Oh, Have I Got A Lot to Tell YOU...

Seriously Ready to Burst
Gotta do it. Wanna do it. Prolly shouldn't do it, but The Boy Who Cried ‘BLOG’ is back, making promises again — well, maybe not promise promises, but promises of intent, leave us say. I’m planning to crank up the ‘ol personal blog jalopy again real soon and against my better judgment I once again feel compelled to tell you about it instead of just doing it and keeping my big yap shut. It’s just that I’m so freaking excited about getting back to my first love that I simply can’t not talk a little bit about it with you first.

I have been all kinds ‘a busy this summer. Between my new(ish) job (which I began in January) and my daughter Amy's impending nuptials in just less than two weeks (August 29th) — and all the commensurate madness that accompanies such an event — needless to say, I haven’t had much time to think, let alone keep up two blogs.

And yeah, I’ll confess, I have been writing fairly consistently on my hockey blog, what with the continuous activity of the Nashville Predators’ deepest run in the Stanley Cup Playoffs in their history this past spring, followed by the surprisingly contentious re-signing of star defenseman, Shea Weber, there’s been a lot of compelling goings-on in that part of my life, and I’ve had to choose one blog over the other. Wish it didn’t have to be that way; perhaps it won’t always be; however I’m not making any promises about that right now.

On the other hand, I AM promising to myself and to you, that my backlog of AYBABTU posts will be seen to here in the next few weeks, and I am SO looking forward to it, I cannot express how much.

First on the docket will be a return to the original subject matter of this blog, a concert/lifestyle review on my recent experience seeing one of my all-time fave bands, the recently re-united, Toad The Wet Sprocket. Glen Phillips and the boys played before a sold-out Mercy Lounge crowd here in Nashville last Saturday night and it was magical! This will be my first (full-fledged) multimedia review, as I have both audio and video content to share. That should be coming sometime later this week.

Next, and possibly before, depending on how long the Toad story takes, will be the first in about a half-dozen partially written-but-never-finished posts from earlier this year and during my full-time work hiatus of 2010. Most of these stories are very close to completion but I really don’t know exactly how long they’ll each take to finish; so let’s just tease them as ‘coming soon.’

The story topics will range from:

• My time spent in a very exclusive entertainment industry focus group that you probably hear references to on a weekly basis
  
• Thoughts on the extremely disturbing way the radio industry works today, and how it’s changed in recent years
  
• How blogging saved my life
  
• Why the ‘Evil Empire’ is alive and well right here in the state of Tennessee
  
• My thoughts on the end of a TeeVee institution

And there are a few others I’m still toying with that may or may not see the light of day. Some may be even too nerdy for me to stomach seeing in print. We’ll see.

Nonetheless, I wanted to commit myself here online to getting these stories finished and out, at least in part before Amy’s big day, ‘cuz I KNOW I’ll be writing about THAT!

So anyway, keep your eyes peeled for the next few days. I’m hopeful this will be the jump-start I need to get back on an at least one-post-per-week schedule. Wish me (and my schedule) luck.

Type at’cha soon.


*     *     *     *     *


finis

A Place Called Blogsville (Epilogue)

Urban Renewal?
I was a year and a half behind the onset of Twitter before becoming truly involved with it in July of 2008, subsequently becoming a daily user some four months later.

In so doing, I also succumbed to the urge to join the masses of info-oriented, ‘useful’ bloggers out there whose content was shiny, new, ‘social media savvy’ and would draw advertisers to my site so that I could ‘monetize’ and make my blog an actual, viable income-producer. I mean look around — that’s the way it’s done these days.

My initial push to accomplish this was a complete flop. At the end of 2008, still buzzing from my newly acquired Twitter-inspired game plan, I mapped it all out, worked on a new template for weeks; I even wrote a few re-introductory posts for those outside the Neighborhood. I went so far even as to announce the 'rebirth of my blog, both in a post that was soon thereafter pulled, and on Twitter, only to back out when I realized I really didn't know what the hell I was doing it for.

Then the recession smacked me in the chops, big time. Right after the Holidays, The Company I worked for announced what would be the first of two workforce reductions in 2009. I was spared from the first one that came down in January, and then fully engaged myself in the subsequent yearlong scramble to try and save my ass from the second, later that November. On the second count I was obviously unsuccessful.

Now a year later and a half later, with nothing left to lose, I’m ready to try again and see just how good this blog can be.

As far as monetization goes, I’ve recently made a few small in-roads in that regard, but have vowed to myself to do it right. Fortunately I’ve become involved with a wonderful new organization of folks who are dedicated to teaching blog marketing techniques that are effective without being obnoxious. It’s called The Third Tribe and if you’re curious you can check them out here or anytime from the Third Tribe badge located in the blog’s right-hand sidebar. It’s pretty cool stuff, really, especially for someone like me who has always been repulsed by traditional Internet marketing methods.

But even if I do end up going with a few affiliate links here and there, there’s no way it will ever become my main focus — that’s not what AYBABTU has ever been about. Like I said earlier, I have struggled mightily with the idea of making my blog a more topically-based destination, and will always seek to exercise brevity in any way I can, but not at the expense of being who I am.

I do realize that my long-windedness can be a handicap to gaining and keeping new readers. But then I always have to return to the Hamletian maxim of, “to thine ownself be true.”

I can publicize this blog. I can monetize this blog. If the readers come, they come; if they stay, they stay. However I cannot be someone I am not, nor can I write like someone I am not — well, I probably could, but why? To what end?

I do consider this the start of a renewal of sorts, but I’ll just have to take it day by day and see what the future brings. I hope you’ll feel inclined to tag along.

But Just For Fun…
As I write this, it has now been exactly 30 days since the opening segment of this series was posted — not that taking a month to write five posts is such a rarity me, but this time it had a lot more to do with contemplation than procrastination.

Part of what has taken me so long to get back to this series has been in deciding how to end it (which is what I should have done before I even began the thing...but I digress...again). It took awhile for me to resolve the issues surrounding that which drove me to write it in the first place.

But I think I’ve got it now.

You see, this was more than simply a trip down memory lane. I’ve come up with a much more practical application for this piece — if I can manage to pull it off.

I’m getting the band back together.

