13 Thoughts: A Friday the Thirteenth Post

Thirteen for the Thirteenth

Rocket Ship Galileo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 






       Lately I've had so many things that I've wanted to blog about, but I can't motivate myself to write the posts.   Ideas keep coming to me--ideas that interest me.  Do they interest anyone else?  But, alas, I don't post and I don't even visit other blogs like I used to.  And I'm still cleaning my garage.

           This being Friday the 13th, I thought I might post 13 random thoughts that have passed through my mind of late...


1.    Here's my defense of Harvey Weinstein.................................

2.   This Weinstein thing could take several directions.  Wherever it goes, this story could get mighty big going way beyond Harvey.   Unless there is some kind of cover-up.

3.    By the way, what's happening with that Mandalay Bay shooting?   This is starting to get weirder and weirder--as though it weren't weird to begin with.

4.   I'd never seen the 1950 film Destination Moon until recently.  I was impressed by the accuracy of the science in this cinematic version of Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo.  Sure there are gaffs and absurdities, but keep in mind this movie came out nearly 70 years ago.

5.   Girls in the Boy Scouts just doesn't seem right. When I was a kid I used to like the official BSA magazine Boys' Life.  What would they call it now?

6.   I don't care what the Boy Scouts do, but please don't mess with the Girl Scouts.  Gotta have those cookies.  What the heck do Boy Scouts sell anyway?

7.  Now and then I tune into CNN just to see what they are reporting.   Has anyone else noticed how whenever they do a story about President Trump they lead-in with something negative?   I'm sure it's a psychological tactic, but that's one reason why I don't watch much CNN.

8.  I watch even less MSNBC--only now and then out of curiosity to see what they are talking about at that moment in time.   My moments with MSNBC are usually fleeting.

9.   Lately I've been tuning in more to One America News Network (OAN).  They present a wider range of news stories than one finds on the other networks.  This network reminds me of CNN in the earlier years when it was almost exclusively news stories with little to no opining.

10.   Going through a box of cassette tapes that I found in my garage, I reboxed them more neatly, looking at each one as I put it into place.  I remembered them all.  So many great memories of listening to taped music in the 80s and 90s.  The Soundtrack of my Life during those years would be very long, lasting for hours.  That box represents a mere fraction of all the cassette tapes I own.

11.  I haven't heard too much in the media about the Rohingya "Crisis" in Myanmar (Burma).   When I have heard reports they don't seem to correctly jibe with what I've understood about the situation.  This problem has been going on for some time and I think it started with the Rohingya people so I don't have much sympathy for them.

12.  Halloween is coming and that reminds me of my old job as well as many other memories.  My earliest posts on Tossing It Out were all related to Halloween.

13.  Sometimes I daydream of moving to some place where I have no connections.  Lately I've been monitoring the housing market in Marion, Virginia.  Anyone know anything about Marion, Virginia?


          Please be sure to come vote on my Battle of the Bands post that will show up on this blog space on Sunday October 15th.   This round I'll be picking a song that is Sunday appropriate. 

Related articles

• Desperate Rohingya Muslims filmed swimming through river in attempts to flee Burma
• Myanmar says 163 killed in Rohingya attacks in past year
• Harvey Weinstein 'facing criminal investigations over Hollywood sex abuse scandal as he heads for Arizona rehab'
• Harvey Weinstein

The Big Blog Idea

.....continued from yesterday.

            Once my job had ended and I was newly unemployed at the beginning of March 2009 I began looking for new employment.  I had not been out job hunting for twenty years, before the pervasiveness of the internet.  In fact, I've never really had to seriously "hunt" for a job for very long.  In the past,  jobs had always been easy for me to find and they usually came to me rather than me hunting for them.  I figured that with my experience, a job, despite a bad economy, would fall quickly into my lap. 

             This was not to be so.  Jobs were in short supply in the Los Angeles area.  In addition, I was under the curse of being "overqualified" which is typically hiring code for "we're looking for someone else".  I soon discovered that pounding the pavement and walking in to fill out applications was not the way it was done for most large companies.  Now applications were completed over the internet, which certainly saved on driving around and applying in person.  I began spending the day on the computer applying for employment online.

            Fortunately, after so many years at my previous job, I was eligible for unemployment.  I could stay afloat financially for a while, I just wouldn't have the extra money I used to have.  With the extra time at home, I began organizing and cleaning things around the house.  I discovered that we had a lot of stuff around the house that we really didn't need.  If only I could find an easy way to sell it to make some extra money while cleaning up the house at the same time.  That's when I decided to open an account on Craigslist.

