Love 2.0 Means No Privacy

For the most part I’m a fan of social media, but from time to time it gets weird. Case in point is an e-mail I got from a friend the other day. It’s from some company called Lovehappens.com, “Where friends help friends find love.” That idea’s as old as Shakespeare, but the following certainly isn’t:

That’s my friend (on the left). I’ve seen pictures of her aplenty. But on the right are photos of four potential swains.

Hmm. If I were one of them, I’d be a little horrified to find out my handle and photo are caroming around the internet, landing in the inboxes of god only knows how many strangers.

(If you’re curious, my friend is 29, so I think the two young ones (20,20) are too young, the two old ones (41, 49) too old. But I’m not going to tell Lovehappens that.

Elegy for a Vanishing Pastime

Every so often I come across someone living a life I wished I’d lived, who’s written a piece I wished I’d written. I came across such a person and essay today in the New York Times. The piece is called “Elegy for a Vanishing Pastime,” and it’s by Charles McGrath.

Here’s the lead:

IN the New England of my youth, back when we still had winter, ice — the kind you skate on — was as reliable as the calendar. It usually turned up overnight, smooth and glistening, the week after Thanksgiving, and it lasted, with perhaps a minor thaw or two, until Washington’s Birthday at least. What you did every day back then was skate — which is to say, play hockey. After school, your mom dropped you off at the pond, the lake, the frozen river, the flooded playground, and she picked you up when it was dark. On Saturdays she made you a baloney sandwich to take along, but by the time you remembered to eat it, it was frozen hard as a puck.

Talking about the ice this winter:

While it lasted, though, the ice was as good as it has ever been — as black and hard as a mirror. Your skate blades left marks like an engraving tool, and the surface was so free of ripples that if you looked down you could see plump orange carp cruising under your feet like submarines.

And if that hasn’t persuaded you, you’re an idiot here’s the end of the piece:

… it wasn’t nearly as much fun as skating outdoors. Nothing is — or nothing you do in daylight, anyway — and it’s sad to think that the practice could one day die out, another casualty of global warming. Archaeologists dredging the pond someday in the future may come across a puck, a waterlogged stick — maybe the very ones we lost this year on Martin Luther King’s Birthday — and wonder how on earth these implements ever found their way to such a beautiful and unlikely place, where fish swim and waterfowl congregate. People then will still skate, I trust, and still play hockey, but not with the same freedom and the same joy. Something will be gone from our collective muscle memory.

There’s even a slide show. Go. Read. Now.

(Image credit: Flickr user Eastick East)

Fear the Wizard

It would be funny when things recur like themes in your life, except that in this case it isn’t. I was applying for a passport for my son, and on the US State Department site, there’s a enormo sign that says this:

Not sure which passport form you need?

Know which form to use, but not sure how to fill it out?

Complete Your Passport Form Easily and Correctly Using The

Passport Application Wizard!

The Wizard will help you determine if you need Form DS-11, DS-82, DS-5504 or DS-4085, help you to complete the form online , estimate your payment, and generate the form for you to print - ALL IN ONE PLACE!

… so I completed the form online. Guess what I got?

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
Index was outside the bounds of the array.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array.]
WizardManagerForNewForms.processControls(Control control, String FormType) +31325
WizardManagerForNewForms.UpdateApplicantData(StateBag activeViewState, ControlCollection activeControls, String ApplicantSSN, String ApplicantFirstName, String FormType) +313
PassportWizardPage.PassportWizard_NextButtonClick(Object sender, WizardNavigationEventArgs e) +11637
System.Web.UI.WebControls.Wizard.OnFinishButtonClick(WizardNavigationEventArgs e) +105
System.Web.UI.WebControls.Wizard.OnBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs e) +693
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WizardChildTable.OnBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs args) +17
System.Web.UI.Control.RaiseBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs args) +35
System.Web.UI.WebControls.ImageButton.OnCommand(CommandEventArgs e) +115
System.Web.UI.WebControls.ImageButton.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +171
System.Web.UI.WebControls.ImageButton.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +7
System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) +11
System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) +33
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +5102

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.832; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.832

… nice, eh? The US GOVERNMENT has less competent people writing their code than the po-dunkiest e-commerce site.