I’ve recently spoken to a couple of my ol’ Blogsville neighbors on the phone, and it was absolutely fabulous. These two, I hadn’t had any significant communication with — quite literally — for years. Like many others, they’ve been around, just not out on the front lines like they were years ago. Some of my other former neighbors have become active on Facebook in recent years, a few more on Twitter; some have even remained active in their original blogs, although often with a largely different readership and/or social group than before.

As for my hesitation in wrapping up the series, I really didn’t like the direction it was going when I first began writing it. It was becoming a decidedly negative lamentation of my life over the past 3-4 years, which while true, was certainly not of a hue that I wanted to paint what was always intended to be a celebration of Blogsville — a somewhat melancholy celebration to be sure — but a celebration all the same.

I may use the 1100+ words I’ve now deleted from this post at another time, in a more suitable context. But for now, I’d much rather turn that frown upside down and end this thing on a positive note. But whether it indeed ends up being positive will ultimately be determined by you.

When remarking earlier about ‘TJ’s Place’ I noted that one of the things I miss the most about our old neighborhood were the comment sessions; that was where the community was generated. I would absolutely love it if we could all come together again — even if just this once — and experience a ‘comments party’ like we did in the old days.

My dear friends, LucidKim and Restless Angel have already chimed in. I’m hoping (provided all the old email addresses I have for everyone still work) to alert a number of our other former Blogsville neighbors as to this series’ existence and invite them back to comment as well.

But to make it really special, I would request that each of you who chooses to say hello, will take the time to spin together a few sentences, telling us all of what you’ve been up to, and hopefully, an email address or other contact information, blog or Twitter username, so that we might have an opportunity to continue the conversation elsewhere down the line.

I know it’s kinda nervy of me to expect that anyone would even want to do this, but geeze louise, you guys, do you not realize what a wonderful thing we all had together? It could be that way again, at least for a little while.

I hope you know how much affection I still hold for you all, and how happy it would make me to hear from you again.

So then, Mike? Lovisa? Jack? El Sid? Inanna? ESC? Esther? CCC? Queenie? Gooch? Jennifer? Kenju? Leese? NoMilk? Aimee? Victoria? Melinama? Anyone-else-I-can’t-think-of-off-the-top-of-my-head-right-now?

Whadaya say?

And to those of you whom I may be forgetting, as well as those who only know me from Twitter or elsewhere, thank you for being here too! Please say hello and join in the fun!

Lastly, but not leastly…
As if this series hasn’t taken enough twists and turns, there’s still one more.

As often happens to me, when I begin writing, sometimes things end up growing and expanding and going off in different directions than those in which I first intended.

What was originally supposed to be a few paragraphs in the series prologue sorta took off and assumed a life of its own shortly after I began writing. I let the idea play out, circled back and decided to include what had become two full posts as an addendum instead. What began as the historical backbone for the series, turned into a standalone biographical sketch of Pyra Labs, the original creators of Blogger.com.

It’s a separate story unto itself, but it still works within the context of the series. It’s a look back on the history of Blogger.com from its pre-Google inception, which is actually when I first became involved with the service as a member of a multi-author blog group of online friends. We used ‘The Blog,’ for a lack of a better term, as a message board.

Back then I didn’t have a clue as to whom Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan were, and neither did much of the web world. But as the co-founders of Blogger — the one that started it all — it certainly does now.

In recent years, Williams has continued to push the envelope with his ‘other’ little social media project, along with Biz Stone, called Twitter.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading this account of a great moment in web history as much as I did in researching and writing it.


Next: Addendum (Part I): Ev and Meg’s Excellent Adventure

A Place Called Blogsville (Part IV)

AJ 2.0
Trends come and trends go; sometimes it’s easy to forget that. For example, back when my daughter Amy was in middle school, one of the many fashion trends of the mid-90s was the revival of the styles from the 1970s ― a time that I know quite well.

So enamored was Amy with an iconic man-made fabric of the era that was now once again wildly popular, she one day exuberantly declared to her mother and me, “Polyester will NEVER go out of style!”

Heh, we’ve NEVER let her live THAT one down…

But to be fair, haven’t each of us fallen victim to that same sort of short-sightedness at one time or another? Haven’t we all latched onto something new that we thought was “life-changing,” or was the next-big-thing-that-we-can’t-live-without; confidently asserting to anyone listening that nothing would ever be the same; that we would forever be changed by that wonderful new paradigmatic epiphany?

I’ve decided that to a large degree, personal blogging was that way for a lot of folks heading into the mid-2000s — at least that seemed the case in our Blogsville neighborhood.

In our early years together it was indeed life-changing, much in the same way that chatting was for people in the mid-1990s; a real phenomenon, and very important for a time. But in the end, it was simply another ‘next big thing’ and once it ceased to maintain that fashionable status, people began losing interest.

Don’t believe me? How much have you heard about MySpace lately?

However it’s unfair to totally place the two in the same boat, particularly given the somewhat well-deserved, seedy reputation that internet chat rooms subsequently earned as a breeding ground for cybersex and predatory behavior. Blogging on the other hand has always been on a much different level; it obviously requires a greater, more honest commitment, both emotionally and practically. It’s hard work, and is not an undertaking for the weak-willed — that is, the weak-willed who are also without conscience.

That being said, there are times when I really have to search my own motivations as to why I always return to personal blogging no matter how long my absence — almost as if my life depended on it. I’m pretty sure a lot of my former Blogsville neighbors have thought about it in a similar vein at one time or another. However in the end, not everyone has the time or perhaps the amount of self-loathing of someone like me to goad them into continually getting back up on that freakin’ horse.

I am now convinced that I must write; I am enslaved to the notion. Why? Who the hell knows? But one thing is for sure, when I got bit by this bug six years ago, it actually did change everything for me. Trouble is, the other things in my life that had also changed made it all the more daunting for me to keep up.

A Rude Awakening
With the popularization of the ‘Web 2.0’ movement, which I began hearing about sometime around 2006 (but which had actually been in the process of implementation since the late 90s), I knew I was out of step and wasn’t ready to deal with it.

The constructs of the modern, social web took a quantum leap forward on a number of fronts, from around the time I began blogging in 2004 to just beyond the mid-decade mark; and quite frankly, I was oblivious to it all.

