John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. I thought this might be fun so I decided to join in.
John posted a photo of a big, old, beautiful tree he came across in St. Augustine, Florida. I decided to go in the opposite direction. A dead tree.
I took this photo with my iPhone on August 8, 2013 on Skyline Dive in Virginia on one of the five cross-country drives my wife and I took between Boston and San Francisco. I was driving, noticed the dead tree almost silhouetted against the sky, and immediately stopped the car to snap this photo. A work of art, right?
If you wish to participate in this fun cellphone photo prompt, please click on the link to John’s post at the top of my post to see his photo and to read his instructions.
Rory, the king of questions, also known as the Autistic Composter, has come up with a new series of questions that he calls “The Dawdler.” He poses three questions twice a week, questions he says are “inspired by life, humor, conversations and observations, town life, blog posts, writers, gardening, news stories, television, entertainment, and human curiosity, and so on.”
Here are Rory’s three Dawdler questions today.
What’s a typical or average day look like for you from when you awaken to the day to when you retire for the night?
Since I fell off a ladder and broke my left hip and my right arm at the shoulder, my typical day has been very atypical compared with what it was prior to that fateful day. Now I spend a good portion of every day doing physical therapy exercises for both my hip and my shoulder. And that will change again starting tomorrow when I’ll be spending an hour three days a week at outpatient physical therapy in addition to doing my home exercises. That will last through June.
Other than that, I watch a few hours of TV, spend 3-4 hours on WordPress, eat, read the newspaper, and do whatever else crops up in the activities of daily living of a retiree. Pretty mundane, actually.
What has been your most well-received blog post to date, and what made it unique to your blog for it to become so popular?
Hmm. Well received? Would that be most viewed? Most liked? Most commented upon? I can answer two of those three — views and comments — based upon looking at my stats page.
Most viewed was a post call Tygpress.com posted on 8/2/2019. It had 735 views, 77 likes, and 93 comments. It was about a site that was screenscraping WordPress bloggers’ posts without permission and publishing them on its own site. I think this post was popular because it affected a lot of us.
Most commented on post was one of my FOWC with Fandango posts with the word Dogma posted on July 30, 2020 It received 179 comments, 134 views, and 26 likes.
As to likes, I can’t seem to sort my stats by number of likes. At least not on my iPhone. Maybe later today I’ll go to my laptop and see if I can download my stats to an Excel spreadsheet and sort by likes. If so, I’ll come back and update this post.
Do you trust the internet?
If I know the source to be reliable, yes. But when it comes to social media sites, no, not at all.
I get some interesting spam comments on my blog, most of which are captured by Akismet, WordPress’ spam blocker. I generally do a mass delete of all of my spam comments after checking to see if any legitimate comments got caught up in Akismet’s spam-catching net.
I thought it might be fun to select a particularly interesting or unique or outrageous spam comment and highlight it each week.
This week’s featured spam comment was from someone named Lacki and it was in response to an earlier Spam Comment of the Week post.
Thanks for another informative site. The place else may I am getting that kind of information written in such a perfect approach? I have a challenge that I’m just now working on, and l’ve been at the glance out for such information.
I think the real challenge Lacki should be working on is how to put together a coherent sentence.
I’m adding a second spam comment today because this one seriously freaked me out. It was from Zoe Jones and she wrote this in response to my post “Work-Life Balance.”
Do you think that Sarah is right that Ted needs to find a balance between work and family? Is it really about him wanting a more serene life spent with family or does he want to work himself to death?
At first I thought Akismet had incorrectly put this in my spam folder since it seemed to be a legitimate response to my post. I was getting ready to approve it, but then I clicked on the link to Zoe’s website, and this is where it took me:
That got me wondering if Zoe Jones is a chatbot and her comment was actually created by an AI text-generator app. Could it be that spammers are copying short posts into a ChatGPT app and having it generate comments that actually sound like legitimate comments from real people? What do you think?
Anyway, have you read some catchy spam comments that you’d like to share with us? If so, put them in the comments or create your own post and tag it #FSCW.
For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday theme, Jim Adams has given us “surf rock.” I suppose I could have gone with The Beach Boys or Jan & Dean, but I decided to go with something more off-beat. I chose a song by The Trashmen called “Surfin’ Bird.”
The song “Surfin’ Bird” is actually a medley made up of the choruses of two R&B classics by the ’60s doo-wop group, The Rivingtons: “The Bird Is the Word” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow.” The brainchild of Trashmen drummer Steve Wahrer, the song was a quirky and consumable hit, boldly combining surf music with novelty R&B. The Rivingtons were awarded writing credit for the song, since it was based on their compositions.
The Trashmen was a garage band from Minneapolis, which isn’t exactly surfing territory. But the quartet soaked up the sunshine and sounds of California when they took a road trip there in the spring of 1963. Returning home, they incorporated the surf sound into their shows when they played local gigs, and eventually worked up “Surfin’ Bird.”
The single was released shortly before the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, so it took longer than usual to climb the chart. It reached its U.S. chart peak at number 4 on January 25, 1964.
Interesting factoid: You may have noticed in the video above that there is only one band member shown. That was lead singer and drummer Steve Wahrer. The video was shot during the January 4, 1964 episode of American Bandstand. Before introducing the band, Dick Clark called “Surfin’ Bird” one of the most “strange and unusual” songs of 1963. But Wahrer performed the song solo, doing a chicken-like dance as he gamely lip-synched along. Wahrer’s three bandmates didn’t join him because the band’s management wouldn’t pay to fly them to Philadelphia where the show was taped.
Here are the lyrics to “Surfin’ Bird.”
A-well-a everybody's heard about the bird B-b-b-bird, b-birdd's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, bird is the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, well-a bird is the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, well-a bird is the word A-well, a bird, bird, b-bird is the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, well-a bird is the word A-well, a bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a don't you know about the bird? Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word
A-well-a-bird, bird, b-bird's the word, a-well-a
A-well-a everybody's heard about the bird Bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well, a bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a don't you know about the bird? Well, everybody's talking about the bird!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word A-well-a bird, surfing bird, brr, brr, ah, ah Ah, bap-a-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pap
It’s March 12, 2023. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).
Today’s word is “innovation.”
Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.
Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.
And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.
This, That, and the Other 