Graphically Challenged and Facebook Inept!

 I decided it was past time to create a new banner for my "Business Page" on Facebook. You can see it here.

Here's my first attempt with two rows of seven Audiobook cover images: 

I was unable to get it to display properly in the allocated space.

"Back to the Drawing Board."  Lots of research and trial & error led to a 3-row 21-cover banner. It looks great here, but only displayed 2 of the rows on the business page. Worse, it's the bottom row, with my newest titles, that doesn't appear. When I muster more patience and strength I'll revisit this challenge.

Second blog post of the day after 3 month hiatus

How to Blog a Book: Write, Publish, and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time by Nina Amir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I am posting my Goodreads review on my blog - my first blog post in 3 months! I'm posting this now, while still working my way through this excellent guide, for the express purpose of "blaming" Nina Amir for this neglect. She says, more than once, to complete all the preparatory work before posting your first post on your blog. Of course she means the blog on which you intend to "blog your book one post at a time," and she differentiates this from a personal blog that roams among various interests of the blogger. Mine has been the latter, but I'm intrigued with the idea of blogging one or more of the books I've intended to write for so many decades. Harry Browne, in his excellent How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World wrote of the "Previous Investment Trap." After putting time and money into a project, you hesitate to stop - even if you should stop. I find it hard to even contemplate scrapping 9 years of work and starting over, and am also too lazy to want to start one or more additional blogs. Thanks to Ms. Amir, I will do one or more of these daunting tasks because I don't want to die with my "music" still in me...



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I have no interest in Twitter

Why I have no interest in Twitter: "It allows for of-the-moment brevity." It's not the limited length that disturbs me, it's the trend away from considered responses to our world, glorifying emotional reaction over reasoned pronouncement.

I admit that the sesquipedalian habit of polysyllabification uses up those 140 characters quickly, but I don't mind that my posts on Facebook often require clicking to "Read more." When it comes to sharing insights, I choose quality over (limited) quantity every time.

Full disclosure: As someone who mostly skims the newspaper I confess to a degree of hypocrisy here...

This diatribe was inspired by this article in The New York Times:

TECHNOLOGY

Twitter Rules Out Long Tweets, Sticking to 140-Character Limit
By MIKE ISAACMARCH 18, 2016

Two months ago, Twitter’s most dedicated fans threw a fit when news of a potentially major change in the service came to light: the 140-character limit, long one of Twitter’s defining characteristics, might be going away.

Keep calm and tweet on, Twitter loyalists. The limit is here to stay.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive of Twitter, assuaged people’s concerns in an interview with the “Today” show on Friday, confirming that the company will keep tweets at 140 characters.

“It’s staying. It’s a good constraint for us,” Mr. Dorsey said in the interview, which took place on the 10th birthday of Twitter. “It allows for of-the-moment brevity.”

Mr. Dorsey’s response — at an economical length of 81 characters — is likely to calm the hard-core base of Twitter supporters who have been vocally resistant to any major changes to the network, home to more than 320 million regular users. For years, those in Twitter’s top ranks have been hesitant to make drastic changes to the service for fear of losing some of those most active users.

But as the company’s user growth has slowed over the last few years, Twitter has faced mounting pressure from Wall Street to attract more people to the network — a feat that has proved much more difficult than the company’s executives have hoped.

Since his return in October to Twitter as its permanent chief executive, Mr. Dorsey has made it clear that many of the things that employees held sacrosanct about Twitter — including tweet length — were no longer untouchable. Employees were given leeway to experiment on different versions of what the product would look like to make it more intuitive and to increase the likelihood of attracting repeat visitors.

According to Mr. Dorsey’s comments, it looks as if the character limit was one characteristic of Twitter he was not willing to drop. But that does not mean the service will not change in other ways.

“We’re changing a lot,’ Mr. Dorsey said. “We’re always going to make Twitter better.”

"The ambulance-chasing media."

"The ambulance-chasing media."
What an incredibly apt phrase!
I just had to share it.
I saw this in a post about the Zero Aggression Project (.org) An initiative of the Downsize DC Foundation.
They are a Libertarian organization that lobbies for the "Read the Bill Act" and other attempts to reign in the size and complexity of government.

A gem - small and worth reading and rereading!

