weirdest damned thing

Recently I had a weird, wild, bizarre thought. What if I started up my old blog? My old Blogspot blog. Insane, right? The weirdest, wildest, most bizarre thing about it all was that the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea.

But wait. Is it still there? How long has it been? 

Yep, here it is. Six years? That can't be right. Oof, several years of reading lists. This turned into ancient history in a hurry. 

Does this thing still work? Guess we'll find out when I try to post this. 

Anyway, back to my thought. I've recently taken up gardening, and I had the random thought that this was the first time in a long time that I have had a hobby.  Which got me to thinking about some of my past hobbies. Which got me to thinking about how much I used to love to blog. Had several different blogs about different topics I was interested in. Hey, they're still there too. I used to love having some kind of creative outlet. I hardly knew if anyone was reading and hardly cared. Just liked to write, to have an outlet. If you liked to read anything I wrote? Fantastic!!!

So, what happened? I started going to Twitter a lot -- mainly to check out the latest news. Twitter was great for that. A lot of verified news outlets and journalists posted there on a pretty much instantaneous basis. It was a really great way to keep up with what was going on in the world. Then, I guess I just got old and lazy. Started spending more and more time there and less and less here. Started finding more and more excuses to quit writing. Also, blogging in general and Blogspot in particular fell out of vogue (if they were actually ever in vogue,) and I finally quit coming here altogether. 

Over at Twitter, things have started to fall apart since Elon Musk bought the site. Nothing and nobody are verified. It's not as reliable as it used to be. Most of the news outlets and other accounts are there, but you have to be extra careful to make sure that everybody is who they say they are and what they are saying is accurate. The blue checks don't mean shit, except to identify the kooks and weirdos who are stupid enough to pay Elon eight dollars a month.

There's a lot of talk on the site about moving to one of alternative sites that are springing up -- Mastadon, Spoutible, and the like. I might make the move to BlueSky when they get where they can handle large-scale traffic. In the meantime, I started thinking more and more about coming back here and dusting off some of these old blogs again. The next few days and weeks will tell the story of how serious I am about coming back here and how much time I can carve out of my Twitter addiction to do so. Stay tuned. 

a postscript: It's been about three weeks since I wrote this post, so haven't done the time carving just yet. I'm still a work in progress. Just wanted to warn you.

JUST WANTED TO WARN YOU!!!

If you're going back through this blog chronologically, past this post are several years of nothing. The last entry was in 2017. That was the end of a few years of keeping track of books I'd read and nothing more. Past that, you're in ancient history. I might go back through it all and sort some of it out, might delete it all, might keep it all. I don't know yet. 

The Lightning Strike

Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via FlickrSo, yeah, we're all a little skittish after the tornado outbreak.  In my case, a tornado devastated a little subdivision about a half a mile from my house, then either veered away or passed right overhead.  It was close enough that I heard the train sound you're supposed to hear when a tornado comes.  So, yeah, that was still pretty fresh in my mind.

After two torrid days that would have seemed much more normal for July, Friday was cooler and rainy.  The forecast called for scattered thundershowers, but it was mostly just some patches of rain.  Maybe a few rumbles of thunder way off in the distance.

And there I was working at my brand-new computer.  Had just bought it the day before.  Had spent a good chunk of my worldly fortune on it.

I don't know where the lightning struck, but it must have been a truly impressive sight.  I just caught a flash of it outside my bedroom window.  One Mississippi, two Mississippi.  Hmm.  Must still be way off in the distance.

Suddenly, BOOM!

It was like standing next to a big cannon when someone suddenly decides to shoot it off without any warning.  No, strike that (pun intended.)  It was like the heavens suddenly split apart.  I guess, in a way, that's what happened.

I 'bout fell out of my chair.  My first thought was about the well-being of my new investment.  Computer innards don't react too well with lightning.  But the lights didn't even flicker.