Why Writers Go Insane, part 46

I’ve been struggling with writing at night recently. After the kids are in bed, the dishes are done, the laundry’s folded, etc. etc, all I can do is stare at the screen through a haze of dumb fatigue.

So I decided to try something different this morning. I got up before dawn, before the heat was on in the house, dressed in the dark and made a cup of coffee, and huddled under a blanket at the computer in the spare bedroom, trying to wake up and keep warm.

But something about having quiet time in a room of one’s own must send out a signal to the children of the universe, who abhor their parents making progress on external pursuits.

The door to the room swung open, and there was my son. Five days a week I have to scrape him out of bed to go to school, but on Saturday he’d willed himself to get up early, and to come down the hall so he could point at the monitor and ask to play his computer game.

What could I do? He was up. I couldn’t ignore him for an hour. I bargained with him and said I needed to finish the paragraph I was working on. The whole time he kept noting how long it was taking.

Total elapsed writing time: 13 minutes.

“Publishers Weekly Shanks One”

If you’re coming in over the transom, I know you won’t know what the hell that means.

So, here ’tis: a month ago, I found out my novel, “Between Clubs,” was selected as a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest. The contest is a way to pick the “best” novel from a bunch of unpublished ones.

The semi-finalists get a three-part reviewing process: customer reviews, an Amazon.com Top Reviewer, and a Publishers Weekly review. The top 100 from the semi-finalists move on … then the top 10, 3, and then they pick a winner.

The PW review of my book is a hatchet job. But it’s also riddled with errors, the kind that you’d only make if you’d skipped about 3/4 of the book. So I finally decided to write a counter-review and post it on my amazon page. The title of the blog post is the title of my review.

If you’re still not getting it, my book is a golf novel, and a shank (see the pic) is the Lord Voldemort of golf shots, so bad some won’t even utter the word by name.

If you feel so inclined, go give the review and counter-review a read, and let me know what you think.

Meantime, I’ll be humming a few lines from a Billy Bragg song:

I said there is no justice
As they led me out the door
The judge said, “This isn’t a court of justice, son
This is a court of law.”

Magic Number of the Day: Six

Today I saw two (count ‘em) two contests, both of which asked people to write something in six words or less.

In the TreeHugger + Smith Six-Word Memoir Contest, Treehugger (blog) and Smith (magazine) “challenge you to define your green life in just six words.”

In my unhumble opinion, this is stating it all wrong. I don’t want to hear about someone’s green life; if they’re living green, or even trying to, more power to ‘em. I’d rather direct my righteous impatience at all the ungreens:

• Stop driving your f—ing SUV.
• Don’t idle when dropping off kids.
• It ain’t Christmas. Turn lights off.

And today I read in the Freakonomics blog, they’re running a contest to “write a six-word motto for the U.S. of A.”

I’m too tired to bother coming up with those. Besides, there were 1,025 responses to the post last time I looked.

All this hexalogomania (like that? it’s sorta Greek) stems from a rather clever book by the founder of Smith magazine, Larry Smith, called Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. Freakonomics gives him props, despite his egotistically eponymous magazine name, and Treehugger’s cosponsoring.

(And while we’re digressing about names, it’s not actually “Smith” magazine. It’s “SMITH” magazine. All caps. The hubris! Don’t know if it’s a good magazine or not. But if it commits crimes against Standard Written English like that, here’s a hint: I’M NOT SUBSCRIBING.)

Nonethelessandsuch, I like the idea of boiling a message down to a tight word count. I used to do that as an editor, and found it excellent practice. The old adage “If I had more time, I would have written less” doesn’t exist for nothin’, y’know.

The Webby Awards made a name for themselves by limiting award acceptance speeches to five words, and in this age of information overload (my Google Reader has 1,000+ items), why not make it pithy?

Besides, I recently entered a writing contest where I entered 100,632 words, and we all know how well that went.

PS – The headline has six words (6)

Aren’t I special? No, I’m not. (6)

At least I’m not named SMITH. (6)

Going Borderless

First I heard of Doctors without Borders. Then I joined an engineering firm, and heard of Engineers without Borders.

Now there’s Teachers without Borders, Lawyers without Borders, Reporters without Borders, and even Mothers without Borders. (Wonder what their motto is: “Will suckle in developing countries?”)

This just in: The world’s going borderless!

But I’m still waiting for Borders Books without Borders.