Given the current wave of “political correctness” in describing things not as they are but as suits a particular agenda, should we begin a massive relabeling of people based on their behavioral choices?

Such as…

Should bank robbers, muggers and other money thieves be called “undeserved earners”?

If people commit adultery, maybe instead of calling them an adulterers, we should call them “extramarital activists.”

Murders can be relabeled as “population reductionists.”

Flashers and streakers can be called “anatomic exhibitors.”

Drug dealers could be called “recreational intoxicant distributors.”

And, while we’re at it, we should just call newspaper writers “propagandists” because that’s pretty much what they’ve reduced themselves to these days.

Why isn’t there Coca-Cola flavored milk? Do you think kids would drink milk if it tasted like their favorite soda?

And, on that note, why not soda flavored juices? Surely we have the technology to remove the juice taste and substitute a cola taste? You know how healthy we’d all be if grape juice tasted like Coke? (Or Dr. Pepper? Or [substitute your favorite beverage here]?)

Or beer-flavored orange juice? It’s orange juice, but it looks and tastes like beer? I’d just stick with my Coke-flavored grape juice, but the beer fanatics probably would go for an orange juice that tastes like beer, no?

Where’s the will power, people?

And, on a related note, why can’t we grow lettuce that tastes like steak? It’d be like really fine slices of steak, like from a Philly steak sandwich. Why can’t we do that?

Why do we insist on trying to force yucky tasting “health” foods on people when we could be producing stuff that actually tastes good? People would eat healthy, if healthy food didn’t taste like beach sand.

Not being able to post pictures is really cramping my style.

Now I have to fill these posts with, like, words and stuff.

Mostly “words” because I can’t put “stuff” up here which would be stuff like pictures because that’s the only stuff other than words that I think I’ve put up here.

So, why did I say “words and stuff” when really all I can post is words? Habit, I guess. Habit drawn from many days and weeks of grabbing a photo and uploading it.

Many times just using the photo in lieu of 1000 words because that’s what a photo is worth, right?

So, I could get away with a photo and a sentence. That was easy. Now I have to, like, think or something.

Somedays, I don’t feel like thinking. You know? Okay, I think of things all the time, but not all of them are things I’d want to share and sometimes I wish there was a way of getting my thoughts into text without the effort of actually having to type them. Not that typing is particularly hard, but I can think faster than I can type, so not being able to type as fast as I can think really holds me back.

Because I may have a brilliant thought, but I’m still stuck typing the previous thought and by the time I finish typing that, I’m already thinking of something else, so that brilliant thought may just get lost in the shuffle.

A shame, really. You don’t know how many genius thoughts the world has missed out on simply because I can’t type fast enough.

And I type pretty fast too.

It’s just that I can think faster.

And somewhere in here was a brilliant thought. But as I’m typing this, the next one has already entered my mind and the next and the next and I’m still stalled back here. So, even though I may have moved on, my fingers don’t have their own memory, so it’s not like my brain can be sending them data that they can store and continue to type out as in some kind of tape delay. No, they more or less have to type in real time, which is a shame for those brilliant thoughts.

My fingers like shorter thoughts. They get done faster. So the longer, more thoughtful ones, well, they get lost in the shuffle. Probably. And we mustn’t forget the typos, because I have to correct them as they happen, which means I sometimes have to backtrack on a thought–not too far mind you, but far enough that other thoughts have been stalled or lost in the meantime.

So, there you go. Another blog post devoid of brilliant thoughts and all because I can’t type as fast as I can think.

A real shame.

I have no idea what this post is going to be about, mainly because I didn’t have any ideas for what to write about, so I asked people to suggest a random topic on a site I’m logged into at the moment.

No one’s replied yet, so I don’t know what this post will be about.

Still no reply. Okay, so I need to write some stuff about a topic I don’t know what it is yet. Okay. How about we say these things (whatever they end up being) look nice but you wouldn’t want to eat them.

I mean, eat them? That can’t be good. I’m sure they wouldn’t be tasty at all.

I suppose you could try frying them, but they’d probably be all melty and messy and maybe they’d look good but I’m still pretty sure they wouldn’t taste good.

Cover them in whipped cream? Again, it may make them look nicer, but I’m still not sure you’d want to eat them.

Mind you, you’ll probably want to coat them before frying, just so they have a crispy outer covering. It’ll make them look nice.

Still, though, you’re not going to want to eat them.

And how will they smell when you’re cooking them? Ugh! You better open some windows to air the kitchen out. I’m not sure you’ll want to be inhaling those fumes!

Okay, let me check the site and see if I have a topic yet…

And the topic is “spuds.” LOL!

Many moons ago, I left the comment below on this post.

In your second paragraph, you have the explanation reversed. A normal fire would feed on oxygen. This new fire feeds on carbon dioxide.

And, that leads to a second question, if it feeds on carbon dioxide, why would water cause it to grow? Water is dihydrogen monoxide. No carbon in water, just two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

Carbon dioxide is one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms.

So, if this new fire were to need carbon dioxide as opposed to oxygen, then it would need the carbon. Since dihydrogen monoxide does not have carbon, it should not be able to feed the fire and cause it to grow.

