It started out as an apology of sorts…

So, as you may know if you are someone who follows this blog, this last week has been a little rugby-enduced fighty on the Facebook.

i had two people in particular who pointed out to me the problem [me] which seemed to somehow be linked to my having too much opinion on too many things on Facebook:

I’m troubled by the fact that you have an opinion about everyone and everything

Brett, you do seem to have a lot to say on Facebook.

So i was in two minds about what to post here. Part of me wanted to write something about why it’s okay that i have a lot of opinions about lots of things and a response of “You have an unfollow button at your disposal” [what they call a win-win] to those people…

Meanwhile i also had the idea of sending out a call to more people to have opinions on matters of importance [race, reconciliation, poverty…] so i wouldn’t have to have as many…

But then i kind of got distracted by a search for this Far Side cartoon strip which would have been far more appropriate for my train of thinking if it said “Stupid People” rather than “Jerks”

Because they really do abound on the internetwebs, and i do so often feel like i am also forced to respond in some way, almost as a means of civic duty to the world.

And then i stumbled upon this one which is ABSOLUTELY true to life for me that if such a society did in fact exist, that would by all means be one of the first questions asked:

And so i ended up not writing on any of those topics at all, but rather searching the house for a really large cardboard box:

Mark Twain might have been on the right track…

And as i looked back on the two comments from the people who decided i was too Facebook opinionated, i was pleasantly surprised to see that one of them [who i have since made peace with] wrote this absolutely amazing thing which i didn’t notice the first time around:

I think you could also be bit less ‘rude’

Which of course only made me think of this, my favourite Friends clip ever… i hope you “like” it.

Pearls before Drugs

A friendly anti-drug service announcement from our beloved punster-in-chief Stephan Pastis and the gang from Pearls before Swine:

[For Pearls before Swine take on Solving the Energy crisis, click here]

[For Pearls before Swine helpful tips on Cartography aka map-making, click here]

 

Pearls before maps

been a while since i stuck a Pearls strip in my blog, but this felt like a good one to begin the New Year with… just finished reading the Rat’s Wars compilation [which was my Christmas present to myself] and have added his next compilation to my wish list already…

but in the meantime, people who deal with a lot of shtupidt people will resonate with this i feel:
and the follow-up:

[For a dangerous Pearls before Swine featuring ‘Grumpy wife face’ click here]

[For the longer list of some of my favourite recent Pearls before Swine strips, click here]

this is too much of truth, if only it were possible…

as you will probably know if you have followed my writings for any amount of time, my favourite cartoon strip is called ‘Pearls before Swine’ by Stephan Pastis [who stubbornly continues to refuse to add a stuffed dolphin called ‘No_bob’ [because he doesn’t] to his series, fearful of the unmanageable rise in book sales i imagine] and every now and then he just completely nails life on the head like in this one:

[For a great looped cycle of some of the other Pearls Before Swine strips I’ve enjoyed over the years, click here]

 

the ABC of writing a blog, and invoking hate speech and candyfloss

i used to think a blog was just a way to get your thorts down… in a public space because yes someone else might be interested in hearing what you think; or else it was an opportunity to make some laugh or challenge someone about life and living; and of course the opportunity to have moments of complete randomness, because i like random. it helps fill in the gaps.

but i’m learning that that is not what writing a blog is all about at all [i love sentences that allow you to have the word “that” twice in a row and still make sense] and so here is my breakdown of one way blog-writing works [that involves hate speech, personal attack and waves of candyfloss]

[A] i write a blog about a topic

[B] someone makes a comment off topic and starts a heated discussion when i politely respond to them which generates into a heated debate

[C] somewhere further down someone joins in and backs their unrelated-to-blog debate and throws in a personal attack either directed at me [“you hate animals”] or else Christians [“christians hate animals”]

[D] from their many years of experience of knowing me and having any idea of what i am about one of the above people will make an absolute statement summing up who i am as a person [“you write blogs because you are desperate to receive all the fame that comes with writing blogs” – hm, they may have spelt “defame” wrong]

that is one way it goes and then eventually i might get tired of approving comments that are unrelated to the original blog and causing destraction and so may even refuse to approve one or two [hardly ever happens] and even delete a couple to clear up the blog which brings in its own wave of “you always” and “christians never” statements

there is another way of achieving the same results i have found:

[A] starts with a friendly request – “hey there, i really like orangutangs, do you think you could make a link to my ‘i love orangutangs’ site because i would really like that

[B] i reply with an honest, “i choose not to like that site because i choose not to given that i have a right to choose to like or not like a site and i don’t particularly like this one”

[C] friendly request changes tone – “you are evil and hate animals and so do all christians and you probably kill baby seals for fun and don’t put the toilet seat down”

[D] i smile. because i realise once again that writing a blog or a weekly thort or recording a podcast is not as simple and straightforward as i imagined and i stop for a second and wonder to myself if there will ever come a day when someone writes a comment related to the blogpost above it. but then i return to reality.

how am i able to smile and keep smiling? engage and keep engaging? love and keep loving? hope and keep hoping?… well, as my good friend Dr Seuss once wrote: “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

lesson for phone technicials

so last week my phone stopped connecting to the internet – not a train smash cos i don’t inet much on my phone but just a nuisance really

so i phoned the phone network (don’t want to mention names but rhymes with spurgeon and starts with a V… and is Virgin) and chatted to someone who referred me to someone in the technical department cos after all it was a technical issue

‘sent me’ settings which my phone never received so phoned back and said he would do it manually but i didn’t have access to another phone – tbV was out thesising – and so we tried – and missed a few times – to make a time when both phones would be available – still waiting for that call to return incidentally altho he did phone once while i was shopping and couldn’t do it

then yesterday i went trawling the phone shops of Stellenbosch – which doesn’t have a rhyming-with-spurgeon-v-starting shop and asked all the other brands for help – most of them couldn’t cos i wasn’t registered with them but two of them gave me advice which involved reformatting and saving information to pc and blah blah blah – no luck

this morning i had breakfast with my good buddy craig beech – he told me to turn my phone off and take out the battery and replace it and turn it on again – i have internet once more

take note working-with-phones-is-my-current-livelihood people – it was not rocket scientist – in driver’s ed it would amount to the “pick up car ke part of the lesson

thankx craig, sometimes it is good when life is a beech