Meeting the Locals

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Here comes the judge! 

seen on a button in the 1960’s.

Being the second half of a speech I gave at Toastmasters, with the first half, Part One, archived in July of 2017. (Yes, you can “judge” me as being “slow” in getting around to posting this, but hey, nobody said they wanted a part two, so there!)

Hello reader,

Like tourism?

Like meeting “the people?”

I’ve heard of tourists who say, “I get off the beaten path, and meet the people.”

In Part One I pointed out that if you want to “meet the locals” when you travel, and strike up a conversation with complete strangers, then it is good to first learn how to do so here at home, before you travel. Incidentally, this is a skill the new recruits for a certain secret service all have to learn, but I don’t think they are explicitly taught: I gather for them it’s “sink or swim.”

Today you’re in luck, no need to drown, because I had think through how to explain this at Toastmasters. Having dealt in Part One with faith (in people and yourself) and the first half of awareness, (of self and others) today we can do the other half of awareness, and then cover willingness.

I try to be aware of my eyes. As in Part One, I like Miranda’s findings that people will talk to you if your eyes are loose and roaming around. I would add that your eyes should ideally be soft and kind. Things are unlikely to work out for you if your eyes are remote or fixed, and you won’t ever strike up a conversation if people see your eyes as dry little coals—too scary!

I suppose there’s a Zen to it: If you are smiling inside and loose inside, then your face will be loose too, and easily prone to smiles, and surely people will respond. It is especially easy for strangers to talk to you if you have excited eyes, thinking: “Wow, I’m a tourist in Britain! Here from exotic Edmonton!” …The question then, for having conversations, is: Are you willing? 

Not if you’re in a hurry… or a snob, or an Ugly American. If American tourists seem crabby about how the “little natives” are not as good and sensible as Americans, well, I think I know the reason. Americans will tend to seem ugly, or at least “not safe and supportive,” when they have a very rigid view of the world. If people are know-it-alls, thinking, “My way or the highway,” then they tend to be threatened by anyone different. Like wearing a Here comes the judge button. Better for them to avoid strangers. They may seem crabby not just abroad, but even in their own hometown. Of course I am using “American” as a metaphor for you and me. As I said in Part One, I have my bad days, but on my good days I try to be willing to listen and talk as I come across new people.

Perhaps willingness is like art or literature. Someone told me the best way to read is to do so without judging, just accept it all as you are reading, then turn on the judgment and reflection after you put the page down: You are less likely to miss out that way. As an old grandmother said: “Live and let live.” A variation: “Accept others, and have self-acceptance.” In a way, strange adults are a bit like children and dogs: They know when you can’t accept them—you reveal yourself when you can’t listen well.

For my toastmasters speech it amused me to wear my Doctor Who T-shirt, and present this scenario: Suppose, on the Royal Mile, I am conversing with a stranger who says, “You Americans, on your TV, you have way too much crazy science fiction.” I could get defensive and say, “I’m Canadian.” I could, if I lacked boundaries, misinterpret that my ego was being attacked, and then counter-attack: “Oh ya? Well, see this T-shirt? Doctor Who is British!” Or maybe I could be accepting, point a friendly thumb at my T-shirt and laugh, “Ya, we keep showing a man who flies through space in a crazy blue box, no bigger than a phone booth…” … or, my final scenario, I could at least wait until I walk away, and only then switch on my judgment, bending forward to mumble with comical resentment. (Fun to act out on stage at Toastmasters) 

Are you willing to be interested in the world? Then the world will be interested in you. Are you bored? Then let’s face it, you are a bore. It never hurts to store up a few lively factoids to share. Earlier I mentioned faith. My belief? People want the same human contact I do. But maybe not factoids. To me, a good life-style choice is: Always leave strangers and acquaintances feeling better for having met me, never worse. And lastly, if I am momentarily feeling too afraid, one day, to act loving towards an innocent stranger, then I may take heart from the New Testament: Perfect love casts out all fear.

There you have it: You may strike up a conversation using your Faith, awareness, willingness, and spiritual faith too. 

Farewell: May the wind always be at your back, may the road go ever onwards, and maybe we’ll meet one day on the Royal Mile.

