Tuesday, February 15, 2011

blahgging

Surely "blahgging" was coined before now, minted on some blase [append accent aigu over the "e"] blog or some creative commons.

No matter.

Speaking of "no matter," what would THAT be like?

Chime in.

With strings, attached.

String theory.

String quartets for existentialists and believers alike.

You're right. I'm blahgging.

Ain't got much to say today.

But hooray for baseball Spring Training!

Monday, February 14, 2011

what is a blog?

Blog. What is a blog? Yes, it is a blend of the words web and log. For a coined term of relatively youthful status, it seems venerable, as if it has been around more than its dozen-plus years.

People blog, but who admits to keeping a journal? Or a diary? As for the word's sound, its onomatopoeia, it sounds so blah. Ergo, blahgging is what I do on an off day.

Web, with its notion of weaving, reminding me of one of the world's best book titles, Caught in the Web of Words, a biography of the Oxford English Dictionary and its makers. Interwoven connections, in digital thoughts as well as the surprise of you who came here, now reading this or hearing it, if you use such software.

Log, with its notion of solidity, woodenness; the concept of a ship's log book; logs because, we are told, wooden floats measured the ship's speed. Log: grounded, rooted in the earth. Fecund and possibly crawling with worms or moss or overshadowed by saplings, metaphorical and otherwise.

So, to blend these disparate visions (and not end up too cross-eyed or star-crossed):

Words and images and musings wandering or dancing or strolling along the spidered reality of incarnate bits and bytes, testing the pliancy or durability of imagination; both partitioning and elongating threads of meaning or nonsense; registered and recorded and cast into a faux eternity made up of seemingly infinite particles of ephemera, yearning for venerable SEO ranking, for immediate, pop-up Googled status: the canonization of the quotidian.

Blog, blogged, blogging. To blog. Cf. loc. cit. Ibid. Op. cit. Ad infinitum. Into aeternitas.

Age quod agis.

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

February

now that we've flipped over January only to see the page of February we can declare that spring is creeping in despite wintry mixes and ice and icicles and snow and slush and snowmelt and winter x games and slalom and wind chill and blustery et alia despite all that pitchers and catchers report in 12 days like 12 steps to recovery and even embedded in the corner of the February page is March ready to march or creep into our personal time zones so do not despair spring is almost around the corner February may prove to be brutal and frigid but can we demand of it that it is the last full and entire month of weatherly winter because in March surely there will be some respite from all those despites.

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

corporate email censorship, reconsidered

We know corporations spy on their employees, explicitly or implicitly. It's legit; it's legal. Employers can censor emails and block websites from being visited, etc. Yes, they can.

Companies use software programs that filter out naughty and obscene words. At least I think that's how they do it. I don't think it's Louie and Edith in a back room sifting through everyone's emails. But who knows?

I suggest the attempts at this censorship are misguided. By that I mean the attempts are typically skewed toward George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words [he lost the case, which went to the Supreme Court in 1978; I was working at a newspaper; I recall the Boston Globe printed the words; most papers did not, though the words are in the court documents; British papers freely use such words, more accurately, they use any words they choose to, pretty much, and are not so keen to censor, and I don't just mean tabloids] or variants of words like that. Such corporate censorship has a narrow scope, does it not?

But imagine the censors, or the software they use, expunging these obscenities:

poverty, starvation, hatred, bullying, war, mutilation, rape, bombing, torture, neglect, intimidation, and synonyms too horrible to conjure and many I've missed and others too unspeakable.




20 words, a winter collage

icicle jail bars

dripping ever so steadily

slowly

awaiting the too-often predicted snowmagedden

that stalls westward

calm before

what?

Words, and Then Some

Too many fled Spillways mouths Oceans swill May flies Swamped Too many words Enough   Said it all Spoke too much Tongue tied Talons claws sy...