A more likely explanation would be if the water itself were to become the oxidizing agent. A fire is a rapid chemical reaction involving an exchange of oxygen. Normally, water would not be an oxidizing agent, because it is relatively stable compared to other compounds. But, with the elemental form of sodium (i.e., “raw” sodium), water (air, too) can serve as the oxidizing agent. Sodium has to be stored in an oxygen free environment, and that includes a moisture free environment, because NaOH is a stronger molecular bond and attraction than H2O. So, when elemental sodium (Na) is exposed to water (H2O), the water molecule will split, with the oxygen atom and on hydrogen atom combining with a sodium atom to form sodium hydroxide (lye) and leaving the remaining hydrogen atom on its own to form hydrogen gas.

So, possibly, you could have used a sodium-based fire, where spraying the fire with water only increased the fire. But, then you would have to explain how the fire maintained its source of sodium.

I repeat that here because that’s good stuff and, with the way blogs tend to disappear sometimes, I figured I best keep a copy of my comment. Which also reminds me I’ve also posted some good stuff on JD’s blog…

Anyway, so why is that important? Well, that comment led to this post, “Are You Salt or Sodium?“, which is one of my better posts around here from back in the day when I actually wrote stuff here that was mildly useful.

Then, that post was followed up later by “Explode Like Sodium, Flow Like Water“, which is another decent post from back in the day when I actually wrote stuff that was somewhat inspirational and stuff and where I didn’t always copy and rewrite (or not even bother to rewrite) a sentence from the preceding paragraph like I just did here. Rewritten, in case you didn’t notice because you weren’t paying attention the first time around.

If you haven’t read those posts in a while, you should definitely read them now. For one thing, that’s some good stuff there. For another thing, this is all you’re getting today because this post ends right, um, here.

Just moments ago (well, moments ago at the time I am writing this but yesterday by the time you are reading this…), I received a “Make Money Online” spam.

Now, I am on some marketing lists, so it’s not unusual to get messages with promotions for products and services related to Internet marketing. This one, however, was not one that I recognized.

So, I looked through the eMail for an Aweber link. Aweber is a mailing list host, and a one popular among Internet marketers. If I see Aweber anywhere in the message, then I know it is a list I actually subscribed to. Of course, not all marketers use Aweber, but I’d say the majority of the ones whose lists I am on do, so that’s the first thing I look for if I don’t immediately recognize a sender.

No Aweber link. And, nothing that indicates it is from any legitimate mailing service like Aweber. So, I am guessing that it is not a list I subscribed to and that it is, in fact, spam.

The URLs listed in the message aren’t the sender’s either. They are from an URL shortening service, seemingly, but packed with a bunch of variables. So, it’s not an URL I would click on.

So, not recognizing any names used in the eMail nor the sender nor anything else, I have to conclude that it is spam.

Funny thing is that, after the body of the message, there is a whole bunch of white space. Many lines of nothing. Then, at the very bottom is what appears to be an URL for an ad on some sort of escort service website. I didn’t click on that link either.

Not sure why it’s buried all the way down there. I’m guessing most people would either delete the message or click the links in the body of the message and not scroll all the way to the bottom.

Maybe they are hedging their bets? If you don’t want to learn how to make money online, then you must already have lots of money, in which case, you might not have a girlfriend if you’ve spent so much time working to make that money so then you might be interested in an “escort” for the night. I wonder if that’s what they are thinking?

Who knows? I just thought it was funny. Want to make money online? No? Well, then, how about an hooker escort?

I’m going to write about pictures without actually having any pictures in the post. Ironic, eh?

Last year, I took over 1700 pictures with my digital camera.

The beauty of a digital camera is that the cost of taking a photo is so low. I had a film camera years ago, and I used to take a fair amount of pictures with that, but you had a limit. You might only get 24 shots on a roll; 12 if you had a small roll. So, there was much more discrimination in terms of what you took a photo of. It wasn’t cheap to have film developed–not if you were going to be taking hundreds of photos. So, often, those photos offer only a very fleeting look at life. You took pictures for special occasions and the like.

Mind you, I do have some off-the-wall photos from back then too. I would try different things. For example, I have a photo of a fork floating in the kitchen. One time, the place that developed the pictures had a mix-up and someone else got my photos. They must have been disappointed to see pictures of dry ice bubbling in a sink.

So, even then I took “alternative” pictures. But, then there was a long drought of picture taking. I think my last regular batch of photos that I took were maybe the late eighties and then just sparsely throughout the nineties. I got a video camera as a graduation present, so I did more videos throughout the nineties than photos.

Of course, the nineties were when I first started trying to do a major newsletter, which morphed into a BBS system which morphed into the world wide web. Then, sometime in the mid-nineties, we got an Apple Digital Camera for work. It was one of the early digital cameras, and had really low resolution. Ultimately, it wasn’t high enough resolution for what we bought it for, so I never really ended up using it for many photos. I do have some photos floating about on various CDs. They are in a proprietary format, though, so someday I need to dig out an old computer with the camera’s software and convert them to JPEG or TIFF or something I can use now.