Sean Crawford

Winter

Alberta

2018

Footnotes:

~The Ugly American civilians, in South Vietnam, nearly all hung around with the urban elite in Saigon. Hence they were so useless at understanding how to converse with the vast majority of Vietnamese, ordinary rice farmers, to “win their hearts and minds” for teaching them to choose democracy over communism. In Iraq the Americans repeated their history by clumping together in the isolated Green Zone, which had the payoff for them: They didn’t have to understand or respect Iraqis. 

As I see it, for success meeting people overseas, before you travel, try to at least practise being less rigid and more respectful at home. As for the fiasco of Iraq: Because of inappropriate screening, which kept out democrats with years of experience nation building in Yugoslavia, many of the Americans working in Iraq were republican-party members who couldn’t even bring themselves to respect democrats, their own fellow Americans.

~Speaking of (Doctor Who T-shirt) boundaries, I’ll be glad when American Muslims go into social work and then teach other Muslims about “boundaries.” And teach them about “victim role” too. Every time I hear “Islam is under attack” I see a flashing neon sign: victim-victim-victim. A healthy democracy, of course, requires citizens to feel a sense of “agency.” 

When Muslims in, say, Pakistan bomb to, as they say, make their country “more unstable” what they mean is to make their fellow Pakistanis feel “less agency” …because then people are less likely to resist a new dictator. History shows us that every dictator, —Nazi, communist, militarist, Islamist—without exception, always turns his country towards having fewer human rights and more fundamentalism. As in, “more Islamist.”Yes, the ignorant Islamist suicide bombers do at least know this much. 

~Of course, sometimes immaturity, such as Sunnis hating Shiites, has a payoff, so we cling to it. At breakfast some of us were telling writer Lois McMaster Bujold how folks from the cities of Edmonton and Calgary, here in Alberta, in their broad inter-city competition, would rather the national Grey Cup was won by “a team from Mars!” than by their fellow Albertan city. Lois burst out, “It sounds like sibling rivalry to me!” 

“(Blushing) Yes, well (cough).”

Questions and Homeland Security

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. “

Albert Einstein

“Question Authority!”

Seen on a button in the sixties

Hello Reader,

Got  congressmen?

I am getting “revved up” from reading a thrilling young adult novel, Little Brother, where the hero’s code name is Winston, (A little like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four) by Corey Doctorow, a name well known in computer and literary circles. I’m confident Doctorow realized that even though the computer nerd side of him liked facts, the reality is many other people are only revved up by stories.

Here’s a story:

 You may recall how the fascists gave us good order, stopped those bomb-throwing anarchists, and made the trains run on time. And, in the case of Germany, also stopped the nightmare of runaway inflation, something the conservatives had failed at miserably. (People were bringing their paycheques home in wheelbarrows)  Sounds good. 

There was a certain “good European”: After the war, which he had hated, being a man of peace, he still did not truly believe in the horror of fascism, not even from the facts of the death camps in Poland. No indeed… not until he heard police boots clumping offstage for the story of Ann Frank.

Doctorow presents a world where the hero, a high school boy, by being arrested, has seen the iron fist beneath the velvet glove of D.H.S. … A bomb is thrown—no, that’s too 20th century—a line of bombs is set off, blowing up a bridge in San Francisco… No one else seems to grasp, or will even question, how D.H.S.  must have had plans in place to obstruct liberty before the bombing. The D.H.S., of course, is Department of Homeland Security.

Naturally Doctorow, like Einstein imagining riding on a beam of light, is only doing a thought experiment. No newspaper journalist today is saying H.S. is fascist, not yet. Furthermore, many people would say only a long haired hippie would question authority—but Albert Einstein had long hair, too. That gentle, credible man was never afraid to question. Question the Nazis, and question conventional gunpowder war. In fact, it was due to his gentle credibility that the U.S. president agreed to undertake something out of science fiction: to invent the Atomic Bomb.

If the police and D.H.S. are innocent, then they shouldn’t fear any questions, right? But no, in Doctorow’s San Francisco, after the bombing,  they want to dominate and to squelch questions from citizens. Not like a pair of police walking sternly outside a dingy “bad guy” bar, but by having many police walking throughout the boy’s entire city, as though anybody might be a bad guy, especially anybody the computer shows having unusual behaviour, as does that peace-loving loyal boy.