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading Austin Kleon's delightful small book was filled with serendipity and pleasure. Jody and I were on the subway (Boston Green Line) just after leaving The Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. I turned to page 73 in Chapter 4 "Open up your cabinet of curiosities." As I read his description of the Wunderkammern, aka "wonder chamber" or "cabinet of curiosities" in the homes of wealthy, educated Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, I realized the "Isabella" is nothing, if not an immense "cabinet of curiosities." Her will assured that it would be shared, heeding Kleon's advice on that page, "Don't be a hoarder."
As "Harry The Librarian," I love the section later in Chapter 4, "Credit is always due." Kleon points out that "Crediting work in our copy-and-paste age of reblogs and retweets can seem like a futile effort, but it's worth it and it's the right thing to do." This recalls a conversation decades ago with library colleague Carolyn Noah, both lamenting the "borrowing" that was already widespread. "I'm a Librarian, and I believe in footnotes!"
Later, in a section of Chapter 7, "Don't turn into human spam," he counsels "You want hearts, not eyeballs." If you have a web site, you will know what that means. His quote on page 131 from record producer Steve Albini echoes one of my favorite self-improvement writers, Steve Chandler. Kleon tells us "Albini laments how many people waste time and energy trying to make connections instead of getting good at what they do, when 'being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.'"
In 17 Lies That Are Holding You Back and the Truth That Will Set You Free, Steve Chandler tells how he and songwriting partner Fred Knipe "invested a huge amount of our time... to expand our network of connections in the music business. We networked and schmoozed... And if there was ever time left over, we also wrote songs. In the end, however, our biggest financial successes came from people we did not know. In the end, networking meant nothing at all. The schmoozing was an empty waste of time and ego."
I will finish this review where Kleon starts it, with the lesson of Chapter 1: "You don't have to be a genius."
I highly recommend this book to artists, writers, musicians and anyone who would like to indulge their passions and make a life-affirming, gratitude-filled impact on their world.


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EDIT, or Maybe DELETE. Do not hit "Send" right away!

[Spoiler alert] This is the final line in the Boston Globe article below: "Edit thyself. Few of us are so smart or clever that we always get it right the first time." [Second spoiler alert] The following sentence includes a cuss word that I normally would not use, but that is crucial to the quote. In "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life," Anne Lamott encourages us to write "Shitty First Drafts." This "nasty" prose will never see the light of day, but gives the author a starting point - prose to be edited OR DELETED. When you are outraged or indignant, feel free to hurl invective and expletives ON YOUR OWN SCREEN but avoid the "SEND" button until you count to ten (or more) and then edit, or maybe delete!

TOM KEANE
The stupid stuff we say
By Tom Keane | GLOBE COLUMNIST JULY 15, 2014

[Picture caption] Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert excoriated LeBron James’s decision to sign with the Heat. Now, James is back in Cleveland.

IN 2010, Dan Gilbert excoriated basketball player LeBron James’s decision to sign with the Miami Heat, calling it “cowardly,” “narcissistic,” and a “shameful display of selfishness and betrayal.” Gilbert was not merely an aggrieved fan, however. He was the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team James was leaving.

Four years later Gilbert is still the owner, and James is now back. The two profess the past is behind them but still, those are thoughts Gilbert has made clear he wishes he’d never expressed. If Gilbert can take any solace in his boneheadedness, though, it’s that he’s not alone. People who should know better — people of power, wealth, and fame — say the stupidest things. They’re helping to give new life to an old cottage industry: the art of the apology. But better, however, would be never to say these things in the first place.

A few days ago, Malaysian politician Bung Moktar Radin congratulated Germany on its recent World Cup win: “Well done … bravo … long live Hitler,” he tweeted. Last month the US Department of Education posted a photo of actor Kristen Wiig, looking obviously intoxicated in a scene from “Bridesmaids,” with a caption saying, “Help me, I’m poor.” “If this is you,” warned the department, “then you better (apply for financial aid).” Also last month, TV viewers saw horse owner Steve Coburn let loose, saying owners who didn’t enter their horses in the first two races of the Triple Crown had taken “the coward’s way out.”

The month before, a Miami Dolphins running back tweeted “OMG,” “horrible” upon hearing the St. Louis Rams had signed Michael Sam, pro football’s first openly gay player. A few days earlier, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts proclaimed “Sexual assault is always avoidable,” ostensibly to mark May as Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And in January, MSNBC expressed its approval of a cute Cheerios ad featuring a biracial family, saying, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww.”