Anyway, in 2002, I got a digital camera. Since then, I’ve put more and more use into it, especially as life goes on and you think why don’t I have photos of that? and so you decide to use the camera more and more so you don’t have to keep asking yourself that in the future. In fact, despite having a digital camera since 2002, 2006 was the first year in which I took at least one photo every month. (Actually, the least amount in a month that year was 10 photos in October.)

So far this year, I’ve taken over 550 photos.

Mind you, not all my photos are of things most people would consider interesting. I like to “archive” things; that is, I take pictures of mundane things just to have a visual record of them. It would be better, of course, if I were to actually record more data than just the photo, but the photos will have to suffice for now. Anyway, I take pictures of stuff like drinking cups from fast food restaurants. Most people throw those away, right? And that’s why we need photos. People will throw things out and then we forget what things looked like back in the day. They may be commonplace today, but they are tomorrow’s history. So, I take pictures.

Ditto for stuff like snack packages.

Lately, I have also been experimenting with stereographic and anagraphic images. I don’t have a “3D” camera, but I’ve been able to simulate the effect manually. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t work as well. And now I wish I had known of this and taken more of my older photographs this way.

And, I still take pictures of clouds and flowers and butterflies and all that.

Plus, product shots. I still do those, as well as other images for websites and such. Last year’s Christmas card at work used a photo I took.

Anyway, I just cleared out my camera a few minutes before starting this post, so I’m ready for another batch of photos…

A post goes here. So, let’s all pretend that there is one here.

Because I’m not sure I feel like writing a post today. But, I need to, as you know, in order to hit 1000 consecutive days of blogging in December of this year.

So, let’s pretend that this is a post.

While we’re pretending, let’s also pretend this is a really, really good post. You know, unlike the stuff you usually read here.

Let’s pretend that this is one of the top ten posts you’d link to if you kept a list of the top ten posts you like.

So, this is that good of a post.

On our collective imaginations, of course.

But, maybe that’s what really matters?

After all, if everyone thinks that something is good, doesn’t that make it good? Now, we’re not talking good versus evil here, but good versus bad. But, not bad as in evil but bad as in awful or just not good. That is, bad being the opposite of good where good is not the opposite of evil.

Got it?

Okay, so we are all going to believe that this is a superb post. Not superb? Just good? Okay, I’ll settle for good because I’m really not trying here. So, good will be good enough.

On the other hand, as long as we are only imagining that this post is good, I don’t see why we can’t simply imagine this post is superb. After all, it’s not like it takes more effort to imagine this imaginary post as superb rather than simply good. It takes the same amount of effort. It’s in our imagination, after all. I’m not sure anyone has suggested there are different levels of imagination, have they? We don’t tell kids to imagine their ideal pet, but to imagine at level 7 rather than level 3. Do we? No one ever told me to imagine something at a different level.

How could your imagination be at different levels anyway? Someone might be more creative in their imagining, but that’s an assessment of creativity not imagination. So, I think there are not different levels of imagination; only different degrees of creativity.

As such, since I am suggesting we imagine this as a superb post rather than merely a good post, there is no creativity involved in that effort. You just have to imagine this as superb, not write a superb post of your own or imagine what might constitute a superb post or what I would have needed to write in order to make this a superb post. You need only imagine this is a superb post.

It’s easy. No creativity required. Thus, I say we all imagine that as a superb post rather than just a good post. Why settle for good when we can have something superb, right? Especially if it doesn’t cost us anything, no?

So, there you go. Just imagine this as a superb post and we’ll call it a day.

Ironically, since I have not been able to upload new pictures on here, traffic has been increasing.

If the traffic trend holds, I’ll beat last April in terms of traffic.

So much for all the blogging gurus who recommend pictures as a way to attract readers.

What readers really want is content.

Not that there’s much of that around these parts. LOL.

But, content is the important thing. Words on a page. If you want to share photos, get a Flickr account, I guess.

Also, that’s why you should test things out for yourself and see what brings traffic to your own blog. Don’t take the gurus at face value. Don’t take what I tell you at face value. Try things for yourself and see what happens.

And, yes, this is a short post, but does it really need to be longer? Here’s the summation: Test. Or, “Test for yourself”, but “Test” is shorter.

The past couple days, I’ve mentioned that I designed 48 logos and then a total of 102 logos.

From that initial batch, I narrowed it down to a couple dozen or so options, with the help of a couple people.

Then, I made refinements on some of those, based on feedback. I also added a few more new ones to the mix.

Finally selected one yesterday. The one we picked was one of the last couple new ones I had created.

The logo came off a little less retro than I originally wanted, but it looked better than some of the retro versions. There was a retro-ized version of the final logo, but it just wasn’t as strong as the final logo.

I did use all three of the colors I wanted to use. The triangle did find its way into the logo, but in an abstract way. I had taken the triangle and given it a more retro design. And then I took that and morphed it into something not immediately recognizable as a triangle but that perfectly ties into the slogan that’s incorporated into the logo. Plus, it also allowed me to work in something from an existing logo, so it maintains a sense of continuity.

So, it works.

And now I am working on the brochure. Actually, two brochures… And then I’ll need to work on the website…