It's almost fifty hours until 2009 and if the year can start anew then so can I. Heck, the country's government will be new in three weeks, too. Not that I'm disavowing anything I said previously (archived here) but I need a change if I'm going to keep at this blogging - and I'd really like to. I'm not entirely sure how I want to change things so the appearance won't change much (at least for now) and anyway goodness knows it took me long enough to arrive at this look.

I'm going to clear out bunches of the links since I doubt anyone but me uses them anyway. I use them like browser bookmarks and they'll be available on the archived blog if I must have them and I won't clear out the ones I use most of the time.

Anyway, it's a year with an almost prime number - okay, a number is either prime or not but 2009 is not a prime number only by virtue of being divisible by 1 and 7 and 7 is richly prime so I'm going with "almost prime" and purists can yell all they want.

So: so long and bye-bye to 2008 and onward to 2009.

Labels: 2008, 2009, blogs (mine)

This is now an archive. The current blog is still muttering by myself.

Labels: blogs (mine)

After a brief hiatus, I'm going to try and revive my blogging. I've enjoyed it enormously in the past and appreciate the words of blog friends while I've been gone. And let me add just just a brief note by way of explanation.

I had been enjoying the campaign enormously in that it was a rare time of actual choices, not merely one party hack versus another, or at least so it seemed. I began the primary season optimistic about Obama running and possibly winning. As time went on, some of his statements and actions nibbled at the edges of my enthusiasm, however, and I also began to be disturbed by what seemed like endorsement morphing into idolatry in nearly all media coverage. Since most of what we voters know comes from what journalists tell us, we must rely on thorough and in-depth reporting, but electronic and print journalists alike failed to ask questions of or about him, let alone probe as hard as they probed McCain or Clinton or Palin. As a result, I wrote what I intended as questions - about him, his positions and, particularly, the moral center that is so pivotal to his campaign and himself. Quite evidently, however, I did not convey what I thought I thought, nor did I say what I meant to say. I can only blame inelegance and inadequacy as a writer, demonstrating again, I suppose, that many bloggers are not professional writers or, at the least, that Yours Truly is not. In any case, I was literally stunned into silence by the intensity and personal negativity of some reactions to what I wrote. All else aside, I very much hope that Obama is every bit the leader we need and want. And I hope that he galvanizes Americans' hopes and energies, and proves to be one of our smartest, most statesmanlike and courageous presidents.

Labels: 2008 election, blogs (mine), reflections, writing

Work.  Traveling.  Sorry about the lag in posting.

Labels: about me, blogs (mine)

The terrifically fun and occasionally instructive click-and-give application, Free Rice, has added many subjects. Where once there was only vocabulary, there are now lots more. My personal favorites are grammar, famous paintings and multiplication tables.

They're very cool, too. When I wrote and expressed frustration because they stuck to American rules when it came to words like "none" being a singular collective noun and a dependant clause being acceptably written as a separate sentence, they changed or removed them. Which is only fair since there are no do-overs!

So just click, play and give here (<-) or on the right sidebar. And I'd love to know which category you like best. But by the way, a warning: Free Rice is highly addictive!

Labels: blogs (mine), games

Just realized that Thursday was JMBM's 4th anniversary. Hard to believe I've actually done this that long. 1542 posts over 1460 days so I've met my goal of writing more or less at least one sentence every day. I still haven't figured out why I find it perfectly easy to write here but paralyzingly hard to write freely on a piece of paper or in a word processing program. I know I've never liked doing much of anything unless there's an audience of at least one, though, so perhaps it's knowing that people might be reading what I write, or is it the punch and brevity? I wonder if other bloggers find blogging or "real" writing easier.

Labels: anniversaries, blogs (mine)

Blogger posters often have problems with huge spaces at the tops of tables. There seem to be three main solutions.

1. The easiest solution is to change your formatting settings under "Convert line breaks" to "No" (the default is "Yes"). This will fix the table but will completely annihalate other posts because everything in a post will now effectively be in one continuous line without line breaks. Tables will look peachy but you will have to apply div styles to every post without a table.
   
2. Another solution is to create tables in Notepad and paste the into Blogger posts. Whatever you do, if you want to use this method, do NOT create the table in Word or even in Blogger because both applications include a lot of problematic formatting. This also works but is cumbersome and really unpleasant to edit because you have to go back to the original in order to be sure not one single Blogger code slips in.
   
3. The third solution was provided by the wonderful Malaysian blogger Peter Chen (a/k/a/ Blogstar) and modified by FamilyNutritionist in a comment (bless him!). Here are the steps:
   
   (a) paste or type these two lines at the end of your css style codes (you may have to experiment with ideal placcement but I find it works best at the end):
   
   . nobrtable br { display: none } (do not add spaces after the periods)
   . nobrtable p { margin: 0px; } (do not add spaces after the periods)
   In blogger posts, table formatting doesn't mirror post/text formatting and therefore it may be good to add font size and line spacing to either or both of these, too, such as
   . nobrtable p { margin: 0px; font: 8.5pt/1.4 Verdana; }
   
   (b) at the start of your table, type or paste this line:
   
   < class="nobrtable"> (without spaces)
   
   (c) if you want a new line in a column without having to make a new row or column, press enter and at the start of each line, type:
   
   < "p" > (without spaces or quotation marks)
   
   (d) at the end of your post, type:
   
   < /table class > and < /div > (without spaces except between table and class)

If you have any problems with any of this, as I do if my table has dozens of lines, add this at the start of the post too, even though it's already in the css code. Sometimes redundancy works, right?!