So the question for us to ask today is: Could the federal H.S., in the future, in our world of computers, become bad? Should we be holding that horse with close firm reins to prevent any future foolishness? 

I don’t know much about federal departments. Here in Calgary, more often than I visit my member of parliament, I will visit my city alderman, or my Member of the provincial Legislative Assembly. One day my MLA and I were talking in his office, the phone rang, and it was a constituent asking about finding a job. The poor guy’s accent was too strong. So then I delighted my politician by alerting him to evening classes in “accent reduction,” that he could tell job seekers about. (He phoned the constituent back right away) Here in Calgary, when you apply for a job with the city, the interviewers ask you for your stories about your past performance as a predictor of your future. 

My question: The Department of Homeland Security may be new, but to predict the department’s potential for messing up, are there any older federal departments we could look at? As Einstein would say, when it comes to H.S., can we “Learn from yesterday”?

As  Governor Sarah Palin might say, “You betcha!” … Consider the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As children we all saw the lovable Jimmy Stewart in The F.B.I. Story, a movie starting from the 1930’s. Kids would send away cereal box tops for their junior G-man badge, while Hoover’s boys were known to be wholesome, well groomed Americans we could all be proud of—so what the heck happened? 

By the early 1950’s President Truman, having contempt for the F.B.I.’s  director, J. Edgar Hoover, didn’t feel safe removing Hoover from office, partly because the F.B.I. was gathering dirt on prominent Americans. I believe President Johnson was merely quoting Truman when he told the New York Times in 1971, “It is probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” 

The F.B.I. secretly taped John F. Kennedy in bed at night sharing his doubts and lack of confidence in things. (In fairness, they thought Kennedy’s female lover might be a communist) Even when Kennedy had become the U.S. president, with his loyalty surely beyond question, they kept the transcripts, kept them even after he was assassinated—perhaps to hold power over the attorney general— but then again, they kept the transcripts even after his brother Bobby was assassinated, too. 

This annoys me mightily because the data collected on Kennedy should have been protected by being destroyed, long ago. As local professor and computer expert Tom Keenan said, “If you collect, you have a duty to protect.” 

At the time of Bobby’s death some clean-cut agents were running dirty tricks, covert operations called “cointelepro,” against loyal non-communists such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Even after Watergate the F.B.I. would not reform: They never did apologize for their complicity in the killing of Karen Silkwood.

If even the F.B.I.’s noble agents could decline into resorting to cointelpro, what hope is there for H.S.? Are they already starting to collect data the way the N.S.A. was doing right up until Edward Snowden’s revelations? Is your congressman allowed to even ask?  

In fairness, within the F.B.I., maybe only a small percentage of agents went over to the dark side, just as, in the Roman Catholic Church, surely only a small percentage of priests went on to be child molestors. Trouble is, as with the Church, sometimes a whole organization can be complicit. Just like in the movie Snowden, where patriotic staff see their not-so-patriotic boss on the six o’clock news lying to congress—and not one …single… solitary individual… blows the whistle.

Perhaps the way to understand government, then, is to understand individuals. I ask you: Don’t we all sometimes get too focused, too much looking down on our own pet issue, for example security, ignoring the larger issues?

Here’s another story:

Canadians were happily protecting their sacred culture, thwarting “Yankee imperialism,” by legislating that a certain per cent of their airwaves must be “Canadian content.” Dirty Canadian socialism? Not to all those self-employed business-artists who were finally able to keep their heads above water. About the time satellite phones were the size of war-time walkie-talkies, there came these giant satellite dishes filling up people’s yards. A cabinet minister, forgetting to lift his eyes to the larger issues such as the informal Right to Property, said government must control the dishes, in order to control Canadian content. To quote a Yankee: “Say-What?” He backed down.

Here’s a story:

In my city, we have a love of the environment, plus an ever-worsening shortage of landfills. (In New York City they have resorted to taking their garbage out to sea—which worked just fine, I guess, until needles wash up on the shore) One day a Calgary alderman, forgetting the principle of Citizens Deciding For Themselves, said that there should be a restriction on the number of garbage bags put out by each household. Call it “prohibition light.” A more experienced politician quashed his idea by saying that people would meet their numbers by coming out with giant bags the size of the next town. Better to use education and peer pressure.

