» On 6/25/2018 12:30:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
"Crap" in "Gluttony" - Publication Day! 

I submitted a 2-sentence, 864-word rant ("Crap" - first sentence = 863 words) about desperate constipation, for a print anthology entitled:

"Gluttony" 7 Deadly Sins, Vol. 2. [The Seven: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.]

The editors replied:

"Hi Alan - we laughed at the beginning, screwed up our faces in the middle, and sighed with recognition at the end. So yes, we will include 'Crap' in 'Gluttony'."

The book was published a few hours ago: https://pureslush.com/store/anthologies-themed/gluttony-7-deadly-sins-vol-2

"69 writers get gluttonous... Edward Ahern, Alan C. Baird, Elaine Barnard, Paul Beckman, Jon Bennett, Howard Brown, Michael H. Brownstein, Mark Budman, Steven Carr, Guilie Castillo Oriard, Changming Yuan, Jan Chronister, Marcia Conover, Carolyn Cordon, Judah Eli Cricelli, Ruth Z. Deming, Andrea Diede, Salvatore DiFalco, Michael Estabrook, Tom Fegan, Nod Ghosh, Ken Gosse, Roberta Gould, Steven Gowin, Noah Grabeel, Anne Graue, Jake Greenblot, Andrew Grenfell, Shane Guthrie, Jan Haag, Mark Hudson, Louise Hofmeister, Sharron Hough, Abha Iyengar, Bryan Jansing, Jemshed Khan, Linda Kohler, John Kujawski, John Lambremont Sr., Ron Lavalette, Valerie Lawson, Tracy Lee-Newman, Larry Lefkowitz, Cynthia Leslie-Bole, Peter Lingard, JP Lundstrom, Chuck Madansky, Karla Linn Merrifield, Marsha Mittman, Leah Mueller, Piet Nieuwland, Carl ‘Papa’ Palmer, Melisa Quigley, Dorothy Rice, Joanne Rizzo, Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, Sarah Salway, Shawn Aveningo Sanders, Rikki Santer, Wayne Scheer, Iris N. Schwartz, Fraser Sutherland, Lucy Tyrrell, Marian Urquilla, Rob Walker, Townsend Walker, Rob Walton, Michael Webb and Jeffrey Weisman"

 
» On 6/21/2018 10:45:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
More than EIGHT THOUSAND Facebookers die every day. 

Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard (BBC):

At some point, there will be more dead Facebook users than living ones – and for those left behind, it is transforming how we experience the death of those around us. [...]

By 2012, just eight years after the platform was launched, 30 million users with Facebook accounts had died. [...]

Neither Kerry nor my Aunt Jackie are memorialised, which means, for all intents and purposes, their deaths haven’t been recognised by Facebook, or by the unwitting users who chance upon them. Their digital identities continue to exist.

Note: YOU can memorialize your loved ones' Facebook accounts ("Remembering ____"), so they stop appearing in public spaces, like People You May Know or Birthday reminders. Just visit this URL:

https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/234739086860192

 
» On 6/02/2018 05:00:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
George Bernard Shaw writes about his visit to Skellig Michael. 

(18Sep1910) Yesterday I left the Kerry coast in an open boat, 33 feet long, propelled by ten men on five oars. These men started on 49 strokes a minute, a rate which I did not believe they could keep up for five minutes. They kept it without slackening half a second for two hours, at the end of which they landed me on the most fantastic and impossible rock in the world: Skellig Michael, or the Great Skellig, where in south west gales the spray knocks stones out of the lighthouse keeper's house, 160 feet above calm sea level. There is a little Skellig covered with gannets — white with them (and their guano) — covered with screaming crowds of them. The Bass rock is a mere lump in comparison: both the Skelligs are pinnacled, crocketed, spired, arched, caverned, minaretted; and these gothic extravagances are not curiosities of the islands: they are the islands: there is nothing else.

The rest of the cathedral may be under the sea for all I know: there are 90 fathoms by the chart, out of which the Great Skellig rushes up 700 feet so suddenly that you have to go straight up stairs to the top — over 600 steps. And at the top amazing beehives of flat rubble stones, each overlapping the one below until the circle meets in a dome — cells, oratories, churches, and outside them cemeteries, wells, crosses, all clustering like shells on a prodigious rock pinnacle, with precipices sheer down on every hand, and lodged on the projecting stones overhanging the deep huge stone coffins made apparently by giants, and dropped there God knows how.

An incredible, impossible, mad place, which still tempts devotees to make "stations" of every stair landing, and to creep through "Needle's eyes" at impossible altitudes, and kiss "stones of pain" jutting out 700 feet above the Atlantic.

[...]

I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world.

http://www.stefangeens.com/gbs.html

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Behind the Scenes in Ireland (Skellig Michael):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9f2y4jUYq8