Is anyone online on the Fourth of July? the blogger wondered, settling in for a cool, damp night with the computer, aware that such a night would technically involve being online on the Fourth of July...I scheduled this to pop up precisely at midday, but it didn't go through. Apologies. Blog post and book review forthcoming. I'm working on something, in between outbursts of the latest glyphosate reaction.
Animals
Meme ganked from Michelle's Mirror, where it was ganked from Twitter, where it was identified as a "stolen meme" but not traced to a photographer...Anyway I think the baby burro is adorable.
Flower
From the same site, a good clear picture of what is sometimes called the passion or pasque flower (because some varieties bloom in the Easter season). There are different varieties. Around here they look strange in a different way from the picture, but here, too, they bloom in summer rather than early spring. In some places they're called May pops, said to bloom in late spring. Anyway, all varieties are beautifully bizarre with a resemblance to one another.
Cybersecurity
Why I don't actually recommend shopping online, although I'm willing to offer perks to those who do...
I think government should make this simple. What needs to be kept out of the Internet are the real identity and contact information of persons. Beyond that, information in the "People who visited this site also visited this other site" category ought to be fair game. It harms nobody. Spam is annoying, but it can be filtered out. As long as these merchants don't know anyone's real-world name, what harm can it do them to note that people who googled "AIDS tests" also googled "drug rehab" or, very likely, "appeal speeding ticket lawyer" or "finish degree online" or "bail bonds" or whatever. They can't use that information to do anything but trace statistical correlations--some of which will be misleading, because some of those searches will be done by writers, clinic workers, etc., who don't use drugs or take chances with AIDS. The only way that information can hurt anyone is if people use their real names online. So, all web sites should be required to warn people not to use their real names, home addresses, etc., online, and possession of phone numbers (to harass people) or Social Security numbers (to steal people's legal identities) on a computer that connects to the Internet ought to be a felony.
The spam problem? I think it's already peaked, and will fade away and die in a few more years. People don't click on obnoxious ads, they don't open spammy e-mails, and they just laugh at lame, obvious, but basically harmless cyberstalking like those online ad systems that keep shoving the picture of what you were doing research about last week at you this week. I think Amazon has already figured out that people don't like being "targeted," and "targeted ads" don't pay.
Assuming that the Internet can be saved from itself--and my skyrocketing page view counts, in the absence of sharp increases in the views of any actual page, suggest to me that Elon Musk may be telling the truth about the automated data scraping, so that the Internet will still be here next year may be a dangerous assumption to make--anyway, if the Internet can be kept functional and useful, I think what's going to work will be for businesses to use it to publicize their own excellent customer service. Big businesses will have to continue to fund the Internet, up front, with small inoffensive ads and/or user fees. The Internet is too expensive to last without that. But people discount anything that remotely resembles an ad, so the actual return on investment will come from making customer service visible to the public.
Far from trying to censor the private people who never bother typing "I look forward to going to Store X to buy Brand Y" until they have a chance to post "Store X was out of Brand Y, and the Brand Z they offered instead is garbage," businesses should highlight these interactions. I happen to think that most of the complaining customers are right, and are doing a public-spirited thing by complaining, demanding better service for everyone else as well as for them. The poor clueless kids doing their first jobs don't see it, but the business owners should be able to see it. If someone says "That gadget you sold me CRACKED when the plane crashed and I ran blindly away from the burning wreck and slid down 700 feet of scree on the backpack with the gadget in it," what can you say but "Sorry the gadget cracked. Where shall we send the replacement?"--because that kind of response is legendary, and builds the brand. (Seriously, replacing a pocket watch for an old grouch who fell down on the ice made Richard Sears, and thus Sears Roebuck, famous, just as walking however many miles to return however many pennies won President Lincoln the nickname "Honest Abe.") Then the business has to sustain the standard it's reached, but everybody wins. Even if the complaining customer was a miserable old grouch who left both his parents and his child to burn up in the wreck, radical kindness may be the one thing nobody's tried, the one thing that might work, on that too.
Colleen Redman reminds us that writing a weekly poem is a good discipline. She's right. I don't have a good excuse. I don't even have a bad excuse.
(A bad excuse for not writing a weekly poem? "I'm working on a NOVel." So? Write the poem that will go on the frontispiece of the novel. Still writing next week? Write the poem a character in the novel will find in a box of old letters. Etc.)
By the time youall see this link, it won't be seasonable any more. You can always save it for next year.
https://classicalpoets.org/2023/07/04/independence-day-a-fourth-of-july-poem-by-susan-jarvis-bryant/
Zazzle
I thought, "If I do a Zazzle product on the Fourth of July, isn't that like advertising that I'm not supporting my home town's festivities? Is that like adopting a caption that says 'Old, Sick, Grumpy, and Devoid of Public Spirit'?" And then I thought, "Well, intermittently I am those things, and I ought to publicize the fact, because knowing why it's happening can help stop it happening to other people as well as me." And then I thought, also, "Zazzle has a valid reason for prodding people to advertise its new products--specifically, insulated water bottles--at the beginning of the hot season. People are going to be outside, in the city, on those Code Red days we're seeing more of every year. A bottle that keeps the ice and condensed water inside, sealed so it can be carried onto a city bus, could save somebody's life. It's only 87 degrees and about 80 percent humidity here...which means it's pushing up on 100 degrees in Kingsport, ten miles away. Older people are going to want to go out and see the fireworks with their grandchildren, again, now that that's legal. They need bottles of ice water now and it's none too soon to advertise washable, reusable ones."
Here's what I like about Zazzle. This person has designed a butterfly water bottle with images of a South American butterfly. The "Postman Longwing" is considered a biological relative of Florida's endangered Zebra Longwing butterflies, but they are different animals. If this design is being sold in aid of a cause, it wouldn't be ours. But, when you use a link from me to buy it, Zazzle actually sends us a sales commission that's actually higher than the designer's product royalty. So if you want your bottle decorated with exotic butterflies, go for it--you're still supporting the campaign to protect the habitat of North America's Monarch butterflies, and of course the hundreds of others that share their wide-stretching habitat range.
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