A story:

In another year, another alderman proposed a law that garbage bags all be transparent, so peers, nosy neighbours and the government too, could all enforce recycling. The greater issue he forgot? The Right to Privacy. A fellow retorted, “Some of my constituents have adult diapers, and that’s nobody else’s business.” The man backed down.

Right now the problem with Homeland Security is they have no shame, no, not even when a powerless senator is reduced to asking questions with sarcasm, while they just keep a straight face… Come to think of it, I read this story on BBC News, on the web—do you think U.S. newspapers carried it? I refer to the story where border agents no longer need any suspicion, let alone probable cause, regarding you taking your private cell phone or tablet across the federal border.

While every citizen’s duty is to question, surely the business world models for us the value of, and encouragement of, questions. In business, the way to remind people to stop their vested tunnel vision, and to lift up their eyes to other issues, is with questions. (For example, asking: “Have you considered the tax implications?”) It might seem rude for a top executive to ask his people this, but after they stop blushing, they’ll thank him. 

As you know, every incorporated business must legally include, besides the obvious such as a president and (treasurer) finance officer, a board of directors. Historically, the board members would be from the same field as the company. However, decades ago we learned better. Now we know boards of directors should be diverse. Not just to think outside of the box, but to ask better questions, inside the conference room. 

(But can they force you to name a financial officer? Can’t you instead, for example, have a commune of cardinals doing the finances in complete equality, socialism-wise? Answer: You can have freedom of religion, but not freedom of corporation—and legally you will need yearly audits too: Because society has learned the hard way what is needed for the “greater good.” When it comes to business, religion and yes, Homeland Security too, “we are saved not by our faith, but by the lack of it.”) 

A half-fictional story:

A company which makes facial tissues (Kleenex) was grappling with the high costs of shipping tissues across the country, focusing on various transport means, hubs and warehouses… A board member from the field of dentistry asked, “Well, can’t you just suck all the air out before you ship them, shipping concentrated kleenex, and then re-air them later?”

I am in Calgary, far away from the swelled heads in the federal capital. Here ordinary people, government people, are fully aware they are fallible, and so when they pass a new bylaw they always put in an appeals process. Only a very self-righteous individual, like the head of H.S., would assume they would get it right every time.

My concern is that H.S. has a “tunnel visioned” for security, without due humility, without lifting their eyes to the issue of Liberty, and without even having Common Sense…. To me the smoking gun for that department’s gross incompetence was when the head of H.S. publicly said that some of the 9/11 killers had crossed into the U.S. from Canada—and no, the head did not resign after that evidence of gross negligence. 

If H.S. is already beyond questions and appeals, beyond the check and balance of congress, if H.S. is trying to be both judge and jury, then I can only conclude they will follow down the same path the F.B.I. took—only greased, on skids.

Back to you, dear reader. Have you got a congressman you can ask? 

Sean Crawford

In the fourth largest city in Canada

Where the biggest minority group is U.S. citizens

February

2018

Footnotes:

~Got tunnel vision? The motto for the local university, where Professor Keenan works, translated from Gaelic, is: “I will lift up my eyes.”

~I describe in detail the role of a board of directors in my essay Olympics and Boards. You may find it in the archives for February 2013, or via clicking on the label Olympics.

~ The investigative book on The Killing of Karen Silkwood could stand alone as proof that “The innocent do have something to fear from surveillance,” as agency after agency is shown breaking the laws for surveillance, despite Silkwood’s innocence. Poor girl. I think it was a surveillance team who killed her. 

Karen was neither communist nor criminal.

~As documented in the movie (link to review) Spotlight, a “small percentage” of priests translated into 90 priests in the city of Boston alone. I won’t speculate on the percentage of “insert fear of choice” in Homeland Security.

~Link to movie review for Snowden.

~Canadians are not socialist, they can indeed buy a private satellite dish, but their constitution, despite controversy while they were writing it, back when I was a young man, does not recognize the right to property.  

