as surprised when we find out that our friend's new love interest is from a different race. I love meeting someone who is into technology as much as I am who doesn't play video games, so I don't feel like such an outsider.
At the university where I work, the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities & Sciences, who is a Professor of Religion & Philosophy, is covered in tattoos. The university chief of staff, a diminutive ex-banker, swears like a sailor. The football coach, who looks for all the world like a defensive tackle, turns out to have been a record-setting quarterback in college. The best network engineer I ever worked with talks with an accent that would fit right in "The Dukes of Hazzard" or "Hee-Haw."
People from other regions of the country (or the world) can easily have stereotypes of those of us from the South here in the US. That stereotype is that we are conservative, a little (or a lot) racist, old-fashioned, and uneducated. I always feel that I need to establish my progressive bona fides quickly, especially if someone knows I'm also a veteran or that I worked in manufacturing. I have to do that for my fellow Southerners too, just to keep the ones who actually are conservative racists from trying to include me in their conversations. I am not the type to ever hide a single facet of my personality or beliefs from anyone. I want people to know exactly who and what they are dealing with.
It seems to be a driving force within conservatism to work towards putting people back into stereotypical roles. Organizations that have used DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) are routinely attacked by Republicans, who paint the whole idea as a disturbance to the natural order of the world. They want women and people of color to stay in their traditional places. They make no secret of their disdain for same-sex marriage. When they try to practice inclusion, they use unqualified bootlickers like Herschel Walker or Mark Robinson or someone with the flawed party loyalty of Nikki Haley.
Learning how to escape thinking in stereotypes can be a lifelong process. Some people seem to naturally escape those kinds of attitudes, while others, like me, have had to be deprogrammed throughout our lives. I'm sure I have a long way to go, but I'm happy with how far I have come. Being open-minded is the goal.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
Cool Tools and New Skills for Bloggers
When I first started blogging again in January of 2024, I had a few distant memories of making web pages in the 90s, but I had no clue about anything related to CSS or javascript because we didn't use that back in our Geocities day. In the intervening 10 months that I have been back creating things on the IndyWeb on Micro.blog, Scribbles, OMG.LOL and BearBlog, I have learned a lot about how to make my web pages do what I want and how to include certain elements. The learning process is ongoing, and I am always on the lookout for use tools. Here a few recent finds for you to explore.
HTML for People - a whole book just for you on using HTML to make web pages. It starts at the beginning and takes you through everything you would ever need to know.
Weblog Custom · Adding meta tags, manifest, and favicons. - lots of info on how to do some neat customization by Annie Sturdivant AKA @anniegreens@social.lol - a great resource for all kids of development info
The IndieWeb Carnival - every month someone on the IndyWeb hosts pages written by independent bloggers on a previously announced theme. Anyone can join in and you all should!
The Whimsical Web - want some inspiration? Here is a collection of websites that spark joy.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
I made the weekly update to my /now page - Joan Westernberg, Bad Monkey, cheap but good earbuds, lots of blog posts, some links I added to my personal collection
📝 Procrastinator’s Anonymous - My favorite time to do anything is “not right now.” - louplummer.lol/procrasti…
Procrastinator's Anonymous
My absolute favorite time to do something is "not right now." I never put gas in my fuel tank until the warning light comes on. The pharmacy used to put my medicine back on the shelf until they learned my patterns. I told Wonder Woman that I was going to buy a new pair of shoes for about a year before I actually ordered them. It's not that I am lazy; I do plenty. It's just that I need A LOT of time to think about doing things before actually doing them. I don't know why the prospect of seeing something that needs to be done and then actually doing it is repugnant to me, but it is.
I have collected quotes for years. I have a number of applications to keep them, plus a plain text repository that I maintain on GitHub. I'm super diligent about identifying quotes I want to save, copying them to a specific workspace in an app I use, and making sure I've got all the pertinent metadata: author, source, etc. And that's where the process gets bogged down. I may wait until I have 40 or 50 quotes saved up before I sit down and make myself catalog and tag them and file them in the various places where I like to keep them for reference. For a while, I tried to make doing that a part of my nightly checklist, but that habit did not stick.
There are other computer-related chores that I put off. I have all the emails from Netflix, Hulu, Max, etc. filtered into a specific mailbox so that I can go through them all at one time and add shows and movies that look promising to our playlists. I have an app, Sequel, that consolidates the playlists, so I don't even have to go to multiple websites to add them. I even have a recurring task set up in my to-do app to remind me to do this every Sunday, typically the slowest day of the week. Yeah, I am about three months behind.
We have a spare bedroom where I usually take naps on off days. The cheap bed frame I ordered from Amazon literally came apart, as in it separated into pieces. I was still napping away on the mattress and putting up with the crazy tilt and weird lumps. Wonder Woman found out about it, and BOOM, instantly fixed. She is a procrastination enabler.
Some things can't be put off, obviously. One of my jobs is preparing dinner for us. She is perpetually hungry because her ultramarathon training burns a lot of calories, and she needs to keep her energy levels up. I learned a long time ago that delaying meal times was a non-starter in our house. All I need is a hangry super heroine coming at me looking for a meal!
I'm also pretty disciplined about my blogging. I am currently riding a 204-day streak of posting every day. If I know I'm going to have a busy night, I try to knock something out in the morning before work or at lunch, although sometimes I just have to stay up late. When it comes to habits, I am always better off if I do them 100% regularly. The last time I meditated with discipline, I managed a 365-day streak, and my Apple Watch rings record is a consecutive 617 days without missing one. All this is balanced by streaks I have for putting things off, like replacing my deck, which I have now successfully stalled for two-plus years.