           Things went nicely as I put up items on Craigslist.  I was getting rid of things and making some pocket money.  Selling over the internet was a nice easy way to do things.  However, I noticed that in addition to the email queries about what I was selling I was also getting advertising spam each time I put something up for sale.

           The most common spam email offers had to do with "make money at home".  This did catch my attention and I started looking at some of the ads.  Many of these had to do with making money through Google.  For $99 and a small monthly fee, the email sender would set up a blog for me and teach me how to maintain the blog which would earn money from advertising.  It sounded interesting.

              After some investigation I realized that I didn't have to pay anybody to set up my blog.  Google would provide me all that I needed to set up my own blog.  I followed the procedure at the Google site and put in my information to open an account.  That's when I discovered that not only did I already have the account, I also had a blog that was ready to go.  I looked and sure enough there was the Tossing It Out blog page just as I had left it nearly a year and a half earlier.   All I had to do now was start writing.

              I studied the Google tutorials and researched some other aspects of blogging for a couple of days.  I set up my blogger profile.  Then I signed up for Google Adsense which was my real purpose in wanting to blog.  I was going to become wealthy by merely sitting at my computer and putting up blog posts.  The Adsense notification advised me that it might take up to two weeks to get approval.  This would give me some time to get some articles online and establish what kind of blog I was writing to make ad placement easier.

             My decision was to start out focusing on Halloween since that day was coming up and I knew the advertising should be heavy for Halloween related sites.  I would begin by writing exclusively about Halloween since that was what my background had been related to for the previous twenty years.
          
             On the afternoon of Sunday, September 20, 2009 I began writing my first blog post.  It was a random stream of consciousness sort of thing with several uses of what I understood to be key words.  I included lots of mentions of "Halloween" with a few other holidays thrown in for good measure.  Then at 6:51 PM I posted my first blog entry called Halloween Is Coming.   No one made a single comment--in fact you can still go back and leave a belated comment if you'd like and even read that first uncertain post on Tossing It Out.

            And so it began.  For the next several days I was posting articles about Halloween.  The first word in every post was "Halloween".  I was doing things the way I understood them to work.  I continued to study the topic of blogging so I could understand how to get top Google search engine placement, more followers, and readers to comment.  

        I very quickly decided to produce the best quality writing that I could.  After all, I had always thought of myself as a writer and now I had an opportunity to introduce my writing to a wider audience than I had ever had at any previous time.  On my third post I developed my blog mission statement.  I wanted to treat my blog with a professional approach.  I wanted to take this blog seriously.

To be continued tomorrow.......

Halloween is Coming!

Halloween costumes, halloween masks, halloween candy, halloween decorations, halloween cards. Halloween cards? Okay nothing new, but today I walked into the Hallmark store at the mall near where I live and I was struck by the quantity of Halloween cards on display. Total display racks devoted to nothing but this "holiday". Perhaps later I can expound upon my wonderment, but I just thought it seemed kind of weird.
Halloween is coming. So is Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year. And of course right after Christmas the Valentine's merchandise will start appearing on store shelves. Today I heard mention of EID which is something to do with Ramadan or something like that-- I don't really keep up with the ethnic (to me) deals. But I did not see any EID or Ramadan displays in the Hallmark store-- and I am happy for that. So one might look at my words here and think to themself, "this guy seems rather holiday obsessive," and I might say in reply, "Okay I've been unemployed for the last 6 months or so and, yeah, it pops into my mind now and then." And it does, but not that much. But enough of that already.
I'm just thinking about blogging. Have been for several months. I guess unemployment does that sometimes. I started this blog awhile back, but this is my first entry. It's an experiment so I'm just writing stuff. I guess that partly what a lot of blogs are, right. I'm just formulating random thoughts and ideas and tossing them out there. Maybe some of them will stick. So anyway please bear with me. This may also be my last post or it may be the beginning of a long exercise in randomness. Or this all may become organized and come together as a fruitbearing farm of thought. I used to fantasize about being a farmer someday. That seems like a lot of work though--but, hey, it is employment.
So what do you think? Obama, Michael Jackson, NFL, Armageddon, Facebook, crochet, cycling, cyclones, cyclotrons, randomness, organized thought, nihilism? I don't know right now. This is my first post and I just tossing it out, seeing if it sticks to the wall. And if it does-- well, if it does I'll figure out what comes next cause right now I don't really know exactly what is going on exactly with this blogging thing.