A high school friend, who aspired to be a cunning linguist, had a way with twisting words into amusing concoctions. He called the library the LIBARRY. He called McDonald’s McDooDoo’S. He had many other such play words.
But he had issues with some of my dad’s goof words. Dad called Ketchup Kellups. The hospital was the ‘shpital, or maybe he spelled it like he pronounced it: ‘shpeetal. He called dinner “dindin”. He would probably have been OK with “dindin” but the others offended him for having no linguistic rationale. He thought they were the made-up words of a child.
My sister and I had nonsense words. Some of them I actually remember but most of them disappeared into the abyss of childhood memory. The most memorable phrase we had was “No Curia, Bullsnitch.” That was our phrase for “No shit, Sherlock.” Why am I saying this? I do not remember. Oh, it is possibly because I am at the library. I had not been here since the last time, a few weeks ago, maybe a month. I am listening to some crap from Audible.com, which I today learned has a bunch of stuff free for Amazon Prime members. I am, I hesitate to boast, among that most estimable class of citizen who can lay claim to the privilege and culturally heroic distinction of being a member of the Amazon Prime race. It is more than a brotherhood, less than saintliness. But I and millions of others agree: Amazon Prime members deserve constant praise and endless accolades for their membership in this exclusive, esoteric society.
So I am listening to a couple of Ted Talks, contrary to every fiber in my being. Anything I have heard via Ted was sophomoric at best, or needlessly superior drivel spouted by self-declared blowhole experts.
I could do one of these talks. I could do a lot of these talks. The business of Fake News is, I think, a tip of an iceberg. It cuts to my moral dilemmas of dealing with phony content, bad data, and intentionally misleading content that exists solely for the purpose of serving ads and making money. Fake news makes a fraction of the money that these type of sites make, but I would speculate that on a broader scale its influence is far wider and far more insidious. I would not do a Ted talk (or any talk) without providing evidence to support my claims. I have plenty, though it is not catalogued at this moment. And Amazon Prime members need not scuff their gentle soles with such pedestrianism as condescending to deliver a Ted talk. Amazon Prime members take their show where they wish. I do mine from the cemetery chapel. I plan to be there Friday, for a sermon of sorts.
Crap, this library sucks ass. I have the headphones on but I hear all the chatter and near-yelling of the others. I remember my hunger for noise-canceling headphones, but the cost is prohibitive. $350 for Bose, $400 for Sony, the latter of which actually looks better to me, contrary to Bose having the best reputation for those things.
Today I was reminded of the grudge I have against the Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village. I was reminded of that place a month or so ago, when a friend from Chicago e-mailed a link to a story in… I think it was Esquire Magazine … about the difficulty one reporter had in finding the burial site of Fred Trump, father of the president-elect. That cemetery is confusing. Its grid makes no obvious sense. I can sympathize with the reporter finding it confusing. But the point of the story was that when she asked the cemetery staff for help they were helpful at first, but when she mentioned who she was looking for they promptly stopped talking, informing her there was nothing they could do to help her. It was like she was asking to find Lee Harvey Oswald’s burial site, or that of Senator McCarthy.
I might seek out Fred Trump’s site, just for the hell of it. But today, while rummaging through my RAID, I was reminded of how the cemetery’s web site is filled with images stolen from my web site. Every page of the web site has a header of about 10 images, all carefully scooped from sorabji.com and assembled into a mini-collage of photos from the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery.
I don’t remember now if I actually called them out on this. I drafted a letter, which I intended to send them via postal mail. But I have no record of sending it, and of course no memory of getting a response.
I think I might have forgone confronting them about it for two reasons. One was that their web site stated that photography of their grounds required a permit. I never applied for one. So perhaps, through some legalese either on the books or concocted after the fact, the Lutheran Cemetery folks were allowed to gather images of their premises if they were taken without permission, as if they were the cemetery’s property. I can see where that logic could follow through.
The second reason was that the cemetery staff itself probably had nothing to do with the use of my images. It was almost certainly the web development firm, one Dodge Media, that performed the theft. That web development firm appears still to exist. If that is still the same company staffed by the same individuals then they have come a long way in the decade or longer since they threw together the All Faiths Cemetery web site. Chances are, even if there have been consistent personnel at Dodge, then they are by now unable to even access or edit the content of the cemetery web site.
The quest for a resolution to this crucial matter would almost certainly have met with swift, unquestioned justice — need I remind you I am an Amazon Prime member? — but I chose not to leverage the prestige of my Amazon Prime membership…
Haha… I’m full of shit sometimes, and it is fun to float with the other fecality in the oceans of shit in which all of us tread water. Talk about fake news… reality is fake, relationships and perspectives on life based in fantasy and the comfort of finding voices with which you agree to the exclusion of anything to disrupt the serenity of the choir with which you surround yourself.
I am getting out of here, this library is just too fucking noisy. Now there is a softly screaming baby…