~I like how Snowden, rather than try to be both judge and jury, used the check and balance of confidentially going to respected sober journalists, and then letting them rule on whether the sound of his whistle should remain secret, or whether it was appropriate to publish.

~My Kleenex story is based on real life, where I think it was an executive, not a board member, who came up with the air question during a brainstorming-like discussion. He began by curiously noting that stuff travels faster in a vacuum. 

…Perhaps he was thinking of how, before interoffice communicators, (intercoms) company memorandums (memos) flew through pneumatic tubes, typed by secretaries who would stop off after work to get a permanent wave. (perm)

~While Doctorow is Canadian, it was a well known British author, Neil Gaiman, who did the front cover blurb for Doctorow’s book, saying, “A wonderful, important book … I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year.”

Tick Tock as we Talk

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Meta-blog note: If a blog post can be made with links, what Scalzi calls a “conduit blog,” then maybe a post could be made with quotes.

Hello Reader, 

Got conversation? And growth too?

Like Oprah Winfrey, I have my talk preferences, which have changed down the years, as my life and character have changed. Here’s what Oprah said in her monthly (last page) What I Know For Sure in O, The Oprah Magazine, for February 2018:

“What defines me is answering the call to Truth—capital T—in every moment.That’s why small talk makes me jittery. It feels fake, like we’re just pretending to have conversation. I have such an aversion to it, I go numb inside. I can’t look people in the eye because the whole time I’m thinking it’s so beneath us to be talking about trivial things when our world is burning.”

Make no mistake: Oprah is not sadly serious. She wouldn’t mind laughter with her non-trivial talk. On page 105, with RuPaul: 

“Fascinated by his ability to defy categorization and spark vital conversation about identity, Oprah sat down with the 57-year-old for a much-needed kiki*.” 

Defined: “*A laugh-filled chat between friends.” 

I picture Oprah’s social beverage being a coffee. On the other hand, speaking of Oprah’s “trivial things,” some folks go in for pure mindless fun over beer. Take cartoonist and essayist Tom Krieder, in his book of essays We learn nothing:

“While responsible people were working… my friends and I were spending whole days drinking bottomless pitchers of mimosas or Bloody Marys and laughing till we wept on decks overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. (page 26) …Nick and I once wrecked our friend Gabe’s entire dining room laughing at something one of us had said, whirling around and toppling over and clutching desperately at tablecloths and knickknack shelves, like a couple of robots gone berserk, yet the next morning neither of us could remember what had been so funny.” (page 27)

The last time I had friends for laughter every time we met was when I was among two outcasts in high school chemistry class. The good students all sat at the tables at the front; we three perched at a high black lab table and amused ourselves mightily, as a sort of compensation, because we were barely passing. (This was queer because in my head I was still a wall flower) Years later I would graduate university, but back then, lucky to get a C-, I was a messed up kid.

Kreider is a university graduate too, as are most essayists. Years into the real world, he re-connected with a professor:

“Spending time with him was not like spending time with most of my friends, a lazy relief from life, hanging out for hours drinking beers and thinking up funny things to say; it was an intellectual workout, hard and exhilarating, like reading Conrad or listening to a Beethoven quartet. …You were not wasting time. And if that sense of seriousness and purpose occasionally felt like an imposition, it also turned out to be something for which I’d secretly been starved.” (page 95)

What I wish to focus on today is Krieder’s line, “You were not wasting time.” It resonates. Today I can relax and waste time, but once I was more like Oprah, and so were my friends. At university, before I was actually a student myself, I once heard Lisa telling us how happy she was to have spend part of her Saturday just lying on the floor listening to an entire album! Her joy, I am sure, was not that she could take time away from studying, (no one studied on Saturday) but that she could bring herself to take so much time away from her “shoulds.”

Kreider again:

“… that oppressive sense of obligation that ruins so much of our lives, the nagging worry that we really ought to be doing something productive instead.” (page 25)

For Lisa, her “sense of obligation” was surely her driving urge to get her act together, get normal and live up to her productive potential. No-time-for-small talk. One day, a few years later, we would meet on the bus. She would inform me I could get counselling on a sliding scale at the Grace Women’s Hospital, kindly alerting me to this opportunity because my problems were obvious to her, just as her urgent sense of obligation had been obvious to me, as both of us were in the same storm-tossed boat. 