Suddenly it seemed my long-winded, narrative style had become less and less relevant to the now-assumed reality of daily, social information-based posting. Most of the successful blogs I was seeing were no longer static, personal essays, but living, breathing, social organisms, teeming with useful information and comment interaction; cross-linked and shared via Delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us), Twitter, and Facebook. It all seemed to happen at once for me; but in reality, while the changes did come about quickly, they were over a much longer period — I just hadn’t been paying attention.

Looking back on it now, I was stuck in somewhat of a feedback loop. Lots was going on in my head, and even more in my life; I just couldn’t seem to get it all out of myself with any semblance of the consistency I had in the beginning, when the stories of my life and family seemed to flow out of me in a never-ending stream of content.

Besides, what was going on in my life at that time wasn’t stuff I really wanted to celebrate, as had been the motivation for my previous work. I second-guessed nearly everything I wrote, becoming tentative, overly self-conscious, and feeling like a hypocrite for letting it all ‘get to me.’

As I stagnated, it seemed as though the neighborhood was withering as well. Most seemed to begin making the same transition away from daily or even weekly blogging, and moving more toward social networks like Facebook and later, to a lesser degree, Twitter; where we slowly found each other and began re-asserting ties that had linked us previously in Blogsville.

And while I certainly can’t speak for anyone else’s opinion, I think the new landscape is certainly a beautiful one in its own way, but it’s just not the same kind of community we had before.

Having been part of the blogging’s inital wave as a mass medium — an early-adopter even though ‘weblogging’ had been around some ten years previously — there was a certain level of pride one felt in being ahead of the curve.

In 2004, blogging was still relatively unknown amongst the general populace; something that seemed ‘weird’ to the average Joe. It was far from the now-widely recognized medium it has become.

However it all seemed to change so quickly, and by 2006, my once-enviable ‘informed’ position had turned on me — or was it I whom had turned away from IT? I found myself in a position similar, social media-wise, to the one I was currently embroiled in professionally, having sailed through the first half of the 2000s as a web designer who didn’t know crap about something as game-changing as CSS, and was now in a mad scramble to step it up or lose my relevance — even my job.

As a result of both my sudden shift in motivation to become current with modern web technology, and the paralysis of my frustration with the changes in the blogging landscape, my blog post production — as well as a heapin’ helpin’ of my perceived personal relevance — all but dried up.

Now, nearly three years later I’m attempting to kick off that creeping malaise. I have already hit rock bottom professionally, having been laid off from my employer of nearly 12-years last November. And even though I did manage to bring my sagging web-tech skill-set up to standards over the last couple of years, the fact that my job performance was allegedly a non- factor in my demise doesn’t provide me a whole lot of solace. It’s more than a little unsettling to go from being indispensable for years, to suddenly finding yourself thrust back into the job market, entering your mid-fifties; competing for jobs in an industry inherently dominated by twenty-and-thirtysomethings.

Sometimes changing with the times is a personal option; for me, right now, it most certainly is not. I’m in a ‘roll-or-BE-rolled’ position for the first time in my professional life.

As to the extent to which I can do anything about the perception of my age as I seek new employment, only the market knows for sure. On the other hand, the blog world, for the most part, is ageless — and thanks to genetics and personality, I’ve never looked or acted my age.

As a blogger I have begun to embrace the change of the now-dated ‘Web 2.0’ moniker — albeit sometimes kicking and screaming — and I have also begun seeking ways to regain my relevance in this continually evolving medium.

Twitter was the biggest step for me, although it has in some ways been somewhat counterproductive to blogging. As a self-described micro-blogging platform, tweeting not only relieves me of the need to express myself via daily posting, but also of the associated guilt when I fail to blog. And while the association of any kind of guilt with personal blogging may seem an absurd notion to most, that’s just me; I know it’s the way I am and I’m tired of beating myself up for it or trying to change my stripes. I will always feel the need to write, and the obligation to myself of the same.

However, as fantastic a conversation vehicle Tweeting is, I need to be able to go deeper. That, I now know, will never change.

I’ll never abandon this house. No matter the condition of the neighborhood or the number of its residents, Blogsville will always be my home. I may spend some time in other abodes, such as my weekend winter cottage, but this is the place I will always come back to.


Next: Urban Renewal?

A Place Called Blogsville (Part III)

The Neighborhood
It’s amazing to me how slow the first half of the recently-completed first decade of the new millennium seemed to pass, versus the last five years, which appear to have evaporated right before my eyes.

Forever ensconced in the midst of that decade will be the three-year period between 2004 and 2006, when I discovered blogging and The Neighborhood was in full swing.

The ‘Hood was in a town we called Blogsville, in a country known as Blogger.com.

We all moved in at about the same time, discovering each other en masse; visiting each other often, attending each other’s parties, and generally, having the time of our lives together.

That strip club I mentioned earlier? There was nothing salacious or untoward going on there; just a bunch of wonderful stories from a guy who managed a strip joint in Florida.

Life at TJ’s Place was one of Blogger’s most popular sites of 2004, and as such was constantly listed on the homepage’s ‘Blogs of Note’ section. Naturally, newbies to Blogsville would visit to see what was going on, and subsequently, a lot of us ‘met’ each other there in the blog’s comments section.

Kevin, the blog’s author was an incredible writer. Despite what you might think, his stories were extraordinarily human in focus and compelling beyond belief. His blog served as the focal point of our neighborhood.

TJ’s was the ‘Motherblog,’ the first of what I liked to refer to as one of the ‘party blogs.’ Those were the places you could always count on finding a ‘live commenting’ gathering in progress on most nights. It was fun. We learned a lot about each other, were introduced to their blogs, and many of the friendships sparked — both ‘cyber’ and ‘real-life’ — have lasted to this day.

It was all so new; so different; so cool. We grew close; very close — some of us, too close.

We all told our stories, shared our lives, revealed our secrets, and listened while others did the same.

There were disagreements, friendly spats, and all-out wars. There was friendship and there were breakups. There was laughter and there were arguments. But much more; there was encouragement; substantiation and confirmation; hope and belief in one other — and thereby, ourselves.

