Remotely Running After My Hat

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[Image of 18th-century dowser from Wikipedia… Wonder if it’s sized to fit?]

I’m going to be computerless much of this week. Which presents me with a convenient dilemma — to wit, how to do a whiskey river Friday post?

You may be thinking: How, exactly, will this be “convenient”? Sounds rather like a pain, in fact. (Also a bit presumptuous. There can’t be that many people who know this Friday series even exists!)

Nonetheless, I’m curious to know how easily this will be accomplished. Options considered and rejected so far:

  • Emailing a post via WordPress’s own built-in feature (limited features)
  • Installing and using the Postie WordPress plugin (not working from Blackberry email address)
  • Posting via Posterous.com (ditto)

Finally, I guess I’ll try what I’m doing now: using the Blackberry WordPress app. Tedious entering mass quantities of text, but I guess since the Friday posts are mostly copy-n-paste anyway…

Here’s a test, using the poem in last year’s edition of the Poetry Daily e-newsletter for today’s date:

How to Find Water

Easier if there are springs.

Before sunrise, lie down flat where the
search is to be made. Place
chin on the earth, so that your
sight will not range
higher than it ought. Then
dig.

Valleys receive rains most
abundantly and snow is squirreled by forests. Springs
run underground and
burst forth in the middle of
plains, protected
by the shade of trees.

Melting, it filters through
fissures in the ground and this
reaches the foot of the
mountain, from which gushing
springs come belching out. The earth
gives moisture under the influence
of heat, as a body emits sweat.

Taste.

(Keith Waldrop, from Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy)

How’d that look? ‘Twas a bear to enter, even with copy-n-paste: the (highly idiosyncratic!) line breaks went missing and had to be entered manually, toggling back and forth into email and the WP app to check and correct them.

…And I still won’t know if it’s right until I can see it in a real browser!

Have a feeling Friday’s post will be very short, ha ha.

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Admin: Had This Been an Actual Alert…

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Over the weekend, don’t be surprised or disgruntled or appalled or whatever if you find posts appearing and disappearing seemingly at random. I’m testing out some “blog posting by email” options and may be generating these things in bursts of multiple posts over the course of a single minute or two as I tinker with settings, do resends, and so on. I’ll try to delete the ringers as they show up — unless, of course, I happen to post something so eye-bleedingly profound that it demands preservation.

(Note: I’m trying to ensure that these emailed posts get assigned simple Draft status, and not go up fully published. So if that part of the experiment works, you may never have to contend with the flotsam — or jetsam, as the case may be — of my sailing by with my eyes on the gauges.)

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Sorting Through an Old Hive

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As some of you on Blogger-based weblogs may know, a fraction of those sites recently had to convert from a particular old technology to a newer one. The owners of affected blogs received a series of email notifications from Blogger tech support, and by now any such sites have been converted over to The New Way… or can no longer be updated.

Running After My Hat is my first non-Blogger blog. But over the years — for myself and for others, some paying and some not — I have built and otherwise had a hand in contributing to a total of twelve Blogger sites. I got notifications that four of them had to be converted to Blogger’s current service level, and somehow managed to get them all switched over about a week before the May 1 deadline.

One of the four was a real relic — one I’d almost forgotten about.

[Read more…]

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Awards Season, at a Distance (and Highly Concentrated)

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Heartiest congratulations to RAMH regular visitor and blog-friend Froog, who has performed the hat trick and then some in garnering — all at once — five best-of-the-year awards for his online presences:

  1. Most Prolific Blogger,
  2. Most Alcoholic Blog,
  3. Most Uncomfortably Personal Blog,
  4. China-Basher of the Year, and (the one I really envy him for)
  5. Most Diverse Blog

It’s about time someone gave him his due!

I understand Joan Rivers has begun making plans for the presentation ceremony. If she can just find a red carpet in his neighborhood which isn’t fluttering from a flagpole, she should be all set.

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The Blogger as Essayist (and Lens)

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E.B. White, bemused to find himself hereReal post for the day imminent. In the meantime, I think this quotation deserves a post of its own:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays. There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person — philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.

[…]

I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.

That’s E.B. White, talking to me (and maybe you) across the decades — about blogging.