I debated for a bit about shutting the computer down.  It probably wasn't the wisest choice, but I kept it on and kept working.  I was right in the middle of one of the dozens of tasks you have to do before you can start to enjoy a new computer.  It worked out all right though.  I didn't hear much of anything else out of the storm except for the long, low rumble as the heavens stitched itself back together again.

Hope your Friday was not as eventful.

Let's Try This Again

A funny thing happened on the way to the Internet...well, okay, maybe it's not that funny.

The last time I posted here I had just gotten back online after a long absence of several months.  I even made a comment that hopefully that might be my last online absence for a while.  Everything was working great.  I was ecstatic.

The good times were over as quickly as they began.  About two and a half days into my triumphant return, my Internet connection started acting a little buggy.  It was dropping out and slowing down.  After three days, I couldn't connect to the Internet at all.  It seemed like the problem was with the ISP and I tried to work with them to resolve the problem, but it just wasn't happening.  I finally discovered that the problem was on my end with my computer -- specifically, I think my network card might have kicked the bucket.

Rather than put any more money into my old computer, I decided to wait a bit and get a new one.  Problems led to delays, and now here we are a month older.  All the pieces finally fell into place yesterday and I'm back again.  Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Rebooting

Don't you just hate it when you're following a blog and it suddenly goes dead on you -- no updates, no new posts, not a word of warning?  Did the author die or is he/she going through some sort of crisis that precludes posting inconsequential stuff on the Internet?

In my case, it was the latter.  I'm still alive and kicking but have been trying to work through some things lately.  To quote Genesis (the band, not the book of the Bible), "I wish that I could really tell you all the things that happened to me and all that I have seen."

My life became somewhat akin to a train wreck  But I feel like I've turned a corner and can now see a tiny bit of daylight at the end of the tunnel.  I'm slowly working my way out of the rut toward that big, bright, beautiful tomorrow.  Hopefully, my next unexpected absence is way off in the future.

When I left you, I was working on resurrecting and restructuring my blogs.  Once upon a time, I had several different blogs, each devoted to totally different topics, namely the diverse things I was interested in -- sports and photography and the Civil War.  One day I had the bright idea to close them all down and consolidate everything here at the old Meanwhile... blog.  The result, as you could probably guess, was a jumbled mess.  Somewhere along the line I got particularly interested in writing about NASCAR, which only added to the jumble. 

I finally bit the bullet, reopened the old blogs and started moving everything back where it belongs.  Now, if you're interested in the Civil War, you can go to my Civil War blog and not have to wade through photos or NASCAR results.  Incidentally, I'm was working on a series of posts there -- the Civil War Calendar.  This was a "This Day in History"-type of series exploring the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the Civil War.  When last I left you, I had just posted about the election of Abraham Lincoln.  The series will resume and I've got a lot of blanks to fill in before the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the true start of the war, which is fast approaching.

My recently renamed photo blog, Visualizations, is also back.  I'm hoping to pull out the camera more often and update it more frequently.  I also have a big backlog of photos I haven't shown you yet.  I'm going to try to post something daily, but I'm not going to be religious about it.  I'd rather have quality over quantity.

I've also started a new sports blog.  I'm still toying around with the name.  (I'm really not too good at naming these things.)  For now, I've settled on "NASCAR, etc." because it'll generally be about NASCAR and whatever other sports story crosses my radar screen. 

I'm not sure what direction this blog will take.  I'm not very interested in writing about politics much anymore.  It's all been done before.  But this is sorta the mothership of my own personal blogosphere, so at least I can write about what's going on on the other blogs while I try to think of something fresh and interesting.  Stay tuned.

Rearranging the Furniture

I've been having a hard time keeping one blog updated, so the logical thing to do (as I saw it) was to restart my other blogs.  I just couldn't stand the hodgepodge of varying topics here, so my Labor Day weekend project was to separate out some of these topics into other blogs.

All the Civil War posts here will eventually be moved back to Civil War Meanderings.

All of my posted photos will eventually be moved back to Foto Frenzy.

