M’aidez! M’aidez!

Or, as we say on this side of the pond, HELP!!!

There is a minor glitch or problem or something funny (funny as in peculiar, not funny as in ha-ha) going on with the Live Traffic Feed thingy over there in the left margin of my blog, and I would appreciate any advice you can give. Until recently, if I clicked on “Options” in the Live Traffic Feed thingy and then on “Ignore my browser,” by golly, it worked and ignored my browser as advertised, meaning it did not add “Canton, Georgia” to the list every time I come to my own blog.

Lately, though, the LTF thingy seems to be suffering from short-term memory loss. Or maybe that should be long-term memory loss.

I am certainly not ashamed of being from Canton, Georgia, but I would prefer not to have the traffic counter fill up with multitudinous references to my place of residence. And I would prefer not to have to keep saying, “Ignore my browser” over and over. I would rather see a list of other people who have dropped by.

Several months ago, my son added a Local Area Connection icon on my desktop and I began “enabling” local area connection before signing on the Internet and “disabling” local area connection after leaving the Internet. As long as I used dial-up, my son said, this hadn’t been recommended because every time I signed on to the Internet back then I was using a different TCP/IP address. But after switching to high-speed Internet, if I understand it right, I now use a single TCP/IP address no matter when I sign on and therefore my desktop is more vulnerable to hacking, viruses, worms, and general nastiness because it is connected all the time. Having a Local Area Connection that can be disabled when I’m not using the Internet lessens the likelihood of getting zapped by the bad people in the world.

All went swimmingly for several months. Lately, however, every time I sign onto the Internet and go to my blog, the Live Traffic Feed thingy has started saying “Canton, Georgia” and I have to tell it repeatedly to ignore my browser. This never used to happen. If I told it to ignore me, it ignored me until I told it to stop ignoring me. Logging off now seems to reset the darned thing.

Nothing has changed at my end of things that I know of. I am one very confused blogger. If my browser is suddenly deleting cookies of some sort that I need, it must have started doing it on its own because I don’t remember telling it to do anything like that.

Does anyone have any idea what is happening or why? I will consider any reasonable suggestion, short of shutting down my blog, that fixes the problem.

All this clicking nonsense is getting downright ridiculous.

On the hottest afternoon in Georgia in seven years, the seventy-second floor of the tallest building in Atlanta was hardly abuzz with activity. A pimply-faced boy slowly pushed a squeaky mail cart down a hall. Somewhere a telephone rang. A receptionist put down her cigarette, cleared her throat, and began to talk.

“Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Houyhnhnm, and Yahoo....Miss Gulliver speaking. How may I direct your call?” said the receptionist into the mouthpiece of her silver telephone.

“Glrbfq fnjx kqdmsl, wqvx,” said the telephone.

“Certainly, sir. I’ll put you through to Mr. Brobdingnag,” said the receptionist. “Please hold.”

Across the hall, another perfectly coiffed receptionist picked up another ringing telephone and said, “Jersey, Holstein, Ayrshire, and Guernsey. May I be of assistance?”

“Kfwscy ljvdn qwerty uiopn?” said the telephone.

“Ms. Guernsey is not in the office today, ma’am. Would you care to speak to Ms. Ayrshire instead?” said the receptionist.

Arthur Pilkington ripped the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it in the general direction of the wastebasket. He stood up and went into the kitchen and made himself a Harvey Wallbanger, even though it was only ten o’clock in the morning.

Another morning, another wastebasket already half full. It was going to be a long day.


Well, enough of that. I tossed off that chunk of immortal prose in a matter of minutes (could you tell?) to make the following point:

I’m beginning to hate clicking on links. Everybody and his brother puts links in posts, me included. No self-respecting member of the blogging community could possibly post anything without links in it.

We do it because we can.

Perhaps we’re all going to Hell in a handbasket.

Now go and check out those links.

Geography lessons old and new

In my day, we learned geography the old-fashioned way. For example, if I wanted to know more about the Gulf of California (also known as the Sea of Cortez or Sea of Cortés; locally known in the Spanish language as Mar de Cortés or Mar Bermejo or Golfo de California), the body of water that separates the Baja California Peninsula from the Mexican mainland, I might read an article in an encyclopedia or study a map like this one:


Today, thanks to the astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, students can see the real thing.


We’ve come a long way, baby.

Here’s another bit of geography no one ever taught me in school:

Give up? The fine print says it’s a photo of NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Telescope seen in silhouette side by side in solar transit on May 13, 2009. That means the big yellow blob in the background is the sun, 93,000,000 miles away. The photo was taken from Vero Beach, Florida, on May 13, 2009. Atlantis and Hubble are at an altitude of 375 miles (600 km)above the surface of the earth; they zipped across the sun in 0.8 seconds. Click on the photo to get a closer view.

I repeat, we’ve come a long way, baby.

New Faces of 2009

If you can’t put the names with the faces, you really need to get out a bit more....