Predictable outrage, of course, greeted each remark. So did predictable apologies.

After a rebuke from his country’s prime minister, the Malaysian pol somewhat non-grammatically apologized: “I unintentionally said something that hurt d feeling of d ppl in Germany.” “We’re very sorry,” said the US Department of Education, regretting its “insensitivity.” I’m “very ashamed of myself,” a chastened Coburn said two days after ripping into the horse-racing industry.

The Miami Dolphins player, meanwhile, waxed broadly in his well-scripted apology, expressing remorse not only to Sam but to pretty much everyone else as well, promising in the future to “represent the values of the Miami Dolphins organization.”

“Dumb mistake,” said Bay State Governor Deval Patrick, making clear his administration would never blame sexual assault victims.

“I personally apologize,” said the president of MSNBC, terming the anti-conservative gibe “outrageous and unacceptable.”

All well and good, I suppose. But still, the offending comments were made. Some — such as the Department of Education post — were just inadvertent or lame jokes. Others — such as MSNBC’s tweet — were likely more deeply felt. Either way, what once would have been boorish thoughts heard or seen by just a few, are now, with stunning rapidity, spread worldwide as stories, tweets, posts, or emails passed on from one user to the next. That’s what happened to public relations rep Justine Sacco, who last December tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” immediately before boarding an 11-hour flight to Cape Town. By the time she landed, her tweet had become a worldwide obsession and her job had been lost.

Dan Gilbert wrote and posted his screed in the heat of the moment following LeBron’s much anticipated “Decision.” Coburn the horseman faced the cameras emotionally distraught from his loss. Competing for ever more followers and influence, Twitter and other social media encourage users’ desperate efforts to be distinctive or outrageous.

There’s much to like about instantaneous communication, but not, perhaps, about thoughts instantly expressed. An old piece of advice runs through my head every time I see these now-familiar routines of offending statements and heartfelt apologies: Sleep on it. That notion runs counter to the immediate-response ethos of social media, but it’s worth reviving. Edit thyself. Few of us are so smart or clever that we always get it right the first time.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.

Loving My Own Company - Arrogance or Serenity?

Is it arrogance or serenity and gratitude that lead me to say "Preposterous!"? The article claims that "Eleven separate experiments showed that we find our own thoughts painfully dull."

I have always found myself to be good company, and my train of thoughts (even "Monkey Mind") to be fascinating. Is it because as a Gemini I am never truly alone?

Walking in stores, or on the street, many seem allergic to just being, without "communicating." Their (side of the) conversation seems mind-numbingly dull, but they seem to be the majority.

I would be interested in hearing how you (my reader) react to this report from yesterday's Boston Globe. There are links in the article to related stories about meditation and health.

People prefer electric shocks to time alone with thoughts
By Carolyn Y. Johnson | GLOBE STAFF | JULY 03, 2014

In the rush of everyday life, many people say they crave a moment of solitude, but a startling new study finds that people don’t really enjoy spending even 10 minutes alone with their thoughts.

In fact, we find our own musings so unsatisfying that, in research done at the University of Virginia, many people chose to administer painful electric shocks to themselves rather than sit in quiet contemplation, researchers from that university and Harvard reported Thursday.

“I was surprised that people find themselves such bad company,” said Jonathan Schooler, a psychology professor from the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the research. “It seems that the average person doesn’t seem to be capable of generating a sufficiently interesting train of thought to prevent them from being miserable with themselves.”

The study, published in the journal Science, adds a perplexing result to the field of mind-wandering. Eleven separate experiments showed that we find our own thoughts painfully dull.

The researchers first tried giving participants in a psychology laboratory anywhere from 6 to 15 minutes alone to think. They weren’t allowed to fall asleep, and they weren’t allowed to check their cellphones. Overall, people rated this idle time as not very enjoyable — a 5 on a scale of 0 to 9.

The researchers wondered whether the artificial laboratory environment was the problem and instead gave people the same task in the comfort of their own homes. Their enjoyment was even lower at home than in the laboratory. Nearly a third of people admitted they cheated by checking their phones or listening to music.

Then, the researchers either allowed people to sit alone and think, or do an activity such as reading a book or using the Internet — although they weren’t allowed to communicate with others. The people doing activities that distracted them from their own thoughts were much happier.

