nobody asked…

On top of all the other little things that have been going south with my WordPress installation over the past 3 or 4 days, now Comments have quite working AND I can’t even change themes. Even tried to go back to the WP default Kubrick and it just errors out with “Sorry, you need to enable sending referrers, for this feature to work.” Well, at least it said “sorry”!

No more posting until this is squared away. Meantime, I can be reached at:

winstonrand AT bellsouth DOT net

Hope to be back soon! Ta ta…

OK, Memorial Day has come and gone. Charcoal doused. Heart-burn pills taken. Had a good nights sleep. Time to get back to work and reality.

“Work as though you would live forever, and live as though you would die today.”
– Og Mandino

An email message just gave me a tip that something was amiss. I’m a Firefox devotee, but I do check the rendering of my pages in IE6 after any major change, and there has never been a problem. Until now. Seems the Search box, Calendar and all the rest of my sidebar have slid to the bottom in IE. They’re all there and look the way they should. Just in the wrong place, about 4 floors down!

I have no frigging clue where to start looking, but look I must. No, wait! Maybe I could just get the rest of the planet to go ahead and switch to Firefox and be done with it. If any of my more erudite readers has a tip that might shortcut the process, please sing out! I am not begging, mind you, just pleading LOUDLY…

UPDATE:
The sidebar.php in the fading_flowers theme had lost all formatting, but correcting that made no difference. Also discovered in the Admin login, Manage - Files reported the header and sidebar.php files did not exist! Obviously they did or the site would not have rendered correctly in Firefox. ????? So until the problem is solved, have switched temporarily to the Quentin theme which had previously been loaded. It had not been polished as much as fading_flowers, but at least it works OK in both Firefox and IE6. So the problem has been localized to the theme and not to the WP installation. Still seeking answers…

WHY does this kind of crap always seem to happen on holiday weekends?

The battle continues…

UPDATE2: 05/30/05, 5:48 AM
Switched back to the screwed theme. Had fingers crossed that by resting it and rebooting it, all would be solved. Don’t laugh - works with computers all the time! But no, zilch, nada…

Will leave it like this while I try to get some assistance from someone who knows a great deal more than I do. And that could be any dude or dudette off the street…

Just returned from Tamar’s place where I read her post entitled “We shed our land legs to sing in cyberspace”, PLUS ALL the comments. Rarely do comments interest me nearly as much as the original post, but this one is different in a way I’m still trying to define for myself. So bear with me, please…

Click on over and read Tamar’s post AND the comments. Then come back here later for the continuation of my emesis, which will use the same post name “Part 2″. May take a little while, this being a holiday weekend with other time demands…

PART 2 May 30 (Continued in the original post so as to keep my plea for help at the top)

Being a newbie … aren’t we all? … I’ve done considerable thinking and reading about the impact of the “blog” (God, how I have come to hate that word!) on our culture, our society, and on us as individuals tangled in our multi-layered matrices with others like and unlike us. Most of the popular (read “uninformed”) media seem to interpret this great new method of communication in terms of how it will influence markets and elections. Some recent examinations by the more technically oriented media expand those notions to include organizational intramural collaboration by project teams. Certainly there are seeds of truth in all those limited assessments, but Read more

“Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” — Mark Twain (1835-1910)

It first happened about 6 years ago and was announced by Roomie barging in through the front door shrieking at a frantic pitch only the dog could understand. As soon as she caught her breath she told me of the alien life forms in the side yard and insisted I do something about them NOW!

Knowing her predilection for exaggeration, especially when expressed in that ultrasonic voice, I topped off my morning coffee and strolled out to meet the aliens. Phasers set to stun. Rounding the corner of the house, I stopped dead in my tracks, spilling hot coffee on my bare feet. “What the hell is that?” Edging closer for a better view, I had almost decided Roomie was right this time. Who do we call - 911, the Air Force, maybe Billy Graham? But eyeing the life forms in their various sizes and maturities, it finally came to me through my morning haze that we were witnessing Read more

So, just what the devil is a “Christian mortgage”?

Occasionally I check the accumulation of excrement in my email spam filter, just to make sure there’s no real mail trapped there before blowing it all to oblivion. There is a growing number of messages pushing Christian mortgages, Christian dating and match-making services, Christian car loans, Christian this and Christian that…

At first I just revulsed at all this as being more spam…and of course it is. But the increasing volume got me thinking, Read more

Haven’t really thought about Ike in years. I was just a wee lad when he was prez. But lately there has been a barrage of all things Eisenhower coming at me. A lot of it, including this quote, actually makes sense to me and really underscores just how much the core of the Republican platform has devolved over the years. I am NOT a Republican, Ike may not have been one of our great Presidents, but I would welcome him back with open arms and my vote. Perhaps there is another retired General who could carry on with grace and wisdom???

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are…Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, November 8, 1954

This feels like a one-liner kind of day so far. Maybe more coffee…

“If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” - Laurence J. Peter

Just found this link over at South Knox Bubba and found it a delicious piece worth passing on. Could there really be hope for sanity among the ruins? Has the GOP finally eaten its children?

The full name of this site, which will spill elegantly across the masthead graphic as soon as as I have the time to figger out how to do it, is “nobody asked…BUT…I’m gonna say it anyway!”

And a subtitle just spoke to me through the last glass of Chardonnay, and it will be:

“The Center for Artificial Indifference”

So let it be said. So let it be done.

Engage, Mr. Chekov!

Soon after college my big-company employer (let’s just call it “Th’ Company”) transferred me to HQ in Pittsburgh. Almost everyone I met there asked the same question, usually just after the “gladtameetcha”s. They all wanted to know “What are you?” Now I can be downright slow at times, but until they ’splained it, I had no friggin’ idea what they were talking about.

“OK…you know, like where do your people come from?”

“Well, most of Daddy’s side came from down from Kentucky, and Mama’s, well they wuz kinda scattered all over, I guess. But mostly they came over the mountains from Carolina.”

“No, no, no! What nationality are you? Like I’m Italian and my wife is German. What are you?”

“Hmm…Never really thought about it much. Guess we’re just Americans.”

And so it went. Read more

“An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame — Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.”
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

It happens every year… in the spring of the year, when every boys attention has been reported to turn to baseball. NOT! At least not for me. As a kid growing up in a rural Suthun town, sure, I dreamed like all the others of becoming the next Stan Musial.

But you see, life in those days in most little towns was simpler, quieter, and…well quite honestly, boring. There was little else to do in the spring and summer but play baseball. And like many of those little rural Suthun communities, then and now, the only game that really mattered was football. In high school and then the big SEC school I attended, all other sports were treated pretty much like intramurals.

Pro baseball is too slow and boring. NBA basketball never got my attention. Can’t seem to get into NASCAR. Golf never did make any sense to me because in other games and sports, high scores win. And now we’ve got poker on sports TV…gimme a break!

So for me, the name of THE game is football! And the spring has little to offer other than the couple of weeks of excitement generated by NCAA signing day and the NFL draft.

Ah, just wait for those crisp autumn days, 107,000 orange clad souls screaming their collective heads off, the Vols beating up on Bama, UGA, and the hated Gators! Until then, I will smother my boredom with my newfound pastime, blogging.