But just as happens in those of brick & mortar, our online community’s resident’s life-circumstances changed; and unfortunately, after only a few months, our little Blogsville neighborhood began to collapse almost as quickly as it had formed.

Kevin, by his own admission, ‘burned out’ by August 2004. Another popular blog, The Abysmal Life of Crayon, also checked out that month. Over the next 2-3 years, more and more folks were showing up less and less.

Some left the neighborhood altogether; others became all but inactive in the group conversation; some just ran out of things to say, or refrained from being so open as to reveal information that might be passed on to outsiders.

In recent years, the neighborhood has almost ceased to exist. Oh people still own the houses, but they’re rarely home. They don’t come out on the front lawn to talk nearly as often as they once did in the old days; they pretty much keep to themselves, occasionally raising the window to throw out a few thoughts from time to time, but seldom are there others around to listen.

The neighborhood has indeed coalesced; those who have remained active have their individual friends that they hang out with, but the block parties are no more.

Just like Real Life?
It’s amazing how closely the dynamics of my old virtual neighborhood have followed that of the physical cul-de-sac I lived on, in Franklin, TN from 1994 to 2007.

Back in ‘94, when our subdivision was brand new, we started like a house afire, and now 16 years later, only two families among the eleven originals on my old block remain.

At last report, I heard that my former physical neighborhood is now comprised of 25% rental properties. For the majority of the original homeowners, it was their first home. Most of them have since ‘moved on up to the East Side,’ so to speak. The neighborhood hasn’t gone completely to pot, though; it’s still a tidy, middle-class ‘burb neighborhood, but it’s definitely lost that new-‘hood smell.

And that’s life; we’re all responsible, but it’s really no one’s fault. It just happens. Same thing applies to my Blogsville neighborhood. It was a phenomenon in the lives of those involved; a phenomenon that had a shelf life which none of us could foresee.

Yet in some cases, the bonds have remained firm. In my case, one of those in particular required some real-time face-time to become immutable.

LA Stories
Something else was different five-or-so years ago: the economy. I had a good job, gas prices were relatively manageable, and somehow, I had considerably less month at the end of the money most of the time.

My Dad, who still lives in Southern California, is in his mid-eighties and 5-6 years ago I had the money to go see him often. I made it a point to get out to California at least once a year. In ’04, I made it twice; once in May ― just before I started blogging, and a second time in August ― not long after having been swept away by it.

Along with seeing my Dad, I had additional motivation as well: to see my friends; the real-time pals of my youth who have always been a big part of my life and desire to make the numerous visits to SoCal that I have since leaving the area in 1992.

Before heading out on second trip to the ol’ homestead, in August, I decided to throw out a fleece and pretty much blindly arrange to meet someone whom I barely knew, but had recently begun running into often in Blogsville.

Michael agreed to meet me for dinner in Santa Monica and we instantly connected. We’ve remained pretty close friends ever since.

The Light’s On, But There’s Nobody Home…
But within a year of that trip, things began to change. The economy, from my standpoint, anyway, began to tighten. By 2006-07, my job security was creeping onto tenuous ground. Fuel prices went sky high, as did most everything else; at the same time, Michelle and I were buying a new house and adding a third more money to our previous monthly mortgage payment.

While I can’t blame the stress I endured at the hands of the economy, I certainly can say that the uneasiness I felt about my job security had an effect on my writing. I lost confidence in myself on a number of levels. I went from someone who had absolutely everything going his way to just another scared, middle-aged Boomer, suddenly out of touch with a rapidly-changing tech world. To say it took the wind out of my sails would be an understatement.

I found myself staying later at work, studying coding technologies in my spare time that I now had to know, both at work and on the weekends, and experiencing the numb, burning sensation on the back of my neck that makes you feel like you want to just burst out of your skin.

Meanwhile, back in my Blogsville abode, I sat and stared out the window most of the time; too stressed to write, too scared to really talk about what was first and foremost on my mind — my real-time job. I tried, though; I came close to breaking trough a couple of times, but for the most part I was writing more apologies for not posting than I did writing many substantive posts.

People would try to tell me not to be so hard on myself (thank you, Brighton), but in reality, I was really trying to apologize to myself.

Next: AJ 2.0

A Place Called Blogsville (Part II)

Googled
As great as things were moving along, little did we know that behind the scenes, a pattern was developing that would be repeated across a wide spectrum of web-based companies throughout the 2000s, and Blogger was one of the early ‘victims.’

Growing, but still struggling, Blogger.com was purchased by Web-giant, Google, in February 2003. At first, it was no big deal to us. In fact, the news brought with it a sense of pride, given that Google was sort of the epitome of the kind of growing, aggressive, cool, Web company who started out little and just ran with it. Those of us who had been involved with the business of the Internet for years were encouraged to see a company truly emerge from the DotCom Bust with signs that they really were going somewhere; that the Web truly had a future based on measurable success, rather than merely unfounded speculation as had been the case in the DotCom Boom years.

Google had it together, and we all assumed that what was good for Google would be good for Blogger.

Only one thing though; we soon learned that what was good for Google was good for Blogger — it just wasn’t good for ‘The Blog.’

On May 9, 2004, Google announced the new, massively significant upgrade of Blogger.com. The typical style of blogging, having been incredibly influenced by the medium’s biggest growth spurt: the 9/11 catastrophe, had shifted.

The term, ‘weblog’ didn’t quite apply as it once did. In the 90s, the medium’s early adopters generally held to a style in keeping with it’s name: a log, i.e.: a series of brief, understated, usually off-the-cuff remarks, generally not more than a short paragraph or two.

The format for weblogs was then, generally a galley list of posts, all on a single web page divided only by the week or month.

However, with the citizen-journalist sea change of post-9/11 commentary, blogs were now becoming decidedly more essay-related in length and scope. The new upgrade to Google’s version of Blogger would reflect that.

There would still be the digest front page, containing a dynamically-created run-on list featuring blog entries of a determinate span of time, but now the layout emphasis would be of a format to support longer, individual page blog entries.

The old template we were running still worked, but the publishing process had changed completely.

This rather played havoc with our groups’s faux forum purposes for using Blogger, so on May 9th, 2004, as the rest of the blogging world rejoiced, the TK Bloggers cursed the ground that Google walked on. We walked out in favor of finding new digs, in an actual message board environment that closely simulated our old Blogger home. It took some doing, but thanks to some geeks a lot smarter than me, we got it worked out, and we still meet there today.

