Another quickie to clear my pallet before I return to the webinovel chapters of the day.

Pointless tech note: I’m typing directly into Chrome, hiding out from the ferocious Zemanta installation that I mashed into Firefox. Zemanta provides WTMI. Still, I like it. I found it while trying to find a solution for Chrome’s reluctance to accept text copied in from TextEdit. This works ok in FF, but Chrome chokes and makes me go monkey with the HTML. It doesn’t like the ‘title’ tag, apparently. Of course, in the wysiwyg TextEdit interface, you never see the formatting going on under the hood (rtf). Same with Word, but I’m not writing in word because I don’t want to see the word count. I’m treating the computer like Kerouac’s storied ‘scroll’ (of paper). So browser to browser I journey; all in a day’s work. That said, the idea that a browser designed by Google won’t be more fun loving with a blog tool also devised by Google is going into my book as the first item in the personal bullshit level around here. (RANToul.)

We (me and Del) sat down the other (all running together at this point) evening and watched a blast on the “Daily Show” that cracked us up. Stewart led off with a bit about Obama and taxes, then handed off to Jason Jones. Jones’ piece on the ‘bullshit ceiling‘ was excellent and rang true. Had it been any funnier, we’d have added to our own personal bullshit ceiling by losing control of bladders and bowels as we guffawed on the sofa. I recommend following the link or Googling it down yourself. Just put down some newspaper before you watch it.

I put in only a tiny amount of time on Facebook yesterday. I saw an item from good old Steve May (NY, NY, UIUC alum) about eating moldy bread. In a nutshell, he writes, “i have heard you can get sick from eating moldy bread. i have also heard that you can time/space/reality travel from eating moldy bread and that you have a 5% chance of landing on the millenium falcon, and a 7% of landing directly on top of atreyu” There follows a comment thread that, among other things, puts forward the concept of moldy bread time travel via the “breadwormhole” as even more irresponsible due to damage to the space/time continuum than just ‘eating the bread.’ This sounded like bullshit to me, and I posted as much. It’s lovely to see these hyper-creative young people tripping the laugh fantastic, but I’m not sure they fully realize that there is no “space-time continuum.” That thing slipped on the ice and broke up about the same time as the collapse of the gulf stream. And BTW, what’s with the lower case? It that the best you can do with a tweet on a ‘smart’ phone? The BS ceiling is only a few more turds away.

Just now, again trying to clear my head on Facebook (which is silly, I’ll admit, because you can see where it leads me), I discovered the new trend of owling. OK. For the tragically un-hip (hep?) like myself, this practice involves posing like an owl on the highest structure that you can stomach. This, apparently, is bumping the old trend (and an old trend is tantamount to moldy bread) of ‘planking.’ I’d have to look this up in (what? the Urban Dictionary?), er, on Google. As I say, I’m trying to get some work done here. The linked clip also mentions ‘tea potting’ as an even more remote ‘trend.’ I really almost hate to ask… All of this, these trends in social media that render the past as ‘yesterday as 1st semester last term’ is bullshit. Jason Jones is right. We’d better raise that ceiling pronto, because, as he puts it, we don’t have ‘poo gills.’

OK, let’s go write some fiction. It’s sure to be BS.