We’re at some kind of barbecue. A social setting, quite possibly extending from our Smoking Garden. I keep trying to put something on my plate – a sampling of this, a portion of that – but things keep spilling to the ground. Maybe I even miss my plate altogether. You’re trying to offer me something extra special you made, but even it fails to reach my mouth. But instead of being angry, you’re quite sympathetic and understanding, as if you know I’m sick or getting there.
Attention, please!
Are you a fellow blogger? Or did something else grab your notice here?
Let me confess that in playing creating titles for posts at the Red Barn, I’ve undergone a shift from the strict rules of writing newspaper headlines back when I was a professional journalist. For the record, I wrote hundreds of thousands of those, even while fixing the texts that followed or placing stories on the many pages I designed, all under a ticking clock and backlog.
One of the things I’ve discovered in blogging is that the title can stand on its own without having to quote from the text that follows. Instead, it can be a tease or even the first sentence of what then follows rather than a summary.
For another, it can be as long as I want. Not just up to ten counts or so of lettering on each of three lines, for example, which might turn out to be three to five words. Haiku looks easy in comparison. In blogging, the title might even be longer than the text that follows. Could you even summarize your post in a handful of words and still seduce readers? That was the newspaper challenge.
What we’re doing here seems all rather liberating or even lazy.
Not that it’s any less difficult.
Now, what grabs you next?
‘Camp,’ as New Englanders say
Shall we dance?
Wherever we are?
The interior static continues
Ten more random notes in no particular order:
- The “award-winning” writer or actor or whatever is such a cliché anymore I will assume everyone’s won prizes. It’s the ones with money that count.
- Jail visitation makes the inmates feel safe, gives them respect.
- A surprise way to increase your wealth. Hit square on the calculator! Beats the interest multiplier for sure. Could this be the secret of cryptocurrency?
- I see she’s moved back to Allentown from Rhode Island.
- Cops at the coffee shop. What an iconic image.
- Playing cards were invented during the reign of Tudor king Henry VII (1485-1509) and his wife, Elizabeth of York. Their portraits have appeared eight times on every deck ever since.
- New leap for storing leeks through the winter: peat moss! Rather than hay or straw or sand.
- Overhead light in the car interior … not just replacing a bulb anymore …
- The blue haze in the forests that gives the Great Smoky Moutains their name is actually a fog released by volatile organic compounds in the region’s vegetation.
- Marden’s Surplus & Salvage has 14 locations in Maine. As for Remy’s?
This was uttered by someone with no job, no obligations, no direction
“You don’t know how hard it is just being me.”
Oh, the possible responses!
“You don’t know how hard it is just being in your presence.”
Just for starters.
Reflecting the sardine industry
Kinisi 171
A toothache I kept trying to pinpoint.
As I said in a recent letter to the editor …
One of the more baffling things I’m finding in living here is the reluctance of folks in one town to participate in something in a neighboring town, as if they were worlds away.
It’s not just a matter of coming in to the Eastport Arts Center, either, or watching a movie in a little theater in Calais.
Pembroke’s renovated library has been hosting a series of free chantey sings by maritime historian Stephen Sanfilippo, and those would welcome (and do deserve) more participants. His well-researched programs usually include much than work songs, despite the title. A recent one that dug into clams and oysters would be a fine eye-opening example.
The most recent event included an illustrated talk by Susan Sanfilippo, drawing on the town’s historical society’s archives. She discussed ships built along the local tidal banks and then showed images of the resulting vessels as they sat in faraway places like Cuba, China, San Francisco, or Hawaii.
Stephen then used the varied destinations of the Pembroke ships as the basis for songs we all joined in singing later, often including nonsense verses while we looked at slides of the vessels. A calypso, anyone?
I should say it was all delightful and enlightening.
Besides, it was a sampling of what happened all along our Quoddy coast. I could image launchings from Shackford Cove in Eastport that then made similar extraordinary voyages.
Who says there’s nothing to do around here? Please look again and expand your horizon.
Jnana's Red Barn 