But what to do with Blogger?

Curiosity and the Inside Joke
With the new Blogger now up and running, I couldn’t help but remain interested, however in practical terms, I still had no real idea what a blog was, even after being a registered Blogger user for nearly two years.

For purposes of posterity and reference in daily dealings with my TK buddies, I certainly wasn’t going to cut myself off from access to the old account, but I also decided to poke around the new and improved dashboard and see what possibly creating my own blog would be about.

Then about a week and a half after we pulled up stakes on the old blog, somebody posted a link to one of the new, upgraded Blogger.com blogs. The site was creating quite a stir in the local Washington DC media, as it involved the kiss-and-tell-all details of a Congressional page and a prominent US Senator.

The scandalous exploits of The Washingtonienne were, well, interesting to say the least. But even more interesting to me was the concept that one could lay out a story like that for all the world to see, and all you had to do was type it and press a button. I, at that very moment, ‘got’ blogging for the first time.

However I had no illusions of grandeur, thinking someone would find anything I had to say interesting. Instead, I saw it as a way to pull a rather inside joke on my pals.

As I explain in one of my info-pages found in the blog navbar, ‘What happen?’ is this:

We had long since carried on a running joke in the group about a key phrase from an otherwise obscure late-1980s video game called Zero Wing. The mangled-Japanese-to-English transliteration of, ‘All your base are belong to us’ had become a geek catch-all phrase in the late 90s. The application, in varied, crazy forms, was rampant on message boards all across the Internet.

So I decided to create a new blog and call it, All Your Blogs Are Belong to Us, assuming that at least one of my buddies would find it, get the joke, and we’d all get a big laugh out of it.

So I did. On May 24, 2004, I created my blog and started posting — fairly innocuous stuff at first — waiting for someone to notice. But no one ever did.

However, something completely unexpected happened. The more I wrote, the freer I felt; like a great weight on my shoulders was being lifted; it was cathartic. Apart from a few lengthy emails, I had really never before expressed myself by way of the written word, and the feeling was absolutely liberating.

I kept writing, and waiting for someone from my TK group to comment — in my blog’s comments or in our private forum — but no one did…for awhile, anyway.

I posted on disparate subjects; from the etymology of the word, shit, to the mountaintop experience of my very first rock concert, seeing The Beatles in 1964 at the tender age of eight years old.

I found myself in an increasingly comfortable place. I didn’t know where I was going, but I was certainly enjoying the ride.

But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon a virtual strip club that I realized I was in the right neighborhood.

Waaait…c’mon, nah! Get your mind outta the gutter!


Next: The Neighborhood

A Place Called Blogsville (Part I)

In a Blog of my own (Revisited)

While I may not have any sordid escapades to write about like the Washingtonienne, it's going to be kinda cool to just post a little stream-of-consciousness every now and then.

I would like to officially thank my Blog comrades in TK fandom, who on a daily basis, make me meaner, more irreverent and a more than just a sight bit smarter, as the inspiration for my Blog moniker. It has absolutely no significance to me or my life, but it makes me laugh every time I think of it. Those who know where it came from will get it immediately; those who don't, won't.

I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with this thing. It'll probably be a series of random thoughts composed of equal parts friends, family, music, sports, and personal history. I'm kind of excited about the idea of chronicling reviews and thoughts about the many concerts and music shows I attend; just to have a record of the experience. I've never kept anything that resembled a journal before, so this should be fun.

I'd also like to talk about some things that I think about a lot: friendship, loyalty to ideals, genuineness, my wife and kids, and other things that make me happy. If anyone reads any of this and wishes to comment, I'd welcome the dialogue.

Well, here we go...

:)

That was my very first blog entry, posted exactly six years ago today. I really didn’t know what to expect of this medium, which I’d actually already been a part of for nearly two years previous, because I still didn’t have a sense of what was bottled up inside of me that needed to get out.

Mister Tony Made Us Do It
I was a part of a group of sports talk fans who in the early 2000s listened with great enthusiasm to former Washington Post sportswriter, Tony Kornheiser’s daily talk show on ESPN Radio. You may have heard of Mr. Tony’s broadcast show on ESPN TeeVee, Pardon The Interruption, in which he banters in crossfire-style debate on topics of sports and pop culture with his good friend and former colleague at the Post, Michael Wilbon.

If you know anything at all about Kornheiser, it’s that he’s hilarious, whether anything he says about sports has any other value at all. So I began listening — and laughing — regularly, at just about this time of year, April/May of 2002.

I discovered this group of mutual Kornheiser enthusiasts purely by accident, while trolling the ESPN.com message boards. They all used to congregate in the Major League Baseball forum there on the web site. That was the point at which I realized that I could actually listen to ESPN Radio online from my desk at work; previously The Company had blocked streaming audio on our network.

I began to participate, familiarizing myself with the members of this TK group, and had a fabulous time laughing quietly in my cubicle as I worked.

Then in July, the always outspoken Mister Tony was suspended for comments critical to ABC/ESPN management and their handling of the events surrounding the recent firing of Tony’s radio show producer, Denis Horgan. The message boards went wild, and the TK group staged a war of words (and deed) with ESPN.

That quickly got the MLB board shut down, temporarily quashing the voices of dissension. However we continued on with a continuous stream of complaint emails to upper management (along with a few other less public forms of protest).

By this time, we were all connected via email, but given that we had lost our means of more immediate dialogue, it was clear that a new forum needed to be found. But message board software was expensive, cumbersome to install, and time/resource-heavy to maintain. We needed something cheap (read: ‘free’) and easy, and we needed it yesterday.

Hence, ‘The Blog’
As a result, one of our group’s members suggested a new, free online service that supported this new phenomenon called, ‘weblogging,’ which I had absolutely no concept of at the time.

The site was called Blogger.com, and we found that the way it was set up, we could actually use it as a kind of faux forum by assigning each of us as an author.

Blogger’s format (typical to how most people composed their weblogs in the early days) was not so much based on individual page posts, but rather on those consisting of a brief paragraph or two; from the blog homepage, they were displayed in digest format with the author’s name and post timestamp appended to each entry. As a group, we simply had to publish the blog after each of our posts and everyone would then be able to see it, updated online, en masse.