I don't think this makes me a terrible person. At least, I hope it doesn't. One day I might have to do something about it. .
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
Some Links for Music Lovers
One of the benefits of having broadband is the ability to hear just about any song you want to, whenever you want to Apple Music, Spotify and a host of other services let you listen on demand. Lots of time you can find live performances on YouTube. There are a couple of sites that give you a collection of links for just about any album or song that you can think of.
The free website Odesli.com will create a shareable web page for you containing links to album art, websites to listen, websites to make a purchase and to YouTube for just about any album or song. You can create a page with a custom URL or make an embed for what you searched for. Here are a couple I made.
Nebraska - Bruce Springsteen - https://album.link/Boss_Nebraska
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (Live) - https://song.link/jcatfolsom
A website to help you make lists of albums, complete with album art, to share with friends or on your blog is Album Whale. It's free.
Check out my album list, Alt Country Classics, on Album Whale! https://albumwhale.com/lou-plummer/alt-country-classics
If you're doing research into a favorite band or artist, there is no better site on the internet than AllMusic.com It's been around forever, and you can spend hours reading album reviews and making playlists.
Check out their page on The Beatles
The last resource is Last.fm, a site that let's you upload the songs you've listened to so that it can recommend other artists you might like. I have over 76K plays uploaded and have discovered many, many bands through their recommendations.
My Letter to a Homophobic Friend
I'm a digital pack rat who enjoys browsing through decades-old emails and blog posts from the 90s when I was on GeoCities. I recently found a letter I wrote to a homophobic friend in 1997, where I tried to disabuse him of some backward notions and challenge some of his beliefs. I won't reprint the whole thing because parts of it are cringeworthy, and I use language in it that wouldn't fly today. However, I am glad to see that most of what I believed 27 years ago, I still believe today.
My friend was unhappy that the use of the word "homophobia" was becoming common. He said no one was afraid of gay people and that there was no fear involved. My response dipped into armchair psychology mode, but in hindsight, I still see it as a valid argument.
There is a fear of homosexuals in our society. I believe almost everyone has, at some point, either had some sort of homosexual experience (rarely) or had a homosexual fantasy (commonly). This act or thought provokes such shame and guilt in some people, usually men, that a strong aversion occurs—one that is so psychologically entwined with self-identity that an overemphasis occurs in denying or rejecting the act or thought. We all know men who are so insecure they can't carry their wife's purse for her, buy her tampons, or admit that Tom Cruise is handsome. Why? Because someone might think they are gay, and since they once had a homosexual fantasy, they might be gay. So they better tell some [gay] jokes, buy themselves a four-wheel-drive pickup, a shotgun, and a Pit Bull, and put that rumor to rest right now.
His other complaint was that the "homosexual agenda" was being pushed and promoted. I think the people doing the promotion were "the liberals" and "the media." This was during the Clinton administration, when the culture wars were just getting started, but the flames of it were already burning brightly.
Since I live in North Carolina, prime Bible Belt country, I don't get to see this homosexual promotion everyone is talking about. In fact, I see the opposite. People may not use the N-word much anymore, but calling someone the other F-word happens all the time. Some of the gay people I know are ridiculed, shunned, and ostracized. I've never known a gay recruiter sent by the National Gay Headquarters to a lonely post in my town to convert school children to the cause. I do know my company doesn't fire openly gay employees as it did ten years ago, but I also know people who don't feel sorry for AIDS victims. Logic tells me that no one chooses to be gay any more than you choose to be straight. Who would pick a lifestyle that offers the possibility of harassment, discrimination, the loss of family ties, and the small chance of ever being a parent?
Thankfully, some of my arguments seem simplistic today. Maybe they are even regarded as common sense. As a straight guy with the privilege that entails, I have the luxury of only thinking about the subject when I feel like it or when I see some backward behavior. Unfortunately, the right wing has chosen to ramp up its attacks with things like banning books about LGBT issues and making Tim Walz's sponsorship of the Gay/Straight Alliance at the high school where he taught into an issue.
Since I wrote that letter, some positive things have happened in American society. Same-sex marriage was legalized, and lots of people now know same-sex couples. Contrary to the fearmongering by conservatives, none of us straight folks had to get divorced, nor is it now legal to marry your pet. You can also be gay and out in the military without jeopardizing your career. Last time I checked, the US wasn't threatened by another country due to the weak state of the Army and Marines. I'm glad both of those things have happened, and I hope that an inevitable future conservative win in an election doesn't undermine them.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet - The community at OMG.LOL along with the services offered are the best thing on the Internet. - linkage.lol/omglol-is…
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet
When I first started investigating blogging, I was heavily influenced by a British fellow by the name of Robb Knight. One of the many things he recommended for folks looking to involve themselves in this thing called the IndyWeb was a $20 a year membership in the web community found at OMG.LOL Describing what you get for that is kind of hard, but I'll give it a shot:
I have four blogs on three different platforms and I use elements of OMG.LOL in conjunction with all of them. If all this sounds cool to you but you simply can't afford it, message Adam, the guy who runs the place, and you might qualify for a scholarship sponsored By a caring member of the community. If you can afford it, great, sign up using my referral link, and I promise to use the benefits to help someone come onboard.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
📝 Doing the Best We Can - For once, pop psychology gets it right. We are doing the best we can do with what we have to work with. - louplummer.lol/doing-the…
