Blogging's 10!

I'm sure the Web will be inundated with this, but it's something I didn't know until today, Aug. 1.

It's the 10th anniversary of blogging. Rah, rah, etc. Hip-hip hooray and all that.

Let's give all bloggers the birthday bumps. Alert the media. Stop the presses. Let's get it on CNN, Entertainment Tonight. No, wait! We're not stars! We're just ordinary people! Oh, OK. Forget it then.

Yada, yada, yada.

I am excited about this, actually, but only on a personal level.

I don't much are about the World Wide Web's main features, although they are useful.

I tend to avoid the dribs and drabs and crapola that get 220,000 results when you Google them, although you might want to check out this Wall Street Journal piece:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118436667045766268.html

All that blogging means to me is my exchanges with people like Homo Escapeons, Laurie, Keshi, Dinahmow, Aidan, Stace, Ziggi, Cherrypie, Pam, Gautami, Andrea, MJ, Bibi, Anna, Divian, Clare, Lee, Angel, Hildegarde, Shelly, Menchie and others.

And this element of blogging -- which to me is what blogging is all about, the mostly warm, engaging exchange of ideas and lives -- was sadly lacking in one Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report I saw today.

What they talked about was the 10 per cent of famous people who blog and who want to connect with their public and the other 90 per cent, they said, who blog more or less just for their families and friends.

Almost as a replacement for emails, one analyst described it as. What a doink.

Later in the report, there was a reference to those people who blog just to get news on the Internet...news of an earthquake they felt, or news of a massive fire they witnessed, whatever.

There was no mention at all of people like us...

...People who blog just to get their own thoughts and feelings and lives out on the Web, who seek out exchanges with other people from the planet in an open, caring way, who develop relationships the UN can only dream about.

The mass media, really, seems not to have a clue about what blogging's REALLY all about.

They can't acknowledge that for some people, they and what they report on and how they report it are so inconsequential.

They don't get it. But we do. And they're ignoring us.

It's ridiculous.

Hair. Long Beautiful Hair.

YOU'D HARDLY KNOW IT NOW, BUT I USED TO HAVE "LONG, BEAUTIFUL HAIR."

It's a goofy picture of me in my contact lens days back in medieval times, but this was me in my mid-20s, with long hair just like in the Broadway play, Hair!


For those of you young miscreants who weren't around in the 60s or 70s or whatever it was when Hair was all the rage, here are some of the lyrics to the song of the same name:

Gimme a head with hair

Long beautiful hair

Shining, gleaming,

Streaming, flaxen, waxen

Give me it down to there (Hair!)

Shoulder length or longer! (Hair!)

Here baby, there mama

Everywhere daddy daddy...

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair

The accompanying YouTube vid has some hippy types mouthing the words to the original Cowsills song. Play it.

OK, so now at 51 and counting, this is my hair situation, recently brought home to me, in sensitive, revealing, simplicity, by my youngest brother Gerry and his camera...

As is obvious from the pic, I have in the past couple of years developed -- horrors to me -- that ugly thing called "male pattern baldness."

Not only am I losing the hair on the top of my head, as you can see, I'm also losing the hair at the front of my head. Any men who might be reading this may possibly understand.

Women, maybe not so much!

The point is, it's traumatizing!

As my muscle tone starts to fade due to age and my testosterone levels decrease, things are happening that are to say the very least, disturbing.

And my best buddy Homo Escapeons and I were joking about this recently.

While the hair on my head is falling out, I am sprouting hairs on my chest, in my ears, in my nose and on my eyebrows, apparently to make up the difference. Are they migrating there?

Or it's nature's way of laughing at me, in some cruel way. And what's THAT all about? Anyway, this all recently came more to the fore when I decided I needed to get my hair cut.

I avoided and avoided...why would I want to take away yet MORE of the precious stuff I'm losing, and make my problem more obvious?


But I took the plunge. And as you can see from the pix below, I'm not exactly enthused.


The hair stylist said despite my requests, she could not take all my sheared hair on the floor and reattach it permanently to my scalp.


I think I'll try Magic Cuts next time and see if they can wave their wands and, POOF!, all my hair will come back.