< type="text/css">.nobrtable br { display: none } < /style > (without spaces at brackets)
< class="nobrtable"> (without spaces)

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

I kind of like the new posts banner when composing, but spell check seems to have gone by the wayside.  I'm a brilliant speller of course (not) but I'd still to have the computer's assistance therewith.  Any ideas other than composing in Word or Notepad and copying into Blogger which is a tad cumbersom?

Labels: blogs (mine)

From Small World Reads (via Semicolon) I learned that Joanna at Lost in a Good Story is hosting The New Classics Challenge and it sounds wonderful! It's all based on Entertainment Weekly's list of new classics - which is an odd list to say the least - but it's all in good fun and who can argue with picking bunches of books to read and talk/write about, right?!

The Rules:

1. Copy the list, post it and bold the titles that you have already read.
   
2. Choose at least 6 other books from the list; read and review them between 8/1/2008 and 1/31/2009.
   
3. Go back to Lost in a Good Story and post links to your reviews.
   
4. In January 2009, cast your vote for which one of the 100 books on the list is your favorite (and write a post on why). The winning book will be sent to a lucky winner chosen by the scientific method favored here in the blogosphere, i.e. names in a hat.
   
5. Have fun! :-)

The List
Bolded titles I've already read; I've asterisked ones I thought were especially good.
Orange titles are on my list for the Challenge.
1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
R4. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)
26. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
29. Bel Canto, Anne Patchett (2001)
30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)
31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)
35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998)
39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
*41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
*47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
49. Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
*55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
56. The Night Manager, John le Carré (1993)
*57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987)
58. Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
61. Money, Martin Amis (1985)
62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
63. Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
64. Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
R65. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
69. Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)
70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)
73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983)
76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984)
81. Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
82. Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)
84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)
85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
87. The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
*88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)
89. Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999)
90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)
93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)
94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003)
97. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)

Hope some of my own rare readers (as Alan would say) will join me.

Labels: blogs (mine), blogs (others'), books, reading, writing

I read this article and suspect the real issue is that every now and then Blogger's mechanics just don't work very well. I've been snagged myself, though not in a long while, thank goodness. The annoyance about them is that there are so many users that sometimes they really can't handle it - and their customer service is awful as far as responding to questions or cries for help. Also it's owned by Google now and there are always concerns when something is used by outspoken individuals but run by people in a large company with goals that may be rubbed the wrong way by the aforementioned users. Given the huge number of users, however, my guess is that many more would have been disabled if it had really been intentional, but I may be wrong.

Main and awesome point for me staying is that Blogger is free (!) and provides those of us who want one, a place to learn tons by messing around with html and web design, without any ifs ands or buts.

Labels: blogs (mine), blogs (others'), politics, web

I usually quite like these things. They're silly and a bit superficial but lend a tiny sliver of a peek at a third dimension for people I otherwise know very little about. And I am exceedingly curious about what makes people tick.

The rules:
1. Post the rules at the beginning.
2. Answer the questions only about yourself.
3. At the end of the post, tag five people and post their names, then go to their blogs and leave them a comment so they know they’ve been tagged. Ask them to read the sender's blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

What were you doing five years ago?
June 2003 — Preparing for my daughter's wedding! She amazed me and touched me by asking me to be her matron of honor (thereby also saving herself the difficulty of selecting one of her friends or sisters-in-law, but hey). It was a lovely celebration of two people's clear and apparently affection and love for each other. A child's wedding is an opportunity to share excitement and joy with her or him and with one's extended family and with a new family as well. June of 2003 was a lovely month. And the birth of her daughter the following July in turn began an era of more frequent contact, greater understanding and even closeness among us all, for which I am extremely grateful. How nice to remember.

What are five things on your to-do list for today?

1. Reserve room for Friday night because the local power company is shutting off power for eight hours for improvements before the height (heat?) of the summer.

2. Finish French reading for class on Wednesday and prepare answers to the questions provided by the instructor by way of review and homework.

3. Make significant progress on necklace I'm making for my friend for her birthday on Saturday - there are really only 3 nights to work on it what with Friday's power shutdown.

4. Continue tests and make good notations about new software package at work so I can answer intelligently at our meetings tomorrow and Friday.

5. Worry about how to find someone to repair my front and back porches so I can hire someone to do the work, soon.

What are five snacks you enjoy?
1. Terra's sweet potato and vegetable chips
2. Pepperidge Farm's Milano cookies
3. steamed milk and froth with a little coffee
4. ice cream
5. almost any fruit

What are five things you would do if you were a billionaire?

