Long Time Gone

Oh my goodness, I've been married a while.

39 years today and counting.

The Way We Live

We were shopping in the bookstore of MSU-Bozeman when an announcement came over a loud speaker:

"There's been an emergency reported in the building. Leave the building immediately."

Not what we usually do, but we set our purchases down and followed the lemming-like stream of students and others out of the building.

Saw the Chief check for smoke. I didn't smell any. And then it hit me.

The building being evacuated contained the bookstore, a branch bank and the student union. It was lunch time. I realized as the calm, quiet crowd poured through the double doors into the courtyard between buildings, a smart bad guy would get everyone out of the building and kill us all while we waited in the quad.

Where's the safest place to stand in a crowd?

I watched the Boston Marathon attack from fairly early on having been alerted via social media.

It wasn't the same, but still eerily similar to 911, when I tuned in in time to watch the second plane hit the Towers.

So, I watched CNN all day with their endless, pointless speculation and neverending reroll of the bomb footage.

And like everyone, I suspect, worried about what's next for our country.

Saw a post from a person glad to see a SWAT officer guarding a street corner with an automatic weapon. Is it too early to suggest accepting armed security as our new normal imperils us in another way?

Where's the safest place to stand in a crowd?

Twelve years later, I still feel moment of discomfort when I see a low-flying airliner. I've decided that will probably never go away.

How long will it take, I wonder, before I'm comfortable again with people en masse?

Where's the safest place to stand in a crowd?

End of an Era

I feel like a trilobite crawling out of paleozoic slime.

You're Old School if you recognize these.

Yesterday, I took my darkroom down.

Can you see in the dark?

 Yes, I am completely digital. I have moved on.

But I did enjoy the trip down memory lane.

Creative Differences

Rocky doesn't like the laptop any more than the iPad.

In fact, he likes it less because when bumped, the human yells at HE WHO SHOULD ONLY BE ADORED.

 

The situation is dire. Limits of stubborn have yet to be breached.

To deny the lap to a little wiener dog? How can she be so cruel?

Just Say No

Episode 9 in which we learn something from Facebook.

So, ignore what I said before.

You know who you are.

When I first signed on Facebook, it used to annoy me with the ads it chose to shower me with in the ever present sidebar.

Diets. Hearing Aids. Hair loss.

Then it got to know me better in whatever sneaky logarithm fb, Google and other Net spammers use, and started offering ads closer to the mark.

Oh my dear, sweet fb, if it were only that easy.

Then, I discovered I had an opinion and clicked through some of the ads. Voila, fb knew me better than my own mother.

The Zombie Apocalypse and Dr Who joined the touts marching up the sidebar.

Oh no, all is revealed. I am exposed. Now my pool of fb friends know what they might have suspected. I want to shoot at the undead and go on trips with a floppy-haired, cutie-pie Time Lord. Or Daryl.

I feel so naked.

Last summer I had a horse experience that stuck with me and once I was loosed from the throes of I may buy a horse, I still clicked fb pages that displayed beautiful horse pictures.

And the sidebar changed to this.

And more of the same.

No longer was I a deaf fat bald woman in need of a career. Or a fan boy.

I was a horse person. A horsemanship fellow in need of saddles, boots, blankets and beautiful, beautiful horses. A cowboy.

Aha, she said.

So, I clicked and clicked and clicked and the sidebar filled up with equine temptations of every sort.

Which made me smirk and revealed an obsession of another kind.

Oh, they still throw a diet ad in once in a while in case I'm getting too big for my boots. But one new selection on CLICK IF YOU LOVE DARYL DIXON, eliminates that.

And here, at last, is my point. This is what those in journalism call BURYING THE LEAD.

As I read the news online, the stories I'm offered range from interesting to scary to WTF. I've decided to try my anti-fb-get-to-know-me trick out in the real world. The real world in this case being the online ether of the Internet.

Which is not the real world, I grant you, but it is one step closer to the real world than Facebook.

I will not click through to a story, any story, to read about that family who have made having no class pay big bucks.

I will not view any picture of any part of anybody's baby bump.

Maybe my Huffington Post sidebar will fill with stories about economics, women's rights, environmental improvements or Norman Reedus biographies.

If we stop supporting the horse's asses by tacit approval, maybe we'll get to see more of the horse.

That's my theory anyway.

Have a nice day.