Another person on the bus to being functional was my housewife friend, Lynn, from my self-help group. I will never forget Lynn being so happy to tell me that one day she and some other ladies, after a yoga class, had just hung out for coffee and talked of trivial nothing—and she felt so fine with that! So she went home and went, “Yahoo!” 

I can still relate to that previous version of Lynn because, as former Calgarian Joni Mitchel sings, I can see “both sides now.” I know I am on the sunnier side of the hill, at last, because a warrior I once served with, (In Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry) now a social worker, said to me over coffee, “You are a success story.” (Yahoo!) 

Today I am “recovered” enough to simply hang out, just like all those “normies” with their charmed lives and half decent childhoods. Yes, but even as I am conversing, while passing for normal, calmly wasting time, inside my head a clock is tick-tick-ticking.

Sean Crawford

East of Eden

February

2018

Footnotes:

~We Learn Nothing by Tom Kreider subtitled Essays and Cartoons, free press, 2012. Here’s a review by a blogger whom I correspond with by e-mail.

~It’s no secret Oprah has a past. We like her, we don’t pity her. Like you and I, she has things to offer others.

~What if Lisa, now my age, were here? I would softly say Joni Mitchel has grown gracefully, like us. Here’s Joni’s mature, weathered version of the song she composed in her youth, Both Sides Now, intended for listeners with patience. Goes good with wine when it’s dark out. Not so good for young “surfers” who frantically click on links.

… And if you do have your wine, willing to be present, then here is Dame Judy Dench, in 2010, singing at the proms, being in the moment. 

My Latest Meta Blog

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnote: Meta means “about,” especially about a “higher order.” A meta blog post, then, would be a post about blogs in general, or, going beyond my specific blog essay, being “about” my blog.

Hello Reader,

Got blogs?

Introduction

Implications

Doctor Who and Customers

Footnotes

Introduction

Remember what blogs used to be like? Many people were less into leisurely reading, and more into frantically clicking, fearful of they knew not what. Not me, I never enjoyed “frantic.” Right from the start I blogged for focused readers.

Here’s a quote from the long running Whatever blog of John Scalzi from September 6, 2002, when blogs were still new:

There’s also the problem with the format of blogs, in terms of justifying their status as paid content. Most blogs are essentially agglomerations of links with short, functional commentary added; one reads the commentary, but it’s usually dependent on the link for context; if you don’t link, you’re missing half (or more) of the story. 

In this way, blogs represent a new kind of content: Conduit Content, in which the primary idea of the content is to lead to you somewhere else. 

This is opposed to Destination Content, the much more traditional brand of content, in which the primary idea of the content is to keep you engaged with the material at hand 

(This site, incidentally, deals primarily in destination content, which is one of the reasons I’m deeply ambivalent about it being called a blog, or me a blogger).

… I get it, Scalzi, I’m ambivalent too. As I said in my third meta blog, back in June of 2010, I’d rather be called an essayist than a blogger.

Implications

Of course I don’t do links—because I have standards! “No links is good links” is the title of one of my “top ten” essays, by hit count, archived back in July 2012.

Yup, standards: I would have been peeved with myself if I had started my new blog site back in 2009 and (a) rushed to talk for a whole essay about me, or (b) if I had rushed to talk “about blogs” in higher, meta terms. Instead, I thought I needed to earn the rights to (a) and (b) by writing lots of real essays first. 

In 2018 I still don’t “self indulge” by talking about me or blogs except at clear intervals. Specifically, at intervals of filling my “web administrator’s page” of 25 titles. I get a kick out of how I crank out a new essay title every week. Writing is hard, commitment still harder.

Now it’s been another 25. Well, what can I say, this time around? Like other blog templates, the one I use, blogspot, hosted by google, has buttons at the bottom for readers to press, such as “like” (G+) and “links to social media.” That’s nice, eh? I don’t do social media myself, but I guess the buttons are nice for others.

The “missing button” is one for readers to “click below to subscribe” to get e-mail alerts every time I post another essay. I guess that would be nice, even though I post weekly.

(Note: I have recently added such a feature, although without buttons)

First question: Would I ever use an e-mail button myself? No, I prefer to crowd my desktop with“favorite buttons” like dials on a pilot’s console.

