The Vanity Seven

Stupid memes. (That link tells you what the hell a meme is, if you’ve been lucky enough to avoid learning.)

Does anyone else hate them as much as I do? Then, wouldn’t you know it,  some person you like and respect is all, “Hey, I totally tagged you for the meme!” When that happens to me,  I go off in a corner and mutter about how I’m going to have to unfriend the oh so likeable Dan and Audrey, or that good natured Peter, and that is going to suck for me,  mostly, because they have plenty of fine friends who are much less surly.

The annoyance meme I’m crabby about today asks that I dig through my archives and find posts that fit each of seven categories. It also requires that I be somewhat vain and show-offy. Um. Okay then.

Memes.  Bah,  humbug. Here’s your seven posts, damn you.


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Guest Post: Night Train to Salzburg

My friend Ciaran put himself through all kinds of crappy travel so he could hang out with me in central Austria for about 36 hours. He sent me this email about the train portion of his return trip and I liked it so much I asked him if I could share it with you. He …


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Observations with Linzer Augen

The cookie was a Linzer Auge. I was eating it with a tiny pastry fork at the Linzer Bakery on the main plaza in Schaerding. A Linzer Auge is a sandwich cookie, two crenellated pieces of shortbread filled with red current jam. This was quite a good one, the shortbread was buttery and crumbly, the …


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I Love Postcards

No, dammit, the postcard is not dead. I still send them, I still love recieving them. And while, yes, you can’t beat those ruffled edged Kodakchrome color landscapes you can still buy from postcard racks and at garage sales, access to the wonders of digital means that you can create your own postcards with your …


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Stubbornly Clinging to the Organic Web

This is about blogging. It’s meta-crap. If you’re not interested in meta-crap about blogging  (and really, who can blame you!) you might enjoy this tiny story about a moment on the beach on Moloka’i instead.

About three weeks back, I pulled out of a Triberr group. Triberr, if I understand it correctly, allows you to build a “tribe” of like-minded folks. Once you’ve built your tribe, it automates the promotion of the work by anyone in your tribe.

I’d joined a group of top quality writers. Every time one of those writers published a new blog post, Triberr automatically published a link to those posts on Twitter. A few times a week, I’d see something attributed to me, on Twitter — an automatic posting under my name. I hadn’t read the post that was being promoted. It took me about four days to figure out what was going on. And then, I pulled out.


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America, Interpreted

Around 7 pm on July 4th — or maybe it was later, it’s hard to know for sure, it gets dark quite late in our alpine town — there was a blast of fireworks and firecrackers. It didn’t last long, 15 minutes, maybe 20. Then it was all over and I went back to reading …


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