Chips Off the Old Block? 2018-W12

It's still Sunday March 11th, same day I wrote the prior post. Let's reminisce a moment about yesteryear. My father used to travel a lot for business, back when you still got paper tickets that came in a bundle and used some weird red carbon paper to imprint multiple copies. Those he knew. But, Dad was never comfortable with what we called an e-ticket then (which was different from that an e-ticket is now). Even with those, you had to check in at the airport counter and obtain a boarding pass. I can't know how Dad would cope with a boarding pass on a smartphone screen.

But I feel I'd have a better guess now. I've just finished writing and posting the last blog, and discovered that the blogging system and photo support are very different now.  Consequently I have some technology puzzles of my own to ponder and resolve. Where do my uploaded pictures go now? How can I breathe new life into my Historic and current Gallery? I almost wish I had a teenager to whom I could outsource this project!

I'll get there, if not this week than sometime before... let's say July 4th. With that, I'm done writing for today and will pick up the thread later this week. <PAUSE> <RESUME> Later this day, I was reviewing the last few posts and noted some things. The world now is very different since Gretchen Carlson took on and took down Roger Ailes. Though not the worst thing yet for him as it turned out. "Woke" is a thing now, which reminds me I promised to whip up some male banshees to equalize gender in that series. I have an idea on how to make that transition. Ok now I'm totally making a hard pause until another day.<PAUSE for sure>

<RESUME> and it's now almost 2 weeks later. Stephen Hawking has died, semi-ironically on Pi Day. March Madness progresses... and I suppose by that I mean the basketball tournament and not any antics on Pennsylvania Avenue.

I haven't resolved any of my Blogger riddles, but I have recently got a reMarkable tablet so I'm busy consolidating scraps of paper-lists and planning for a more organized 2018 going forward. I also managed to paint last weekend, adhering to my pledge to transition the Banshee series toward more gender equality.

While you may think this shows the same demure subject as last week's Banshee, it is not quite her. Rather, it's the old block off which she was chipped. A 'he' masquerading as a 'she'. I admit it's a bit of a cheat, and an easy cheap shot to boot. Too bad.

I do have a subject in mind for the first Mr. Banshee. He's a world class twat, and refreshingly not part of any current administrations. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Here without further delay is Banshee number 12. Hope you enjoy it's misty mood. I'm fixing to try for back-to-back posts, so fingers crossed we will meet here next Saturday. Peace!

Banshee XII

I'm Coming Up 2018-W10

In retrospect, my 2017 tally of blog posts — one — is at least unimpressive, and possibly embarrassing in the face of unfulfilled promises I made to post more regularly. But now, as they say, I have nowhere to go but up. Besides, how relevant are blog posts any more? Blogging per se seems a little old school when set alongside the Instagram/Twitter-verse that sucks all of the internet oxygen these days.

I am an Insta-virgin (ha!, what a great product that would be), but do have a Twitter account gathering dust, a remnant of my tour as a web-dev boot camper. A personal goal: never tweet again, leaving my total tweet history comfortably in the single- or low double-digit range. As an "old",  I engage the internet rather differently than those Millennials.

I sit on the train to work and watch the youngsters, necks bent, scrolling past endless feeds of #word-barf and #pic-porn on their phone and I roll my eyes... Figuratively, if not literally. In contrast, I read articles. (When I'm not otherwise occupied by looking out the window.) Sometimes news of the day, sometimes so-called "long reads", and sometimes brief essays not unlike this here.

Shortly after the train pulls out of the last stop before mine, I will have put the phone in my pocket in advance of deboarding and walking from the platform into the building. At least once a week, a Millennial oaf — eyes glued to their phone (no prize for guessing that) —walks into me and mutters their typical "sorry" out the side of their mouth. One day I will hear it when I'm just not in a mood for a lame apology from a phone-enthralled mook. I'm not sure how that moment will go, but the telling of it could make for a future blog post.

A post that is sure to be read by no more than three Millennials. All of my personal acquaintance.

Anyway, with the exception of their walk-swipe-bump-sorry.notsorry bullshit I like Millennials just fine; they are not destined to ruin civilization as we know it. Although they will probably over-photograph it.

And speaking of photographs, here comes a painting. Finally! It turns out that the paucity of posts is down to this: me and painting were on a break...

• I was seeing other hobbies
• My painting group has hiatused itself to near extinction
• what I will refer to as socio-political distractions not otherwise specified 

That last item furnishes the model for my return to painting, a continuation of the Banshee series which is explained here. I sheepishly admit I had to look up what banshee number was next.

Banshee XI

I felt rusty and not so confident as I went into and through the process of painting this one, but I like it okay. Same story as I sat down to write this post. No idea what I'd write about, but in the end I'm okay with how it turned out. Thanks to all that mild enjoyment, I now aim to ramp up momentum and get through eleven more paintings and postings before July 4th. Yowza!

Thanks for stopping by