Here are two that have been around a little longer, in happier days:

M is for Multitudinous

Some people take photographs of sunsets.

Some people take photographs of flowers.

Some people take photographs of animals.

Others take photographs of churches, or tombstones, or battleships, or antique automobiles.

Me, I play with words.

Therefore, as a public service to those of you who would rather write than switch, including Dr. John Neenah of Linna, Wisconsin (or maybe it’s Dr. John Linna of Neenah, Wisconsin), who sits around making up his own words, I am providing a list of perfectly good words, free of cost, for your reading and writing pleasure. The Merriam-Webster people have done the same thing, but you have to turn a lot more pages.

A: anthracite, appendectomy, arthritis, axiomatic, abalone, aeronautical, aphrodisiac, Afghanistan, acetylsalicylic, alliterative, amniotic, Appaloosa, aquamarine, asthmatic, Amenhotep, authoritarianism, ambidextrous, avoirdupois, autumnal, arduous, awkward, azure, acrimoniously, Arapaho.

B: bituminous, blithely, barbiturate, Bostonian, blacklisted, benchmark, barbaric, Bhutan, bodily, Bosphorus, brittle, backfire, burro, bystander, Byzantine.

C: corpulent, crestfallen, crowded, Capricorn, charlatan, crapola, Charlemagne, cinnamon, clarification, Corpus Christi, chaotic, cushion, cyanide, California, cyclical, cuddly.

D: dehydrated, dastardly, deciduous, dingo, Dramamine, daffodil, debutante, drunkard, Dubai, dazzling, dimwitted, dabbled, dyslexic, disarmingly, dynamite.

Other words come to mind, too, like felonious, heliocentric, pterodactyl, quotidian, Rashtafarian, sanctimoniously, tintinnabulation, and Zinfandel, but they occur much farther along in the alphabet (farther along, we’ll know all about it; farther along, we’ll understand why). Since it is a bright, sunny, Sunday afternoon (cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine; we’ll understand it all by and by), I think I will stop posting and go lie down for a nice, long nap instead.

Life happens

As John Lennon once noted, life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.

It was true then, and it’s true now.

As people in Georgia say, the only good thing coming out of Alabama is I-20. As people in Georgia say, the reason all the trees lean westward in Georgia is that Alabama sucks. As people in Georgia say...well, let’s just say that people say a lot of things in Georgia.

I am writing to you today from somewhere in deepest, darkest Alabamistan because that is where I happen to be. Life, as I said, happens. So far, I have not encountered anyone with a banjo on his or her knee, but I will keep looking.

This will surprise those among you who know how private a person I am, but I will now divulge a little about my family. Mrs. RWP and I have three grown children, A, B, and C. Let’s call them Agamemnon, Byzantium, and Clytemnestra. Each of them found the perfect spouse, X, Y, and Z. Let’s call them Xylophonia, Ypsilanti, and Zirconium. As luck, fate, time, and several very active libidos would have it, these three happy couples (A-X, B-Y, and C-Z) have two children each, making a total of six of the most perfect, brilliant, talented, handsome, beautimous grandchildren in the entire world who just happen to be mine, er, ours.

C-Z’s oldest child, LMNOP, will be ten years old tomorrow and we have come to help celebrate that happy event. He has crossed an important boundary in life. He is now into double digits.

As are, I trust, you all.

A very important day in the history of mankind

May 19 is the 139th day of the year (140th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 226 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1935, T. E. Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, died in Britain.

On this day in 1994, Jacqueline Lee (“Jackie”) Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, the wife of the 35th president on the United States, John F. Kennedy, died in Manhattan.

On this day in 1971, Ogden Nash, an American poet, died.

On this day in 1864, Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American author who wrote The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, died.

On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded.

But enough about death and sadness. Let’s talk about something happier.

On this day in 1946, André the Giant, a French professional wrestler, was born.

On this day in 1941, Nora Ephron, an American screenwriter (can you say Sleepless in Seattle?) was born.

On this day in 1861, Dame Nellie Melba, an Australian opera singer, was born. She was not named a Dame until some time later, probably after she had taken a few singing lessons. Her operatic career was so successful that a dessert, Peach Melba, was named for her. Peach Nellie just didn’t have the proper ring to it.

According to Wikipedia, on this day in 1962 a birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy took place at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The highlight was Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of Happy Birthday. Either Wikipedia is wrong about the date or this is very strange indeed, because President Kennedy’s birthday wasn’t for another ten days. Perhaps he planned to be sailing in Hyannisport. Perhaps Marilyn Monroe’s presence was required on a movie set. Perhaps Madison Square Garden was already rented out by someone with more pull.

But all of those events fade into insignificance when compared to the chief reason May 19 is a very important day in the history of mankind. The chief reason May 19 is a very important day in the history of mankind is that on this day in 1963, forty-six years ago, Mrs. RWP and I were married in a little church in Orlando, Florida.

Although it is our policy never to allow photographs of ourselves to be published, on this happy occasion we will make an exception.