Day: September 29, 2019

Those Were the Days

Fandango25 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I hunger for the days when the President of the United States wasn’t a corrupt, lying ignoramus and wannabe dictator, whose only interest is enriching his family’s fortune and those of his ultra-wealthy cronies.

I am wistful for the days when our Commander-in-Chief had the capacity for honesty, integrity, and empathy and took seriously his role to honor the Constitution of the United States and to serve and protect the American people.5D1E844E-9B54-42BF-8B9A-2461E37EADC2Aren’t you?

Written for these daily prompts: Word of the Day Challenge (hunger), Ragtag Daily Prompt (corrupt), The Daily Spur (fortune), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (wistful), and Your Daily Word Prompt (capacity).

Chip Off the Old Block

Fandango36 Comments

I’m using the WordPress block (aka Gutenberg) editor for the very first time, since I’ve been having issues with the Visual editor in the “classic” mode in my iPhone’s browser. So far, I find it not at all intuitive and very confusing. I hope that I’ll be able to revert to the “classic” mode at the end of this experiment. But, I’m going to give it a shot nonetheless.

Now I’m going to try to post an image.

6e6146f3-4544-4466-b34c-082dc3d7ac1cWell, that seemed to work, although, because I’m using an iPhone, my screen doesn’t look like either of those two images in the graphic above.

4b1f98d2-ebd4-47c3-8ca8-6c0787fe6511So the next thing I tried to do was preview what my block editor post looked like. I tapped the “Preview” button on the top right of the screen. But instead of seeing a preview of my post so far, this is what I saw.73E676A9-7877-41BC-96C5-58FAB4E23A12It has taken me about three hours so far to compose this post, which is ridiculous. So I’m going back to the “classic” mode will finish this post using the HTML editor. It’s not as easy to use as the classic Visual editor, but at least I know what I’m doing, which I don’t when using the block editor.

That way I can finish this post, preview it, and publish it.

Finally!

Who Won The Week? 9/29/19

Fandango5 Comments

10CC3057-4EEA-4C80-B8C1-700C0FC6C906It’s time for another Who Won the Week prompt. The idea behind Who Won the Week is for you to select who you think “won” this past week. Your selection can be anyone or anything — politicians, celebrities, athletes, authors, bloggers, your friends or family members, books, movies, TV shows, businesses, organizations, whatever.

I will be posting this prompt on Sunday mornings (my time). If you want to participate, write your own post designating who you think won the week and why you think they deserve your nod. Then link back to this post and tag you post with FWWTW.

My pick for this week is technology.Technology I chose technology this week in the sense of a zero-sum game. A zero-sum game is a situation in which one person or group can win something only by causing another person or group to lose it. And this past week, technology won and Fandango lost.

I spent hours on Monday, as I posted here, about my battle with Comcast. I spent the bulk of last Monday trying to resolve a significant performance degradation in my internet speeds after Comcast magnanimously “enhanced” my internet speeds for free. The good news is that, after more than six hours, that problem finally got resolved.

Not so yesterday, though, when I spent another six or seven hours trying to resolve an issue that surfaced after I installed iOS 13 on my iPhone, as well as the latest update to the WordPress app for iOS, which I wrote about here. In the end, the issue that surfaced and prompted my rant, remains unresolved.

I did get a suggestion from a fellow blogger, who commented,

“So I went in to the editor on WP.com and I was in the new block editor. When I went back to the classic editor I was able to duplicate your situation. Back to the other editor, all is well. See what happens when you change your editor on your iOS device in Safari’s wp.com.”

My response was

“I’ve been trying to bypass the block editor because I hear it’s kind of cumbersome and harder to use. But maybe I will have to give it a shot.”

So bottom line, this past week I was beaten down by technology and technology won.

And if any of you have thoughts and/or suggestions about the WordPress block editor, I’d love to hear from you.

And now it’s your turn, folks. Who (or what) do you think won the week?

Song Lyric Sunday — Trains

Fandango13 Comments

For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday theme, Jim Adams has given us the topic of trains. There are a lot of songs about trains, and the one I chose is “City of New Orleans,” most notably recorded by Arlo Guthrie and written by Chicago singer-songwriter Steve Goodman.

Goodman wrote the lyrics for the song on a sketch pad after his wife fell asleep on the Illinois Central train, City of New Orleans, where they were going to visit his wife’s grandmother in New Orleans. Goodman wrote about what he saw looking out the windows of the train and playing cards in the club car. Everything in the song, he said, actually happened on the ride.

After he returned home, Goodman heard that the train was scheduled to be decommissioned due to lack of passengers. He was encouraged to use this song to save the train, so he retouched the lyrics and released it on his first album in 1971.

It was Arlo Guthrie’s cover in 1972 that popularized the song and brought attention to rail lines that were vanishing across middle America. The song was a hit for Guthrie on his 1972 album Hobo’s Lullaby, reaching number 4 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart and number 18 on the Hot 100 chart. It was Guthrie’s only top-40 hit.

The chorus line from the song, “Good morning America, how are ya?” became a cultural touchstone in the United States.

Here are the lyrics to the song.

Riding on the City of New Orleans
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields
Passin’ trains that have no names
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles

Good morning America how are you?
Don’t you know me I’m your native son
I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans
I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done

Dealin’ cards games with the old men in the club car
Penny a point ain’t no one keepin’ score
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin’ ‘neath the floor
And the sons of Pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father’s magic carpets made of steam
Mothers with their babes asleep
Are rockin’ to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel

Good morning America how are you?
Said don’t you know me I’m your native son
I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans
I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee
Half way home, we’ll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea
But all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain’t heard the news
The conductor sings his songs again
The passengers will please refrain
This train’s got the disappearing railroad blues

Good night, America, how are you?
Said don’t you know me I’m your native son
I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans
I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done