I’m old enough to remember Duran Duran’s [first] rise to fame a couple of decades ago.
They’ve come and gone a few times since then, and I’ve gotten a great deal older. I’ve moved on, and they seem to be back again. Again.
I say again: I’ve moved on.
Yet when Duran Duran took the stage at Live Earth, I could name every single visible member of the band. And recognize — and name — the missing Taylor brother.
That’s sillyness.
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With all due respect to Steve Martin, the internet is a wild and crazy place. It’s large, it’s vast, it’s open. It can be very personal.
Or it can be completely anonymous.
These extremes can be hard for some people to conceptualize. For example:
Years and years and years ago I signed up for classmates.com, and, a little later, a similar MSN Group. Today, in my weekly update on what [very little] has happened on the MSN group, I was notified of a new member. Wondering if it was someone I might know/remember, I went to the site to see. There wasn’t a great deal of information on the new member. Name? Age? Gender? Marital Status? Location?
Undisclosed. Undisclosed. Undisclosed. Undisclosed. Undisclosed.
Some of this being undisclosed makes sense: MSN is quite nosey. But name strikes me as an odd choice to leave out. This is obviously someone who prefers the completely anonymous aspect of the internet. That’s fine. But then I get to the email address (obviously redacted par moi):
firstname.lastname@isp.com
Coming so soon after the oh-so-subtle leaving out of their name in their profile, I found that quite funny.
And thought that you should, too.
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There is a phenomenon in publishing that I have never, and will never, understand.
This page intentionally left blank.
This has always struck me as quite silly. It’s not blank, obviously, is it? I know that this is because, in the far distant past, someone came across a page that did not warrant any content, thought they were missing something (that they weren’t), and complained. And/or sued, of course. And the world responded with this: a non-empty empty page. A full blank. A non-trivial trivial thing.
This morning I saw this in the weirdest place I intentionally never thought I might unintentionally see it: the back of a sewing pattern.
Now, no seamstress, I, it’s true. But even still I would have a hard time imagining what might be missing, in the event of a printing mishap, on the back of a piece of paper who’s only reason for being is to be cut to little pieces while being pinned to fabric. What could one possibly be missing, on the invisible side of the paper, that it might actually be necessary to write, in bold sans-serif type 15p high, that it’s blank on purpose. When it so obviously isn’t.
This leads me to wonder if the Powers That Be ever deemed it necessary to write “This side of the moon intentionally left dark”? I guess we’ll never know, without enough light to read it.
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