Timothy Wilson, a University of Virginia psychology professor who led the work, was discussing the weird results in the living room of his Harvard collaborator, psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, and they began brainstorming another experiment. If people found it so unpleasant to be alone with their thoughts, what lengths might they go to in order to escape themselves?

To answer this question, they started by exposing volunteers to positive and negative stimuli, including beautiful photographs and mildly painful electric shocks. They asked the people how much they would pay to avoid the shock experience if they had $5 to spend. Then, the researchers told the 55 participants to sit in a room and think for 15 minutes. If they wanted, they also had the option to shock themselves by pressing a button, feeling a jolt resembling a severe static shock on their ankle.

“I have to tell you, with my other co-authors, there was a lot of debate: ‘Why are we going to do this? No one is going to shock themselves,’?” Wilson said.

To their surprise, of the 42 people who said they would pay to avoid the shock, two-thirds of men chose to shock themselves, and a quarter of women did. One person pressed the button 190 times.

The researchers were stunned. People were choosing an unpleasant sensation instead of freely cogitating on whatever they wanted.

Despite a fair amount of searching, researchers did not find a single subset of people for whom ruminating on their own was clearly enjoyable.

One of the experiments recruited people ranging from 18 to 77 years old from a church and a farmer’s market. Regardless of age, education, income, gender, or smartphone or social media use, people basically found being alone with themselves not very fun and kind of boring.

That sheds new light on previous mind-wandering studies, such as one by Harvard researchers in 2010 that showed people were not happy when their attention wandered. It seemed reasonable to think that they were less happy because the distraction was inconvenient.

“We’re trying to get our tax returns done, but our minds keep drifting away to an upcoming vacation, and as a result, we spend the whole weekend reading and re-reading the stupid 1040 form,” Harvard’s Gilbert, a co-author of the new paper, wrote in an e-mail. “Well, if that’s true, then mind-wandering should be an annoyance when we’re trying to get something else done, but it should be a delight when we have nothing else to do.”

Quite the opposite, the new study suggests.

So, are we just kidding ourselves when we say we love spending time alone with our own thoughts?

Wilson wants to study the phenomenon further; he wonders whether people who regularly meditate will rate the experience differently. Schooler said the study suggests that steps could be taken to help people enjoy spending time alone.

But maybe there’s a larger message, too, about the handwringing that routinely happens about the attention-consuming devices that have become almost like an extra digital limb. Maybe the problem isn’t our smartphones; the problem is human nature. We are in a mutually enabling relationship with technology.

“I think this could be why, for many of us, external activities are so appealing, even at the level of the ubiquitous cellphone that so many of us keep consulting,” Wilson said. “The mind is so prone to want to engage with the world, it will take any opportunity to do so.”

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @carolynyjohnson.

Your Own Cone of Silence

In his reviews of equipment and software, Hiawatha Bray often reveals easily overlooked implications and issues. He never says outright, "Privacy is such a sweet, quaint and obsolete illusion" but raises questions. There is a reason I make it a point to only share good news that I would be happy to have seen by anyone. Bray says the popular-with-youth "Snapchat, a photo-sharing app... erases each picture after it is viewed. While computer forensics experts with special software might be able to retrieve the photos, for the average user, they are gone." Don't you think today's "special software" used by computer forensics experts, will be in the hands of "the average user" in the blink of a digital eye? Think before you hit "Send!"

Below is the text of the entire article. If you click here, you can see it on the Boston Globe website with a three-minute video of Mr. Bray sharing related information.

tech lab
When our messages vanish, privacy gets a better chance
Hiawatha Bray; Globe Staff; February 27, 2014
The text message from my sister in New York was innocent enough, but it was nobody else’s business. I won’t repeat it here. Indeed, I can’t; it vanished a minute after I read it.
Rosemary and I were using Telegram, an instant-messaging service conceived by a couple of Russians and based in Berlin. Telegram features a “secret chat” setting that automatically destroys your text messages, whether on your phone, or your friend’s.
Suddenly, people are rediscovering the value of privacy. You remember privacy, right? We were quite fond of it until the Internet came along. Then we started handing our personal data to anybody who promised us free e-mail service.
Log onto Google, and every keystroke and mouse click gets recorded and analyzed, in a bid to sell us stuff. Place a phone call and the time, the place, and the number you’re calling are likely being filed away inside a giant database at the National Security Agency.
At last, millions of us are having second thoughts and would like some of our privacy back.