I'm going to keep most of the dated sports posts, including most of the NASCAR stuff, here, but the informational posts and all sports stuff from here on out will be posted on a new blog, The Southern Sports Retort.  (I had a hard time coming up with a name that was not already being used on Blogger.)

I'm not sure what direction this blog, my mothership, will take.  Hopefully I can get re-energized and start posting about news and politics again along with some miscellaneous topics.  Of course, any political posts I make here will be crossposted at The Blue Voice.

A good deal of the transferring of posts has been done and should be finished by the end of the week. It may not be strictly kosher to be moving these posts all around, but, in the long run, I think it will be better to have all this stuff divided up.  We'll see what happens.

Redesigning

There's a new look around here.  I used the new Blogger Template Designer to change the digs around.  How do you like it?

About This Blog

Image via Wikipedia

This blog breaks one of the biggest cardinal rules of blogging; it doesn't just deal with one topic. That's what they tell you to do when you start blogging; pick a topic and focus in on it like a laser. When I first started blogging, that's what I did, focusing almost solely on politics on AOL Journals.

I also tried the bit about focusing on one topic when I left AOL and started blogging here on Blogspot. At "sotto voce USA" it was blogging politics all over again.  Then I decided I wanted to write about other topics as well. I started a now defunct sports blog, and a Civil War blog, and a photo journal. 

Since I'm barely motivated enough to maintain one blog on a consistent basis, you can imagine what a chore it was to manage four.  Then I started blogging about politics with a bunch of other AOL journeymen at "The Blue Voice."  By the way, that's still an ongoing concern and I still contribute to it on a much too infrequent basis.  The group blog confused things by robbing my main blog, the first one, of its focus...politics.

During a long Internet layoff, I decided to start anew and consolidate everything here.  So here it is: a blog that encompasses almost everything I'm interested in.  I've always been interested in politics to one degree or another.  I've been pretty apathetic about it of late, but occasionally get motivated enough to offer my two cents about one thing or another and usually cross-post anything political at "The Blue Voice."  I became interested in the Civil War from spending most of my life in the Chattanooga area where a good chunk of it actually happened.  I've been a sports fan all my life...also to varying degrees at different times.  I used to watch almost anything that was on, even Australian Rules Football when that was all I could get.  I'm more selective these days, focusing mainly on NASCAR, SEC football, and the Braves, Falcons, and Titans (and mainly in that order).  I've also had an on-again-off-again affair with photography over the years. 

So its all here -- all the stuff that I like to blog about.  Pick a topic on the sidebar to the right or start at the top and read straight down.  Whatever.  That's what I'm here for.  Keep in mind that a lot of the topics to the right take you to series of posts that are sometimes works in progress.

I made the blog's domain name fdtate.blogspot.com because I didn't want the domain name to be the title.  I envisioned changing the blog's title from time to time just to shake things up a bit.  I've changed names exactly once.  This blog was originally called "life...the universe (and everything)," a title borrowed from Douglas Adams and indicating the wide range of topics that would be here.  After another long Internet layoff, I sorta did a system reboot -- changing the template and changing the title to "Meanwhile..."  I saw it as akin to Monty Python's "and now for something completely different" line.  As in, the last post was about the Civil War, meanwhile here's something else.

I've probably told you most of this stuff before...mostly in the first post back in September of 2007.  It just seems appropriate to refresh the mission statement from time to time.

Crossing My Fingers

My monitor died early this week. It was my computer monitor, not a lizard, but it was still a traumatic experience. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, I had a couple of extra monitors lying around, but, of course, I got rid of them and didn't have one when I needed it. Typical.

After asking around at work and getting nowhere, someone suggested the local thrift store. The thrift store? I finally got a day off and checked it out and sure enough they had a few. They didn't look all that hot, but they were cheap. I grabbed the biggest one, which looked about the same size as my dead one, and headed for the door. Turns out it's a bit bigger than my old monitor. We'll see how long it lasts.