Next question: Would anyone else care? I think Minkee Robinson, a local published author, once told me she couldn’t find an e-mail button on my site, but no one else has mentioned it.

Last question: Would I care… about missing out on getting more viewers? This question gives me a beautiful chance to segue (slide) into a new part of this essay. 

(If you are reading this at your leisure, as I hope you are, you may feel free to go for a Second Cup (Registered Trademark) and then return here)

Doctor Who and Customers

Go to the Who Store, 30 minutes by tube out of Central London, and you may see a manager my age in pink futuristic clothing out of the 1970’s British TV show UFO. What you won’t see is a young clerk wearing black freaky disrespectful-to-others clothing. Why? Because if even five per cent of customers are turned off, well, that’s five per cent less profit, and if the profit margins are very slim, well… who needs to go into the red just to support a disrespectful young person’s freedom of expression?

As for the Doctor Who show, there must be more than five per cent of viewers who are not fans… —I know, that’s so hard to imagine!— 

And truly the BBC goes after those marginal viewers with a full effort, as in, for example, stupidly showing scenes from next week’s episode, so fans like me have to close their eyes, plug their ears and feel with their elbow for the mute button.

Speaking of buttons, either for muting… or for e-mail subscriptions for the sake of the “five per cent” of my viewers who barely like my blog… well let’s add a zero: Because those folks who “barely like” are in fact “50 per cent” at least: surely the “majority.” God bless them. 

It’s all good. I have never promoted my blog. No special buttons. No scenes of next week’s post, no gratuitous jokes, and no beach pictures of my young lovely baby sister, perhaps standing next to her blond 28 year old daughter.

Forget bells, whistles, and fish swimming across the page.

For my blog I just want to write. No egotistically collecting viewer stats. (Hit counts) No paid content, or trying to impress potential advertisers, and no linking to fool search engines. Besides, every time I mention an archived essay, without linking, I know from my stats that very few will go and look. … It’s all good.

See you next week!

Sean Crawford

On the lone prairie,

2018

Footnotes: (Again, reading as a leisure activity, you may go grab a tea now)

~My previous 25th blog was A Blog Interview with Me archived August 2017

~Can I discern who visits my site? No, not unless they have a home made web site. Ordinary blog templates are anonymous.

~It’s a small world: Minkee (Hermine) Robinson and I both have short stories published in an anthology out of England, The Baby Shoes Project.

~Regarding that lady in UFO pink, I dwell on the casualties of time’s arrow and war, and the old show UFO where an outrider was killed, in my essay Outriders and UFOs archived October 2014

~I have a statistics (stats) feature, very crude because it’s free, showing the “top ten only” for post hits, sources, and nations: Recorded for the day, week, month, and “all time.” 

Hence I know that No Links is Good Links is in my top ten of all time. (July 2012) My most hits ever? The Death of Buffy, back in January 2012. My one on Anya, Friend of Buffy, only got a normal number of hits. (April 2014) Maybe to get hits I should have titled it The Death of Anya. (If you only want to see her death part, click on the last Youtube music video link in the essay)

Hey, I wasn’t “blabbing,” when I revealed Buffy dies. Her death is foreshadowed right from the first episode, and again when she overhears the only two grown men in her life discussing how her death is prophesied. She confronts them, right after she hears her fate, in this dramatic Youtube clip.

Similarly, when a certain young companion on Doctor Who dies she foreshadows it for us, “This is the day I died” in a voiceover at the very beginning of the episode. That way we would not be so shocked, even though her death scream was so loud. (They say you could hear her all through the BBC studio) She was sadly missed. You can find fan clips on Youtube of other characters referring to her down the years.

~More fun with stats: For my essay about a housewarming, where the three residents are a virtuous gay woman and a straight couple living in sin, (July 2011) I keep getting hits from India. I guess Indian students have a school assignment to write a composition on housewarming parties. So in the comments I noted that an important man with an Indian name, the Prime Minister of Ireland, is a homosexual. 

He came out “of the closet” casually during a radio talk show, six months before the election, and still got into power. Of interest to students? Maybe not. No student ever adds to the comments. And no student clicks on my label for “gay,” either.