• Where’s the header picture? I removed it because this blog posts to my author’s page on Facebook and the software that made that happen kept selecting the header picture to display with the post rather than the picture I had inserted into the post. That ended up looking like nonsense. Sometimes I could fix it, and sometimes not, but the hassle was getting to be just too much.
• Figuring Out Readership in Advance. I can’t do it. My post about the latest Florida tollway boondoggle is getting more attention than posts about Run, Rose, Run (Patterson and Parton) and the real librarian of Auschwitz. I would have bet money that the tollway post wouldn’t attract much attention when up against bestselling books. Hey, it’s okay with me. I’m happy to see a bunch of readers every week.
• Darn it, Husqvarna. Thanks (sarcasm) for mounting the sparkplug in such a way that I have to add a socket to my socket and ratchet set just to change the sparkplug. I have accumulated several of these sets and, while each of them is capable of disarming a submarine’s torpedo (after it’s fired), none of them has a sparkplug socket–which costs about the same as the new sparkplug.
• Selling a chapbook for a good cause? If so, why make it hard to buy? First, there’s no apparent website displaying the chapbook. Second, you have to send an e-mail to the professor in charge of the project to find out the cost and how to order it. And then, you have to use a Paypal competitor (that’s owned by PayPal) to make your purchase. Maybe you love Venmo. It seems to be intended for those with mobile devices. Whether or not I can install it on my desktop PC is described in convoluted instructions around the web. The thing is, I don’t need it or want it. So, finally, after a lot of back and forth, I got the chapbook people to accept a check sent via snail mail. Making the chapbook hard to buy won’t help the cause. I hope the publisher didn’t mandate that poems to the chapbook had to be submitted in a WordStar file or rolled up inside a sparkplug socket.
• Thanks for the Janis Joplin pix. I don’t know who’s doing it or why, but Facebook has been displaying archival Janis pictures. She was a favorite of mine gone too darned soon. I hope some of the smiles on her face in these photographs came from joy rather than too much Southern Comfort. I still have her vinyl records but due to bad karma, I’m too hard of hearing to listen to them. I liked the way she thought: “Life is too damn short and [screwed] up to go through it silently loving someone and never telling them how you feel. [Screw] the consequences, [screw] the implications of the actions, to hell with it all… whatever happens as a result is better than the nothingness that is inevitable with silence.”

—Malcolm