The Rodent Forecast

On Groundhog Day, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow but Georgia's official groundhog, Lilburn's Gen. Beauregard Lee, did not. In fact, the early part of the day here was wet and overcast. The general would not have been able to see a shadow until mid- or late-afternoon. What does that mean? Six more weeks of winter in Pennsylvania, but an early spring here, I hope.

Decompression

In the hectic days immediately surrounding the Christmas season, it was good to get away from the old Blogspot and chill a bit. I say in the sidebar that reading this blog from top to bottom might cause headaches or seizures. That was never more evident than in the days just before Christmas when my posts consisted of Quotes of the Day intermixed with Christmas songs. It made for a weird read. But then, Christmas strikes me as a weird time anyway. It should be a solemn religious occasion, and there are some aspects of that, but it usually turns into a frenzy. Rampant commercialism and greed run amok.

My loot consisted of an mp3 player, some Coca-Cola memorabilia, a restaurant gift card and other assorted curios, but I had more fun playing with some of the gifts my relations received. My son got a R/C race car and put a good show on out in the road. He had to repair it a bit after he jumped a speed bump, came down at the wrong angle and cartwheeled about five or six times. We put my grandson's NASCAR racetrack together and put on some good races until the Tony Stewart car (sold separately) broke. Not long after that, the batteries ran down in the charger and we had to put it up. We then got out my grandson's art kit and the assorted pencils, pens, markers, &c. he got in his stocking and did some coloring and drawing.

Christmas dinner was turkey with most of the trimmings. As usual, my favorite dish was my wife's sweet potato balls. She saw Paula Dean make them and got the recipe off her website. She doesn't make them exactly like Paula does, but mmmm mmmm, they're good!

My time online has mostly been spent reading news feeds with Google Reader and changing out the shared articles to keep them current. If you haven't noticed this sidebar feature yet, it's right below the Bush countdown clock (just 24 days left!!!) and just above the Blogroll. I've also been trying to figure out the Picasa Web Albums and organizing some of my old photos. My first two web albums (Downtown Chattanooga and Chickamauga Battlefield) are immediately below this post.

Forty Years Ago

On December 21, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 lifted off from Cape Canaveral on an awe-inspiring trip around the Moon. It was a trip borne out of necessity; NASA could not afford to fall farther behind the Russians in the Space Race.

NASA was stymied by the lunar module (LEM), the craft that would transport the two moon explorers from the command module to the lunar surface. The LEM that arrived from Grumman was not flight-ready, full of defects that had to be corrected before the Apollo program could continue. All future Apollo flights depended on the LEM and it wouldn't be ready until the next launch window had already come and gone. NASA had to test the LEM in low Earth orbit and work out all the docking procedures before they could even consider testing it in lunar orbit and attempting a lunar landing. Meanwhile the clock was ticking. The Russians had a launch window coming up and were thought to be planning something big. In August, NASA decided to go for broke -- a mission that would bypass the Earth orbit missions and go all the way to the Moon and back.

The crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders became the first men to get a close-up view of the Moon, and the first to ever set eyes on the far side. They discovered a cold, desolate wasteland, but the most amazing sight came when they emerged from the dark side, "a grand oasis in the vast loneliness of space."

The Earthrise photo was one of the most iconic photographs of the 1960s...

On December 24, the crew made a live television broadcast from lunar orbit. At the time, it was the largest television audience ever...



The Russian launch window came to nothing; it came and went with the spacecraft still sitting on the pad. In February 1969, the LEM was finally ready for the Earth orbit missions. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to land on the Moon. Time Magazine named the crew of Apollo 8 their "Men of the Year" for 1968.

BRRR!!!