I knew nothing about Pyra, the parent company responsible for this wonderful little service. I knew nothing about their previous struggles and growing pains over their previous three years of existence; I knew only what we all knew: that Blogger was now the greatest thing since sliced bread.

It was mid-to-latter 2002, and fortunately for us, Blogger.com was gaining momentum, both from within as well as without; but more on that later.

Our new ‘forum’ was operating flawlessly (most of the time, anyway), and in it, we happily congregated, commenting, and contributing to each other’s Tony Kornheiser experience. However we didn’t meet only during the show’s three hours each weekday. Someone was pretty much always there most of the time, chit-chatting, spinning stories, telling jokes, whatever. A profound, albeit testosterone-dominated community was forming; and it was good.

Guys were becoming friends. Despite how much we ragged on each other — oh, and believe me, it was merciless at times — there was always a sense of community, and a deep-down respect for all.

Our new community had no official name at this point, but since it was born of a place called, ‘Blogger,’ we universally referred to it as, ‘The Blog.’

We still do.



Next: Googled

A Place Called Blogsville (Prologue)

Waxing Sentimental
I usually do a special post on the anniversary of this space, which today marks six years for AYBABTU. However I’ve never really taken the time to talk about why I got started blogging, and how my concept and awareness of it as a medium evolved to get me to the place I was six years ago today.

I think I’m gonna do that now.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a post like this. Heck — it’s been awhile since I’ve written much of anything at all. But I’m not gonna worry about that; not right now; hopefully not ever again. Seven months of forced self-employment has taught me a lot about priorities — not to mention the value of melancholy as a state of mind for me.

See, navel-gazing is an art form that comes pretty naturally to me, and to be perfectly honest, has always been the basis of this blog, whether I like it or not. I don’t write 5-Steps To a Happier ‘X’-kind-of-posts. I write long, thoughtful essays about my life, my memories, and the people I love.

After struggling to morph my style into something more akin to the today’s ‘grip it and rip it’ mentality of ‘useful’ blogging, I’ve finally decided I might as well go with what I know.

I’m a thinker, and this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately; somewhat initiated by the previous Happy Birthday post to my friend, Michael, who is the greatest personification of what I value the Web as a social medium to be. The fact that he and I could become friends, coming from different parts of the country, with totally different backgrounds (not to mention, upon initial introduction, thinking that each other was sort of a jerk) is simply amazing to me, and not to be taken lightly. It’s something to be celebrated.

However, in the yin/yan of relationship, where there is celebration on one end of the dynamic, the opposing emotion can present itself just as powerfully on the other. The mourning of friendships that die from malnutrition is often sad; even more so because sometimes the death is inevitable.

This is a look back at the beginnings of my personal experience with blogging as a social medium and community-generator. It took place at a time when social media was in its infancy, and its effect, decidedly more dramatic — in my opinion — than it is even today.

It’s about a place that has always been my touchstone as a participant in the SocMed phenomenon; a place that revealed a side of me I never knew existed; a place called Blogsville


Next: In A Blog of My Own (Revisited)

And Now On A Much Less Serious Note...

Special thanks to my pal, bbqguy for turning me on to this lil' gem.

Valkyrie didn't win an Oscar, but this clip should.

If you've ever obsessed over a band, you're gonna love it.

Good gawd I needed this. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time...like about a month now.




FWIW, the guy who did this clip, also did several similar spoofs using the same Valkyrie footage but with different subtitles (click through to YouTube to check them out); but this one was the best IMO.

Cheers...

finis

I’m on Staycation

"Hey you know, the first time I tried to talk to you, you embarrassed me. So I teased you a little bit which maybe I shouldn't have done, so I'm sorry. And now you're sitting over there playing with your knife, trying to frighten me - which you're doing a good job...

But if you're gonna kill me, get on with it; if not, shut the hell up - I'm on vacation."

The preceding isn't just dude ranch hand-for-a-week, Billy Crystal’s ‘Mitch,’ pressing his luck with Jack Palance’s gristled cowboy, ‘Curley,’ in one of my all-time favorite flicks, 1991’s City Slickers; no, today, it's me, giving life a two-handed chest-push and saying, “Step back, Jack.”

For the next seven days I’m the one callin’ the shots. I’m tired of being tired and mentally beat-down by the Man. Sure, I’ve got things to do, but I’m gonna do them on my own schedule. I’m taking a week off of work to do some more work, but on my own terms and at my own pace; neither will I be under the thumb of activity or travel schedules during this working holiday; Michelle and I aren’t going anywhere. However we both have agendas that we plan to stick to and goals we intend to accomplish — although mine will be a site bit looser than hers.

So, bite me, o shrieking banshee-of-an-alarm-clock. Up your nose with a rubber hose, rush hour traffic. Kiss my pitootie, mind-numbing staff meetings. You’ve all tried to kill me but failed; so shut the hell up — I’m on staycation.

finis

A Little Toilet Humor

Okay...maybe one more.
Yeah, it certainly wouldn't be the first time I've underestimated the length of time it takes me to do something. As you may know from my previous post, I fully intended to have this blog converted to the shiny new look and feature set of the new updated template that I've been feverishly crafting since last Friday. But alas, the bugger took me all of the hours I had to devote to it this past weekend, leaving me no time to actually write the two or so new posts I wanted to coincide with its formal introduction.

So I'll have to beg your pardon on the timing, but It may be next weekend before I officially flip the switch, given how busy a week I have directly ahead of me.

So in the meantime, I've decided to offer up one final exit post to tide you over. Sorta like its author, it's a real stinker, but I hope you like it.

It's a Mad world
I've gotta warn you, if you're like a lot of reactionary, politically-correct people these days, you may find the subject matter of this story offensive, gross, and disgusting.

If you're like me, you'll just find it funny.

I don't know about you, but I often do some of my best thinking in one of the two places I spend time each and every day: standing in the shower, or ensconced upon the porcelain throne.

This morning I was engaged in the latter circumstance, here at The Company where I work, when the sound of activity from a stall several feet to my left triggered a memory that almost immediately brought a smile to my face.