Are these apps as secure as they claim? The developers certainly make all the right noises.
Telegram aims to meet this need with its vanishing chat feature, and it’s got lots of company. There’s also Confide, which only displays incoming texts when you touch the words on the screen, and Wickr, a cool app with a “Mission: Impossible” trick — your messages can self-destruct after 10 seconds.
Privacy lovers were alarmed last week when Facebook agreed to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp, an instant-messaging program with 465 million users. WhatsApp’s privacy policy is pretty good, and Facebook says it won’t make any changes, but many WhatsApp users were skeptical, and began looking elsewhere for security.
Facebook, which mines gold from the personal data of 1 billion users, is famously willing to change its privacy policies in search of a few more dollars. The company settled a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission that it deceived consumers about how their personal data was being shared.
So it’s no surprise that demand for ultra-private alternatives to WhatsApp is surging. On Monday, Telegram, which is free, said it had picked up 8 million new users in the days after Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp.
Telegram, along with similar apps like Wickr and Confide, may be tapping into a growing global distaste for the constant monitoring of our digital lives.
But are these apps as secure as they claim?
The developers certainly make all the right noises. Indeed, they are so confident of how bulletproof their systems are they dare hackers to break in. Telegram, for example, publishes an encrypted Telegram message every day and promises $200,000 to the first hacker to decode it. Wickr offers a $100,000 prize to successful hackers.
Still, no software can ever be considered absolutely secure. For instance, one hacker got $100,000 from Telegram for finding a serious software flaw (though he didn’t manage to decode the message).
There’s another problem with these privacy apps — getting your friends to use them. Despite the rising popularity of ultra-private messengers, still relatively few people rely on them. Also, the apps are not compatible with one another. A Telegram user can’t send a message to a Wickr user, and so on.
Still, any one of these apps could catch on with remarkable speed. Less than three years ago, two Stanford University students developed Snapchat, a photo-sharing app that erases each picture after it is viewed. While computer forensics experts with special software might be able to retrieve the photos, for the average user, they are gone. It sounded nuts at the time. But now, 77 percent of the nation’s college students use Snapchat at least once a day.
Snapchat proved that people are hungry for truly private digital communications, and the booming popularity of Telegram shows they want privacy for their text messages as well as photos.
Telegram has a super-secret mode in which the sender switches on a self-destruct timer that will delete the entire contents of a message after a fixed time — a week, a day, or in as little as 2 seconds.
Although Telegram can protect against government or corporate snoops, it’s not much help against your friends: a smartphone’s screenshot feature can make copies of Telegram messages, or you could use a different phone to shoot a photo of the screen. So this app is best used with people you fully trust.
A much simpler secret messenger, Confide, is designed to be screenshot-proof. A free app available only for Apple Inc. iOS devices, Confide delivers text messages that look like a declassified CIA file with the words blacked out — in this case, every word. To see a word, stroke the blacked out portion with your finger. Lift your finger and the word disappears.
This clumsy reading method prevents a recipient from taking a screenshot of the message. If he even tries, the sender is notified. And when a recipient closes the Confide message, it disappears forever.
Wickr, also free, offers a lot more features than Confide. You can transmit photos, videos, and audio as well as text; the Apple version can also exchange PDF documents. It links to services such as Dropbox, letting you easily forward files to a friend. It even has a feature that scours your phone’s flash memory to ensure that deleted files are really deleted.
A simple fingertip control lets you decide how long your message will survive: as long as five days, or have it self-destruct 15 seconds after it’s opened. And while you can use the phone’s screenshot function to capture incoming texts, Wickr makes it tough to copy photos, by using the same trick as Snapchat. You must touch an on-screen icon to display a picture, making it very difficult to activate the screenshot command at the same time.
But if it’s absolute privacy you are after, consider going back in time — to good old-fashioned snail mail delivered to an anonymous post office box. And if you must have technology, maybe you can take a page from Maxwell Smart from the old TV spy show “Get Smart” and demand your own Cone of Silence.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.