And if White’s not talking to you, maybe the inimitable xkcd is:

[Read more…]

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Insufficient World and Time

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Jeez, when I get backed up from stuff at work and stuff at home and stuff everywhere in between, the first casualty is obviously the blog. I’ve got a couple things simmering in draft form but don’t know if I’ll get to one of them today.

In the meantime, please play quietly among yourselves.

And yes, I am watching you. So behave.

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Good Will, Slumming

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[Entry from William Shakespeare’s recently discovered blog, “Honour’d in the Breach”]

Well now I’m not so sure workshopping Shrew was such a great idea.

Like I said the other day, I was really looking forward to the new group. I’d been working with the others for like SO LONG that we were all starting to get on each other’s last nerve, you know? (“Do be or don’t be”? Puh-LEEZE.)

So I’m sitting in the tavern at that table in the back. And every time the door swings open I’m like totally checking out the newcomer, wondering if it would be Bacon, deVere, or Greville (so-called Lord Brooke). Marlowe I knew from the old group of course and wasn’t crazy about bringing him along to this one. (Drunken sod, if I had to lay a shilling I’d say he’ll die in a tavern.) But he was already there. Not with me, of course, at the bar. Chatting up the strumpet of the day, and a right loony Ophelia she was too.

Bacon strode in first. ‘Struth,I knew him by reputation right enough. He had every bit the swagger I expected, and lacked every bit of wordsense you need in a good workshopper. By evening’s end he had us all pretty pissed, except for Marlowe who’s always pissed anyway. On the other hand the boastful cock did come up with “Gremio,” the “Gresio” I’d been using always bugged me. Too much the slur on the Eye Tees, you know? So “Gremio” it is.

I had high hopes for deVere. I’d heard so much good about the man. He certainly knows his words, and he certainly knows (ha ha) his Queen. I did like much of what he had to offer but eventually concluded he had, like, too much to offer. When he told us about the bloke he borrowed the 500 Cs from I seized ‘pon it at once and made him Kate’s da. Then we all had a good beery laugh like old chums about Bertie and deV’s sister and I managed to put some of that in, too, and the stuff about Italy, well, a little local spice never hurts and Christ knows I cannot supply any of that meself. But then deV got greedy. Started on that piggish swill about “A Shakespeare/deVere Production” and he wasn’t jokin’ neither. Who’s the think he is? Pox him, I say. Pox him soundly.

Greville, what can I say. Seems like a right enough chap. But as the saying goes, all the world’s a stage and if you can’t make an appearance till the curtain drops, you sir are no player. Or however it goes. By the time he showed up I’d already tidied me pages. I might show him some o’me other stuff sometime, if he’s lucky hehe.

Which left Marlowe. Lucky for me he had already had one or two or perhaps three too many, or he would have recognized himself in, ha ha, Christopher Sly. That seemed to sail over everybody else’s noggin too, perhaps I should be making the point more sharply. Christopher Toolow, perhaps? Nay. Sly it is.

Anyway, Marlowe was Marlowe. When he slid me his copy of the draft, o’er which he had spewed his draught, I stopped attending to him.

Surprisingly to me, worst of all was my own dear dear Anne.

She had been at me for weeks, she had, and perhaps ’twas the last time I’ll let her peek at my stuff ahead of time: You’ve gotta make Kate do this. Make her do that. Kate would nary say any such thing. All that muck and I went along with it just to shut her up. But when she plunked herself down at the tavern, elbowing deV aside (granted, he’s an arse-licker and I was well rid of him) and trying to keep Marlowe from tossin’ peanuts ‘twixt her bazooms, and THEN in front o’me workshopmates starts saying this and that about men and womenfolk and how the one needs a little more of this and the other less of that… well I have to say I do love the woman dearly dearly after all but am starting to wonder if she really deserves to get my best bed when I am dead and in the ground, you know what I’m saying? Blest be the woman that spares these stories and that woman clearly is not Anne.

But I showed her, indeed I did. This morning before I mailed to the printer the final quarto or folio or whatever the Hades they call it these days, I crossed out that “rights of woman” oration at the end which dear dear Anne had insisted on. Hehe, came up with some good stuff. “My hand is readie, may it do him ease” indeed. Dear dear Anne will crap a pretty brick when she hears that tomorrow night. ‘Course it doesn’t make much sense considering all the rot that came before but at this point I just want to be shut of it. Let the critics sort it all out, I say.

More later!

[Hat tip to Moonrat, of Editorial Ass]

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