I had no sooner published my previous post (Getting To Know You) about first-person vs third-person descriptions in online profiles, when I remembered a different path some take. Rather than be forced to choose between first-person voice (“I invented the Internet.”) and third-person (“Jim invented the Internet.”), they will reject both, dispensing with pronouns and…
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Remember that episodic Seinfeld character named Jimmy? The guy who only referred to himself in the third-person? He’d say to Elaine, “Ya know, Jimmy is pretty sweet on you,” or to Kramer, “Jimmy might have a compound fracture.” Well, Jimmy’s way of speaking is referred to as Illeism. And it can really get annoying. Now…
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Before my family left the state to escape mob reprisals, I spent the first of my Wonder Bread Years in a small, river valley town called East Liverpool, on the easternmost edge of Ohio, right where Pennsylvania and West Virginia bump up against it. Baby boomers like me easily forget how childhood in those days…
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Not only am I struck by the contrast, I’m actually moved by it. In a week when soccer nuts are literally killing each other, I’m seeing cycling nuts, as well as folks who may care very little about cycling, all crowded together by the roadside; by the Mediterranean coastal highways of Corsica; by the narrow,…
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Frida Kahlo would have been 106 years old today. I noted the anniversary a year ago as part of my series, Born To Be Wild, which marked the birthdays of noteworthy artists and appeared on Vine, the blog at Wisteria.com. Twenty years ago, in an exhibition of Mexican surrealists and before I even knew she existed, I…
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For anyone who writes a blog, creates web content, or for any reason requires images for use online, Wikimedia Commons might possibly represent both the internet’s best kept secret and the largest single repository of bad photography in our galaxy. First, the Best-Kept-Secret category: Because much of Wikimedia Commons “database of 17,568,982 freely usable media…
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To mark the one-hundredth running of the Tour de France begun today on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, I’m launching the first in a series of occasional posts entitled, Things Those Cool Guys in the Tour de France Would Never Do With Their Bike So You Shouldn’t Either You Numbskull. Sometimes I’ll be forced to…
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Warning: the following post contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some viewers. Even I squirm a little just thinking about it. Only what bothered me wasn’t watching a surgical incision being made inches away. Or seeing a doctor insert large, pokey, stainless steel objects into another person’s abdomen. Or even the blood. No, I squirm…
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The next time you see a little bird flying into the wind, think of a cyclist out riding on a day like today. You know, little birdy’s up there flapping really hard but pretty much staying in one spot. I felt that way a couple times this morning, making the ten-mile-plus ride from the Apple…
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THIS IMAGE reminds me of something. Many of us have experienced that predicament in which we’re genuinely convinced our life is about to end. For me it came in December of 1997, very near the place in this photo. After a two-hour drive over “the desert road” and a weekend in Alexandria, I told my…
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