Everyone here in the Chattanooga area is freaking out over the weather. Damn it's cold!!! Well, not really. It will probably be a bit colder later this winter, but in comparison to how it has been lately, and considering that the winter has just started, yes, it is bleeping cold. For the past week or so it has been rainy, cloudy and very unseasonably warm. Temperature have been in the high sixties during the day and the high forties at night. Nice, but exceedingly wet. Then the cold front blew in. Sunday morning at midnight the temperature was close to 60°. But that was the high for the day...at midnight when the day was just beginning. As the morning and day went by it got colder and colder and the wind kicked up quite nicely. Now, just after midnight on Monday morning it's 22° with nice wind chill that makes it feel like 9° and a low by morning of about 17°. Today will stay cold -- high around 35°, low about 25°. Tuesday will be a tad warmer, back in the 40's again...and staying around 40 for the low. Wednesday's high will be back in the 60's again.

Wow!

Tonight's full moon was the biggest and brightest of the year because the moon is currently at perigee, the closest it gets to the Earth. The difference between the moon at perigee and apogee, when it is the fartherest from the Earth, can be seen in the photo below from National Geographic...

Chaos

If you thought the drivers in your hometown were crazy, this will boggle your mind. It's video from an Indian traffic cam...

A Wintry Blast

It doesn't matter when they say winter is supposed to officially arrive, it's here now in full force. Last night, we saw our first snowfall of the season, flurries that left a light dusting that was gone by morning. Tonight, the low is supposed to be around 13. With the wind chill, that should feel like 8 degrees.

I guess things are tough all over. I wish this was a political map.

Most Enjoyable Reading

'Tis the time of year for lists. Everyone has their people of the year, people who died, top stories of the year, pictures of the year, etc., etc., etc. Cracked.com even has lists of the Top 10 Douchebags of the year, and seven things we should pretend never happened. Time Magazine went a little overboard with 50 Top 10 lists covering every subject imaginable, except maybe douchebags and events to purge from history.

One of the most enjoyable lists is the New York Time's list of the Notable Op-Eds of the Year. Some very good reading here, including...

• the story of the Swiss Army accidentally invading neighboring Liechtenstein
• former U.S. attorney David Iglesias giving his version of why he was fired
• Anita Hill answering claims made by Clarence Thomas in his autobiography
• a local describing how the Virginia Tech shootings affected the people of Blacksburg
• the story of the last surviving veteran of World War I
• summaries and excerpts of Chinese Harry Potter counterfeits
• a group of soldiers describing "The War as We Saw It"
  

Check it out!

Changes

I've been mulling over some changes to this blog. One I've just made is to rethink the whole concept of the labels. I've been using them as a sort of a blog index. Now they encompass more broad topics. Not that big of a deal, but if you use an RSS reader for this site you might have noticed that I just reposted most of the entries.

New Features

Let me direct your attention to a couple of new features on this blog...

In conjunction with the weekly music quiz, I've added a music player to the sidebar that contains some songs featured in the music quiz. For your convenience I've turned the autoplay feature off -- that's the feature that makes it start playing as soon as the page loads. Don't you just hate it when you're blog surfing and click on a site and music comes blaring out of your speakers at you. Anyway, the goal here is to add a couple of songs a week from the music quizzes and delete old ones. By the way, there's a song on the player from this week's quiz -- and there's still time to get your answers in before answers are posted this weekend.

Just below the music player is a poll. I'm going to change these around from time to time with new questions, but right now you can tell us your opinion of the 43rd president of the United States (psst, it's George W. Bush.)

comic from blaugh.com

My Cultural Ignorance

This is a meme that Paul at Aurora Walking Vacation got from Dawn at Carpe Diem. I didn't want to do it and show my cultural ignorance, but let Paul talk me into it. Following Dawn's instructions, here's my list...

The books listed below are the top 105 books most often tagged as being unread by LibraryThing users (as of October 3rd).

I am changing the instructions so that you copy the list without any bolds or strike throughs.

I will annotate, in italics, as follows: read, read a lot, TBR (to be read), gave up (for those I started & didn't finish), never (for those I don't want to read) and ??? (for those books I don't know at all).

The Strange Case of Jonathan and Mr Norell (???)