Librarian Among the Poets

This morning's Globe South section of The Boston Globe has a wonderful article that I want to share, along with the comments I put on my Facebook page (where it is easier to "share" the entire article with a couple of clicks, but whence I am still unable to embed my post here, so I'm doing it manually in several steps.) The article is "Poets step up to the mike at Plymouth Center for the Arts" by Robert Knox. I will paste the text of the article below, after sharing the thoughts and memories it evoked in me.
Thanks to Robert Knox for dedicating so much "ink" to these wonderful poets and their performances. In 2004 I became Executive Director of the Brockton Public Library. Organizers Phil Hasouris and the late Frank Miller asked if I would "allow" the Brockton Library Poetry Series, which moved to the library the previous year, to continue. "Allow it? I'll promote it!" We collaborated with Arnie Danielson to turn this loose “organization" into the non-profit corporation, the Greater Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts, which continued the monthly series for seven years. It moved to the Fuller Craft Museum after I left the library. (I pleaded for my only legacy to be continued nurturing of this magnificent partnership, to no avail.) I had the opportunity to listen to, and discuss their work with, Ryk McIntyre (in the photo) Mike Amado (photo in body of the article) Jack Scully who keeps the Plymouth series going in memory of Mike, Nancy Brady Cunningham, who edited Mike's last book with Jack, and so many others. I have a shelf full of books autographed "To Harry The Librarian" and had the honor of interviewing many world class poets for video. My interview with United States Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is on YouTube. As Maxine Kumin says of contemporary poetry, "Prepare to be astonished!"
Poets step up to the mike at Plymouth Center for the Arts
By Robert Knox | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT | JANUARY 09, 2014
The monthly poetry reading series at the Plymouth Center for the Arts was created six years ago by a Plymouth poet with only a short time to live and a Boston poet who befriended him, to create a local opportunity for poets to share their work and network. “There was nothing going on in the Plymouth area” for poets, said Jack Scully, who founded the series with Mike Amado, the late Plymouth resident who wrote poems about the contemporary social and political climate and about his own medical journey. They approached the Plymouth Center for the Arts, the nonprofit arts organization housed in a former town library in Plymouth Center, and proposed the reading series, titled “Poetry: The Art of Words.” Shortly after they got it off the ground, Scully said, “Mike knew he was on the way out.” He died five years ago this month, at age 33. Scully, who has since retired from his job with the state, promised he would keep the open mike series going. A lifetime resident of Plymouth, Amado was diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease in his early teens. Also a musician, a drummer, he graduated from Plymouth North High School and attended Quincy Community College in Plymouth, although his education was interrupted by his medical condition. Amado published several books of poetry with small publishers. Scully edited his last book (with Nancy Brady Cunningham), “The Book of Arrows,” and had it published. According to the Greater Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts, which runs a reading series Amado participated in, he wrote “lyrical, rhythm-based” poems including medically inspired poems such as “Just Waiting.” That poem begins: “Waiting for the Doctor/ Waiting for the pills/ Waiting for the scalpel/ Waiting to heal/ Waiting for treatment to begin/ Waiting for treatment to end/ Waiting to feel better/ Waiting to feel worse.”

“The Art of Words” readings begin with acoustic music, then two featured readers before opening the microphone up to whoever else has brought something to read that day. Local participants in the readings include Plymouth’s Charles Harper, who has published three books of poems, including “Gratitude,” a book of meditations each using a term for “gratitude” or “thank you” in a different tongue. “It seems that our species has an urgent and universal need to say ‘thank you’ to that Mystery from whom we come,” he writes in the book’s preface. Another reader, Elizabeth Hanson of Plymouth, has published poems in the anthology of The Bagel Bards, a long-established Cambridge poetry group, and by Ibbetson Street, a long-established Boston poetry publisher. Ryk McIntyre of Providence, a featured reader in Sunday’s reading, calls himself a “performance poet.” “Performance poets get up and perform,” McIntyre said. “Some people have told me I come across as a combination of Robin Williams and Lewis Black. . . . I’m a grumpy humanist.” He is also a four-time National Poetry Slam team member and a cohost of The Cantab poetry readings in Cambridge. The world of “poetry slams” takes poetry out of the academy and puts it on the live stage where participants “perform” and compete before judges for numerical scores. It’s akin to theater and standup comedy “couched in Olympic-style scoring,” McIntyre said. “The judges are chosen at random from the audience.” The idea of the slam is to attract people “who normally wouldn’t be caught dead at a poetry reading,” McIntyre said. Slam venues in the Boston area include the Cantab Lounge and the Lizard Lounge, both in Cambridge. McIntyre participated in the Providence Slam and earned his way onto the national poetry slam team. His performance poetry has also led to national tour dates. He performed as an opening act for musician Leon Redbone and for poet and National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu and took part in the Lollapalooza music festival. He has also performed at the New School in New York City and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and Strand Theater. He recently published his first complete book of poems, titled “After Everything Burns,” consisting of poems written in the last year and a half when, McIntyre said, his second marriage fell apart. “Doors are the ghosts of conversations,” he writes in the title poem, “framed with slamming; this house was wall-papered in shouts.” Sunday’s reading also features Boston poet and visual artist Elizabeth Quinlan, author of “Promise Supermarket” (published by Ibbetson Street Press). She is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and a member of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences. Quinlan is currently working on a collection of poems based on the life of Maud Cuney-Hare (1874-1936), an eminent scholar of African-American music, pianist, and composer. Scully said the meeting area in the Plymouth Center for the Arts seats about 50, and the open mike readings draw a diverse crowd with readers ages 12 to 81. Typically, about 15 to 20 people step up to the mike. Along with the music at the beginning, the gathering offers refreshments and an opportunity for poets to mingle and talk about what they’re up to. Encouraging poets through networking opportunities, Scully said, is one of the reasons the series has received a grant from the Plymouth Cultural Council.