You probably have to be at least close to my generation's age to remember this well, but back in the 60s, that veritable bastion of sophomoric humor, Mad magazine, offered numerous 'special' issues throughout the year, containing various bonus paraphernalia — things like pull-out posters and/or stickers with gummed or peel-off adhesive backing. Oh, the havoc wreaked upon the painted surfaces on which we kids used to slap those stickers! It surely must have driven more than a few parents to drink back then. Of course, I can appreciate this now, but as a pre-teen at the time I couldn't have cared less.

There was one Mad issue that I recall fondly, featuring a set of what collectors now refer to as 'trouble' stickers; ones printed with various humorous cautionary phrases that poked fun at everyday appliances, pop-cultural opinions and everyday events; just silly, ridiculous kids-stuff, as per the Mad tradition. The sentiments were usually pretty corny, but geared perfectly to the goofball sensibilities of adolescents like yours truly.

Phrases like, "Stomp out violence!", "Attention Burglars! It's OK to break into this house!", and "Caution! The Driver Of This Car May Be A Hazard To Your Health!" always tickled my funny bone. But then again, some of the jokes just went — swoosh — right over my head. And just like that proverbial guy who busts out laughing after finally 'getting' a joke he'd heard a week earlier, it wasn't until years later that one of those miniature handbills would quite ironically change my life — and most likely save me thousands in future plumbing bills.

♫ Teach, your children well...
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not not normally one who talks a lotta crap — or even dwells on taking one. However, I've often wondered about the aspect of 'closing the deal' on that (hopefully) most 'regular' of all bodily functions.

I mean, who really teaches us how to use toilet paper?

Obviously, the likely answer would be our parents, or someone who took care of us when we were little. But how many lessons did they offer? Did they take the time to actually demonstrate the finer points, or did they just show us the roll and let us figure things out on our own?

Now again, this isn't something to which I devote a lot of meditation, but it has crossed my mind from time to time. Maybe it's crossed yours too. And if it hadn't yet, well...you're welcome.

Anyway, back to the stickers...

So there I was this morning, sitting in the stall, when I hear the sudden, continual sound of a spinning toilet paper dispenser, echoing from about three stalls over, on the far port side of the men's room. It sort of reminded me of the sound that a roller skate wheel makes when you spin it with the tips of your fingers.

"RhhrrrrrRAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT...RhhrrrrrRAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT...and so on, probably 4-5 times in succession.

It took a second or two for the significance of the sound to register, but then it hit me; that dude was usin' some paper, yo.

And after an initial, brief burst of contempt, leveled at the guy for the potential environmental-impact of his apparently wanton waste of waste-paper, I caught myself and smiled, then flashed back to the days of my adolescent youth when I too was a roll-spinner.

♫ Can't touch this...
My childhood fear of touching my own grunt was such that my typical tee-pee torrent had to double-over at least 5-6 times on the floor beneath it to convince me that a sufficient buffer would then exist between my right hand and the toxic waste to be wiped from my cute little hiney. I'm quite sure that by the time I was ten I had single-handedly (pun intended) used enough of the stuff to represent the deforestation of half the state of Oregon.

Now don't judge; I'm innocent! You see, I don't recall ever having more than a single instructional session as to the proper use of bathroom tissue. No one that I can recall ever told me how much was too much; I just kept on spinnin' that roll until I had at least a half-an-inch of bulk from which to work. Multiply that by four or times per session, and it's no wonder that the toilets at my house were constantly stopped-up, although I never once had an inkling that I might have had something to do with that.

However, for as strange and classically 'childhood' as that anecdote is, it took the aforementioned adolescent humor magazine to get me to see the error of my environmentally-irresponsible ways.

♫ Let the Good Times Roll...
I can clearly remember excitedly examining the sticker insert included with the issue of Mad that one of my brothers brought home for me on a summer's day in the late-mid-1960s. As I scanned the two pages-worth of adhesive-backed beauties in various shapes and sizes, I came across one that particularly appealed to the abject grossness of my adolescent boy sensibilities.

The sticker read: "WARNING! This toilet tissue must be MULTIPLE-FOLDED to avoid break-through!"

"HAAAAA!" I thought. "This is great!" "They're talking about probably the grossest, sickest, grodiest, most disgusting thing that could ever happen to a human being in history, right? How funny! How gross! WOOOHOOO! I gotta go put this up in the bathroom!"

And so I did; slapping that sticker on the wall, just above the toilet paper dispenser, where I (and the rest of my family) would see it every time I did my bid'ness for the next two years. Of course, at that later date, when I had reached the mature age of eleven or twelve, I began to see things differently (...okay...not that much differently, but a little).

I do know that I began to see the sticker, and what it said, differently. Oh yeah, I'd always known it was a joke, I'd just never really understood the setup. I knew the concept was a goof; but then it began to occur to me that maybe — just maybe, there was actually something to be learned there. The sticker suggested something that I had never really even considered: the concept of actually folding toilet paper — as opposed to wadding it up in a huge ball — which had always been my M.O. — in order to create maximum cushion between digits and dung.

Following my established method, break-through was pretty much an impossibility. But could it be feasible to actually use less tee-pee, even...dare I say...multiple folded? Do people actually do this? How could anyone employ such a risky practice?

Nevertheless, the Environmental Movement was already firmly entrenched in the national consciousness by the late-60s, and was an important consideration at the time, even for a young boy such as myself. Killing trees unnecessarily was a big no-no, and the little ecological angel on my shoulder was beginning to assert herself in my decisions. I decided I would try and go folded, and thereby, hopefully go easier on the tee-pee.

It was one small step for a young boy; one giant leap for tree conservation.

And so to this day I continue, just tryin' to do my part for the planet. I considered using corncobs once, but thought better of it. Nope, I'll just keep on foldin.' Oh, I know it's not much, but it IS a little something that I can do-do to help save good ol' Mother Earth.

And now I once again pause to consider the plight of the roll-spinner over in the fourth stall, with whom I shared the restroom earlier today. All things considered, I feel kinda sorry for the poor sap, and sorrier for the planet. But maybe he's just oblivious to it all like I once was. Maybe he didn't have anyone to teach him the way of the multiple-fold when he was a boy.

