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.

THE "APPARENTLY I HAVE NO SHAME SERIES" (Part 1)

I THINK I'VE BEEN POSTING LATELY ABOUT THINGS THAT ARE FAR TOO SERIOUS AND INCONSEQUENTIAL.

Such as drunk astronauts, people who do or don't want their pictures or stories on my blog, hoodoos and voodooos, politics, George W. Bush, Iraq, the silliness of religion and things like that there.

So in a lighter moment, and because Homo Escapeons actually had a shower that at my place recently so as to totally embarrass me, I thought I'd expose myself as the single, idiotic male that I am.

Ladies, you can turn your heads away now. Please don't hold this against me.

I know I've told you in the past about (and shown you) my fridge, my stove, my shoe closet and other extremely personal things, things that I have cleaned right before your very eyes. And I know how impressed you have been.

But the bathroom, the loo, the WC, whatever you call it in your part of the world, well, that's different. And I am not about to show you my toilet, which would truly be criminal and whose lid is, admittedly, up all the time.

What I am going to expose to you is my bathtub. And this disclaimer: it's white, it's an apartment tub and I have never had such a dirty bathtub, ever.

But having said that, and I'm sure my daughter is prancing around in glee even though she's never complained about it and my son appears not to care in the least, here are some before and after shots:

I seriously do believe that this tub is impossible to get clean. However, I also admit that I do not make much of an effort to clean it. It's only my feet that ever touch it. Doesn't that make at least SOME sense?

I still have to scrape out all that grunge along the side of the tub and put new caulking in, and I promise to do that. I still have to apply more Comet, Mr. Clean and elbow grease to try to remove the black from the white.

If there are any suggestions, I'd welcome them. In the meantime, I have a semi-white tub that is much better than it was before. Please do not ridicule me. Man was not made to scrub white porcelain. He was made for much more fun things.

SPACED OUT IN SPACE

MY INTENT HERE IS NOT TO MAKE LIGHT OF ALCOHOL ABUSE.

Except I can't but laugh over the huge furor rocking NASA and the media about a report suggesting some astronauts might have been drinking right before they lifted off.

HELLO!

REMEMBER THESE PEOPLE AND THIS ABORTED SPACE SHUTTLE MISSION?

Those seven astronauts at the top died when the space shuttle Columbia exploded during re-entry to Earth's atmosphere in 2003. They were obliterated. Disintegrated.

The same thing happened to Challenger in 1986, but that explosion happened shortly after lift-off.

And neither disaster happened because the astronauts were all looped.

It was technical issues.

And if I understand correctly, during lift-off the space shuttle crew doesn't really have a lot to do except strap themselves in and just survive the launch itself until they get into space.

People administer drugs to their pets just before they're shuffled off to the under-belly of a plane during a domestic flight, just to try to calm them and numb their terror.

OK, so maybe astronauts are something close to human, just like the rest of us. They have fears and problems, as evidenced by Lisa Nowak (below) who got caught in that astronaut love triangle.

And so how are they different from the top politicians, entertainers, athletes and others, who we already know have done far worse things and still get our undivided attention?


Alcohol abuse is virtually a worldwide problem. In the West, it's not just legal, the sale of it is controlled -- and massive revenues derived from its sale -- by governments.


At least in Canada it is.



The same governments that spend millions on advertising campaigns warning people not to abuse alcohol benefit from its sale by populations that consume it to numb the pain of their lives that governments help create.



And the media gets billions of dollars from the liquor companies that advertise with them. Sports stadiums are named after beer brands. Alcohol is deeply ensonced in our culture.



If I was an astronaut and I was about to get on a spacecraft like Discovery or Challenger or Columbia and put my life in the hands of scientists and technology, I wouldn't mind a few toots either.


---

NASA astronauts tanked up on liquid courage before flights: report

We shouldn't make too much of this news, that astronauts flew into space while marginally blotto, because the report that it comes from queried members across all 40 years of NASA flight teams.

Nevertheless, as Reuters summarizes, it's kind of kooky:

NASA astronauts at least twice were permitted to fly in spacecraft despite signs they were drunk, according to a report released Friday by the U.S. space agency. NASA said it intends to investigate the allegations.

“Interviews with both flight surgeons and astronauts identified some episodes of heavy use of alcohol by astronauts in the immediate preflight period, which has led to flight safety concerns,” said the report from a panel assessing astronaut health matters.

“Alcohol is freely used in crew quarters. Two specific instances were described where astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and/or fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety.

"However, the individuals were still permitted to fly. The medical certification of astronauts for flight duty is not structured to detect such episodes, nor is any medical surveillance program by itself likely to detect them or change the pattern of alcohol use"

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin ordered the report as well as another also released Friday after February’s arrest of then-astronaut Lisa Nowak. She is scheduled to be tried on Sept. 24 on charges of attempted kidnapping, battery and burglary.

Well, an alleged thousand-mile trip in a diaper to confront a 'love rival' seems pretty tame compared to flying $20-billion of U.S. tax dollars while over the legal limit. I wonder what it looks like to vomit in space?