To emBEd or not to emBEd.

This morning I posted on my Facebook page, "Frustrated by Facebook. I did a bunch of research last night on how to "embed" one of my public posts into my blog or web site. FB help and some independent blog experts say the drop down on the right should include an option to embed the post but it is not in my menu. Anybody have a clue about this?." Later I added, " I just took a screen shot of this post with the drop-down (downward pointing arrow at top right of the post) open to show that the Embed option is not present there. I submitted it to the FB Help/report a bug people. They say they don't reply to all such messages, so if any of you know a fix for this I would appreciate hearing about it." My daughter commented, " I think it only applies to Pages, not people's profiles (a page is something like for a business, club, etc.)" to which I replied, " you may be right, although the Help pages and blog posts I saw made it sound like it would work for us with Profiles, not just Pages. I hope the FB people will get back to me on this. I find myself posting here so much more often than on my blog, that it would be good to at least put some content on my blogger site (now accessible by the url I purchased: harrythelibrarian.com) more frequently."
All of this relates to why I may have to continue manually copying and pasting my Facebook posts here, or vice versa.

My "New" Web Site - still here but with easier access!

On December 21, 2007, I started this Blog, writing, "I've been HarryTheLibrarian at aol dot com, then at att dot net, and in the search for speed, now at comcast dot net. I maintained a Geocities site from 1996, and a "commercial" website (the quotes because the only commerce so far has been to pay the hosting fees) since 2000. It's about time I joined the millions smart enough to recognize a better way, and entered the blogosphere. I hope you will welcome me, as I welcome you to my new 'place.'"
The references are to my old email addresses and now "HTL" at comcast is also obsolete. I was unable to get use of "HarryTheLibrarian at gmail.com," possibly because the handle was already in use, maybe even because of me using it for this blog. I grabbed HarryIIITheLibrarian@gmail.com as the next best email address just to have one somewhat consistent with the old ones, but it's a bit awkward, so I also notified people that the easier-to-type HRogerWill@gmail.com will also reach me.
The BIG NEWS, at least for me, is that thanks to a wonderfully helpful blog post by Dana at Wonder Forest, I purchased the url HarryTheLibrarian.com so now I "own" my own identity, and you don't have to type .blogspot.com at the end of harrythelibrarian. I have the advantage of having "a real web site" while enjoying all the advantages of hosting on Blogger.
I am dismayed when I see how infrequently I have been posting here, but now that this is really "my space" I will be a lot more faithful. I guess I had better share this information with my Facebook friends, as I have been a lot more regular there (although never "daily") than here.
Happy New Year!

Ouch! The Absentee Author

Painful words to discover as I log in on August 9th: "last published on May 28, 2013." You'd think a retired guy would have little to do save write and public blog posts. In order to log in I had to update my account information - Jody and I have been preparing to move from Brockton to North Oxford for the last couple of months. I've made a fair amount of Facebook posts and attending to a lot of my interests, but have totally neglected my blog. By the end of this month I expect things to be a bit more orderly and then we'll see if I can't become a "regular."