Anna Karenina (TBR, maybe)
Crime and Punishment (TBR)
Catch-22 (read a lot - my all-time favorite book)
One hundred years of solitude (read - didn't get what all the fuss was about)
Wuthering Heights (never)
The Silmarillion (gave up)
Life of Pi (???)
The Name of the Rose (read - more like muddled through)
Don Quixote (TBR)

Moby Dick (TBR)
Ulysses (probably never)
Madame Bovary (never)
The Odyssey (TBR if I can find a good translation)
Pride and Prejudice (never)
Jane Eyre (never)
A Tale of Two Cities (read)
The Brothers Karamazov (TBR)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (TBR)
War and Peace (gave up)
Vanity Fair (the magazine? no? TBR, maybe)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (TBR)
The Iliad (TBR - see The Odyssey above)
The Blind Assassin (TBR, maybe - but I don't think Margaret Atwood can top The Handmaid's Tale)
The Kite Runner (???)
Mrs. Dalloway (never)
Great Expectations (gave up - TBR soon)
American Gods (never)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (never)
Atlas Shrugged (never)
Reading Lolita in Tehran (never)
Memoirs of a Geisha (probably never)
Middlesex (TBR, maybe)
Quicksilver (???)
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (???)
The Canterbury Tales (never)
The Historian (???)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (gave up)
Love in the Time of Cholera (probably never since I wasn't impressed by 100 Years of Solitude)
Brave New World (read - excellent!)
The Fountainhead (never - quit with the Ayn Rand already!)
Foucault’s Pendulum (TBR, maybe)
Middlemarch (probably never)
Frankenstein (read)

The Count of Monte Cristo (read)
Dracula (read)
A Clockwork Orange (never - saw the movie, wasn't impressed)
Anansi Boys (???)
The Once and Future King (read - parts are excellent)
The Grapes of Wrath (read - excellent. The movie's pretty excellent too.)
The Poisonwood Bible (TBR, maybe)
1984 (read - aaarh, the rats!)
Angels & Demons (never - not a Dan Brown fan)
The Inferno (TBR, maybe)
The Satanic Verses (TBR, maybe)
Sense and Sensibility (never)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (TBR, maybe)
Mansfield Park (never)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (read - see The Grapes of Wrath above.)
To the Lighthouse (???)
Tess of the Ubervilles (never)
Oliver Twist (TBR - I hope to eventually read all of Dicken's books)
Gulliver’s Travels (read, I think. I definitely remember reading it, but can't remember if I ever saw it through to the end.)
Les Miserables (TBR)
The Corrections (TBR)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (???)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (???)
Dune (read - loved it, hated the sequels I muddled through)
The Prince (TBR, maybe)
The Sound and the Fury (TBR)
Angela’s Ashes (never)
The God of Small Things (???)
Cryptonomicon (???)
Neverwhere (???)
A Confederacy of Dunces (TBR)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (TBR)
Dubliners (probably never)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (probably never)
Beloved (never)
Slaughterhouse-five (read - excellent. Have also read about eight or ten other Kurt Vonnegut books.)
The Scarlet Letter (probably never)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves (???)
The Mists of Avalon (probably never)
Oryx and Crake:a novel (probably never - see The Blind Assassin above.)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (probably never)
Cloud Atlas (???)
The Confusion (???)
Lolita (never)
Persuasion (???)
Northanger Abbey (???)
The Catcher in the Rye (read - what's the big deal?)
On the Road (read - what's the big deal?)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (TBR - I've seen a couple of versions of the movie though.)
Freakonomics (probably never, but I have visited the Freakonomics blog occasionally.)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance(probably never)
The Aeneid (probably never)
Watership Down (read, but was much more impressed by Traveller, the "autobiography" of Robert E. Lee's favorite horse)
Gravity’s Rainbow (never)
The Hobbit (read a lot)
In Cold Blood (never)
White Teeth (???)
Treasure Island (read)
David Copperfield (read)
The Three Musketeers (read)