1. Pay off all my and my childrens’ debts and set up college funds for my grandchildren so they wouldn't have to worry about college or graduate school

2. Buy an estate on the shore in Maine and another on the shore near Carmel (CA) - two equally beautiful and different pieces of paradise on earth.

3. Take family and friends on a ship to the Galapogos Islands, covering their living expenses so we could be gone for three or four weeks.

4. Spend one month in France and one month traveling, every year.

5. Save and carefully invest the rest with the help of the best financial adviser I could find so that the money makes money and we'd all be set for the rest of our lives. What fun it would be to leave significant money presents for people now and then.

What are five of your bad habits?

1. Procrastinate. A lot.

2. Make plans to do bigger things than I really can accomplish.

3. Spread out what I'm doing all over the place even though I hate mess.

4. Avoiding people and things that make me uncomfortable even though I know perfectly well that facing them would be all right if I just would face them.

5. Eat out too much because I don't take the time to go to the store and buy good ingredients so I can cook good-ingredient food even though I like how I feel when I do and like how it tastes.

What are five places where you have lived?
1. Greenwich Village - great place to grow up, a small town in an intellectual atmosphere
2. Riverdale, the Bronx - nice but neither city nor suburb
3. Guilford, Vermont - fantastic countryside
4. Dutchess County, New York - strong communities, very pleasant
5. Northampton, Massachusetts - happenin' college town

What are five jobs you’ve had?
1. clerk at penny candy store in Greenwich Village during high school
2. housekeeper at seaside resort on Long Island, one summer during college
3. waitress
4. assistant administrator to college dean
5. assistant book store manager (if only it paid real wages . . . )
6. graphic designer
7. software and document specialist
8. jewelry maker and (eventually) designer
9. mother and grandmother!!
Oops - did you say "5"??

Five people I tag:
1. Missy
2. Color Addict
3. Barb - her post-tag post
4. Morgan Freeberg - his post-tag post
5. Dad - his post-tag post

Labels: about me, blogs (mine), blogs (others'), writing

Just discovered that I've been tagged and I'm actually looking forward to doing this one - it seems a bit probing and interesting - but can't do it until this weekend. Thanks, Laura . . . I'll trackback when I'm done!

Labels: blogs (mine), blogs (others'), writing

This is the closest it's going to be for a while to balancing (a) something I can stand looking at all the time, (b) appears [nearly] the same in I.E. and in Firefox (don't know about Mac yet), and (c) is a bit snappy. If anyone has any serious objections or thoughts or comments, please let me know.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Among other issues for me at the moment is that I love my previous design but it was unreadable on Firefox and on Macs, and the world is now filled with people who use many different browsers and at least two different platforms. Since I blog in part because I want feedback and reactions (I'd keep a journal otherwise, if I did anything at all), it defeats my purpose if this is viewable solely in I.E. So I redesigned a bit, pushed here, tweaked there. Do you like it? I almost do but there's something that needs something and I don't quite know what it is. If any rare readers want to make suggestions- while remaining kind, of course - I would appreciate it. I'm looking for something a bit less strictured that the usual boxy lines of most blogs and this isn't quite there, though it's pleasant enough.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

It's been almost a month since I wrote here. It wasn't for lack of ideas or subjects to write about but for too many and for suddenly being unable to pick one or two. After four years, I'd have thought that hurdle was demolished but I'd have been wrong. Apologies to anyone who came and didn't see anything. I intend to be back.

Labels: blogs (mine)

Sorry - I was out of town and out of blogging range. I kept thinking of things I wanted to write but there was no way to do it. Unfortunately I haven't managed to get the email posting thing to work so absence was the only alternative.

Labels: about me, blogs (mine)

If you use Firefox, please accept my apologies for the weird display. Several weeks ago, I'd worked it out so the display was fine in both browsers but now, only in Firefox, not I.E.7, the first title and date appear but everything else drops down to begin below the sidebar and spread out across the whole screen. All the div and /div codes seem right so maybe it's something else. Any suggestions will be very much appreciated. In the meantime, I need to check and doublecheck, and don't have time right now unfortunately. I don't use Firefox as my default because it's wildly less secure for me (every time I've used it even for a few moments, I've gotten third-party invasions). But I know lots of people use it so I want to accommodate them too. So bear with me....

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

I fiddled a bit and now the banner and sidebar are readable in both browsers although they don't look identical. One hears moaning and groaning about I.E. from various people but my own issue usually is simply that something looks peachy in I.E. and cramped or differently positioned in Firefox. Anyway, for now they're both readable, at least. This time, just for variety, the Firefox display is closer to what I want.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Sorry about the week of no posting. Well, as if anyone noticed or cared, she said flippantly. Anyway, relatively normal life will now resume. Lucky CRRs.

Labels: blogs (mine)

Pish tush. As others and I myself have noted, the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem is unpredictable, inexplicable and fickle. A few days ago I had soared way up. Today, despite a week or ten days of increased readership and many more comments than usual, my category has slipped by three. It makes no sense and probably I should stop trying to think about it. Competitiveness is probably bad for writing, anyway, even at this mild level.

Labels: blogs (mine), blogs (others'), reflections, silliness