Quote of the Day

And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, the place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. I saw how sweetly we were enabled by the land and the animals and our few simple tools.
                                             Wendell Berry - from A Place on Earth

Quechup Warning

Over the last 48 hours I have been bombarded with invitations to join Quechup, a new social networking site. DO NOT DO IT. I was fortunate that the first "invitation" I got was followed about 10 minutes later by an email from that person (someone I didn't even know) saying ignore it, that they spammed his entire address book. He was not happy, needless to say. He is a writer, and had a ton of professional contacts in his address book, so they all got hit along with the rest of us.

His invitation and follow up email was followed by numerous others, including some to my podcasting groups. The way this site works, apparently, is to ask if you want to see if any of the people in your address book are on the site yet. But, unlike the scrupulous sites like Facebook, this one just automatically spams everyone who's email address it can latch onto, telling you that this person has invited you.

So, if you get an invite from Quechup, just ignore it. And realize the person who appears to be sending it may have no idea it has gone out under their name.

The Random Button on blog sites

Hitting the Random Button on blog sites can send you into dark alleys of the information superhighway disguised as Mommy Blogs, where you find more talk about pee and poop - and sometimes photos of children on potty chairs - than you would think possible.

Frankly, I'm not that interested in the toilet habits of toddlers, so I read very few mommy blogs. I always wonder who is so interested in looking at small children on potty chairs, and why anyone would indulge that interest by posting such things on the world wide web. I find the whole thing more than a little creepy - from taking such a photo to posting it online to looking at it. Just because digital cameras make it possible to capture every moment, doesn't mean you should.

Of course, for reasons that escape me, parents have been doing this for years. And, those of us who have dated the grown up men who's personal moments were documented by their parents are put in the difficult position of figuring out what to say when confronted with the photographic evidence that the man we're dating wasn't always potty trained. "You freaks, why would you take a photo like this of your baby?" is not appropriate. Just in case you were wondering.

It's not like we thought he was so perfect that he came out of the womb potty trained, but we don't need to see it. Some things are things we know intellectually, and that's all the experience we need with it. We know he clips his toenails, too, but we don't want to see it. Eeeewww... (I'm particularly disgusted by toenails, for reasons I don't understand. Hey, we all have our hangups.)

And why do the parents always want to show you the photo of their little darling on the potty chair decades later? Why? I don't need to see that. Some things are meant to be private. As of yet, I've not had a single man pleased to share the photo with me, but his twisted parents get some joy out of it. Obviously.

With the advent of blogs, now they can spread this joy world wide. It's creepy. And I won't make the mistake of hitting the random button again anytime soon.