Then again, maybe he just grew up without any decent bathroom reading material.


finis

ELF’n Myself

Just a little Holiday levity courtesy of OfficeMax.com.

If you wanna see this wild lil’ elf do his thang, you can check me out here (you may have to give it a few seconds to load, but I trust it’ll be worth the wait...*hee hee*), then you can do your own Elfamorphosis if you’d like.

But anywhoo, things are still pretty crazy in my life right now, and hopefully I’ll be posting about it soon. But in the meantime, here’s hoping that your Holiday shopping and preparations aren’t making you too looney!

I hope you’re all having fun — despite the stuff I'm dealing with, I’m certainly trying to. I hope you're taking time to love your families and friends; soaking up the season; taking advantage of the opportunity that this time of year affords all of us — to fall in love with life again, if but only for a little while.

God Bless you all, my friends. Talk to you soon...

Shallow Thoughts by AJ in Nashville

Here’s a subject coming to a Seinfeld monologue near you:
What is the deal with these guys talking on their cell phones in the john? This disturbing trend is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon at my place of employment. Do these guys think they’re actually having a private conversation, or just a conversation with their privates? If I’m in the stall next to one of these Einsteins, I always make it a point to give at ‘em least a couple courtesy flushes just to make sure that the party on the other end of the line knows where they’re “office” is located.

Now I can understand it if you’re sitting there and your cell phone rings. Most people are gonna answer it. But to continue on and grunt through a conversation while answering a different type of call at the same time, well I think that’s just a little bit much. Couldn’t they just tell ‘em “Hey, I’m a little backed up at the moment, can I call you later?”

And if answering a call in the john isn’t bad enough, I’ve actually been sitting there in the next stall when I’ve heard guys actually making a call! Unbelievable!

Does this only happen at my company? Do women do this too? Inquiring minds want to know…

Okay, enough of the toilet humor…[cue the rimshot, please…]

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

That's some pretty nice shite right there...

I dunno about you, but I've always been fascinated by etymology, the evolution of words, their roots and changing meanings in popular culture. I'm particularly interested in popular traditional slang and/or "cuss" (which itself is an etymologization of "curse") words.

A few years ago I was all hot on the idea of actually writing a book about the common euphemisms of tradional 4-letter curse words that have been used in "polite conversation" in America over the past 200 years or so. I've always found it amusing how these "polite" variations, invented to provide alternative explicatives at a time when cursing was not only considered a sin, but was actually a punishable offense as well, exemplify our continuing compulsion to bend the rules.

"Dang" and "darn" for "DAMN"; "Heck" for "HELL"; "Shoot" for "SHIT," among others. It's really pretty funny when you think about it.

However my book ambition lost most of its steam when I started doing some research to find that there is SO much info out there on the Web, why would anyone want to pay for it? I may still do it at some point, but I'll need to come up with a better angle than doing it to poke fun at hypocritical "pious" culture.

At any rate, I thought I'd share a little of what other people have said about the etymology of perhaps the most functional cussword in popular language, the ever-popular, "shit."

Etymology Online defines it thusly:

shit (v.) - O.E. scitan, from P.Gmc. *skit-, from PIE *skheid- "split, divide, separate." Related to shed (v.) on the notion of "separation" from the body (cf. L. excrementum, from excernere "to separate"). The noun is O.E. scitte "purging;" sense of "excrement" dates from 1585, from the verb. Despite what you read in an e-mail, "shit" is not an acronym. Extensive slang usage; meaning "to lie" is from 1934; that of "to disrespect" is from 1903; used for "obnoxious person" since at least 1508. Shat is a humorous past tense form, not etymological, from 18c. Shit-faced "drunk" is 1960s student slang; shit list is from 1942.

* * * * * *

Nadia breaks down the apparently similar etymologies of "shit" and the word "nice":

Jack mentions randomly in a conversation some story Alexf had told him about the words 'nice' and 'shit' having a common root. My first response was "what, in proto-indo-european?"

This is interesting, so I investigate. It's easy to find a discussion on the word 'shit':

From Old English "schite" (and similar spellings), originally as a verb meaning to defecate. It's been traced as far back as the proto-Indo-European root "skei-," to cut, split, also responsible for "science," "omniscient," "conscience," and lots of other words. Defecation is a kind of separation: the material passed leaves one's body...

-- http://phrases.shu.ac.uk/bulletin_board/20/messages/560.html

Next for 'nice':

"Nice" has had an interesting history. Deriving from the Latin nescius, "ignorant" (from nescire, "not to know"), it's meaning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries commonly was "foolish" or "wanton." To refer to someone as a "nice person" was no compliment in Chaucer's day.

-- http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/mrniceguy/54/4.html

* * * * * *

And finally, an observant D. Ward of the The Library of Halexandria explains why "shit" is the most functional cuss word in our modern lexicon:

You can be shit faced, shit out of luck, or have shit for brains. With a little effort, you can get your shit together, find a place for your shit or decide to shit or get off the pot.

You can smoke shit, buy shit, sell shit, lose shit, find shit, forget shit, and tell others to eat shit and die.

Some people know their shit, while others can't tell the difference between shit and shineola.

There are lucky shits, dumb shits, crazy shits, and sweet shits.

There is bull shit, horse shit and chicken shit.

You can throw shit, sling shit, catch shit, shoot shit, or duck when shit hits the fan.

You can give a shit or serve shit on a shingle [the proverbial "SOS"].

You can find yourself in deep shit, or be happier than a pig in shit.

Some days are colder than shit, some days are hotter than shit, and some days are just plain shitty.

Some music sounds like shit, things can look like shit, and there are times when you feel like shit.

You can have too much shit, not enough shit, the right shit, the wrong shit or a lot of weird shit.

You can carry shit, have a mountain of shit, or find yourself up shit creek without a paddle.

Sometimes everything you touch turns to shit, and other times you fall in a bucket of shit and come out smelling like a rose.

When you stop to consider all the facts, this word is one of the basic building blocks of creation. For if nothing else, once you know your shit, you don't need to know anything else!

References:
[1] Robert Hendrickson, The Facts of File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Checkmark Books, 2000.

* * * * * *

Well, here's hoping everyone has a really nice...er I mean...Have a great Memorial Day weekend!