What's on your mind?

Such a strange tentacled creature, is facebook.™®

This is how facebook®™ greeted me Monday, with a picture of me someone else had posted a long while back:

Shawn, we care about you and the memories you share here. We thought you'd like to look back on this post from 3 years ago.

Really? facebook®™ cares about me? Everybody at facebook©®, or just the executives? Or whoever's in charge of holding onto old posts and showing them to me on the anniversary of their posting?

Or maybe the algorithms and bots and gear boxes assigned to this work have become sentient, developing emotions for those whose posts they aggregate?

Or is facebook©® speaking on behalf of other users?

"This won't show in anyone else's News Feed™®™ unless you share it," facebook®™assured me, and I took it at its word, leaving it unshared.

Last week it designated a Friend's Day — I'm guessing it was some facebook®™ anniversary — and you could watch a video of a pair of hands tossing photos of you onto a surface, along with showcards bearing your name, as if a friend or relative was looking through a photo collection (odd, right, actual tactile photos, with white borders, like from the 20th century before home computers?) and culling the photos of your facebook®™ past for you to peruse and presumably to share.

I didn't oblige. Photos of me are relatively few anyway, and they represent events far between. If I'm in them, I'm part of a group, usually as a reluctant participant (except for portraits with well-traveled swimmers), and it's someone else's photo, posted on someone else's facebook®™ page. Not much to see here; move along.

Many people did share this montage, and on my News Feed®™ toward the end of the day they ran right after another. I didn't look look too closely, just long enough to note I had probably seen these photos from others' pasts. It's the same pair of hands, tossing the same photo shapes onto the surface; only the photos and the names are changed.

I seem to remember that facebook®™ did something like this around the holidays last year, except that it was a kind of music video with your photos. Same music, but your photos, and text with your name in it.

On Sunday, facebook®™ reminded me that the Super Bowl®©™ was to take place later that day, and encouraged me to post about what I was doing to commemorate this glorious day.

I don't really think facebook®™ was asking because it cares about me and wishes I wouldn't be an unpatriotic wallflower and not watch the American Game.®™

Every time I open facebook,®™which is a lot, it asks, "What's on your mind?" Lately it has also asked if I'd like to post onto facebook something I attached to a private email, and gives me to the link to the attachment, making it just a click from world viewing.

facebook©™ is passing strange.

facebook©® regards me likewise, I'm sure.

If facebook©®™ ran an audit, it would fire me as a user. facebook®™ is photo- and video-driven, for one, and I prefer words.

It's the only social media I use, the only one I can handle, the Hoover®™ vacuum of my free thought and time. If I tweeted® and followed others' tweets,™ or snapchatted™® or looked at everyone's Instagram®© pix and gifs, I would lose what little room I have left to exist.

facebook®™ alone has been enough to turn me into one of the folks I used to wonder about, looking into their onyx slabs of magic as the world rocketed by, before I got a shining magic slab of my own.

Now people wonder about me, bent over my magic slab, wonder why I can't or won't give them my full attention. I would tell them it's because I'm following the multifarious lives of people far away, on facebook,®™ but I'm heel and cad enough already by that point.

On days when the world rockets by, taking me with it in a full day of work and away from my smart phone, then I consider it a treat to peruse facebook®™ at the end of the day, to see how other people's days (mostly the swim parts of their day) have gone. It's all the other times, bored and misanthropic, that facebook®™feels conspiratorial, sucking time.

I like facebook.®™ Even as an unsophisticated (photo-averse) user, I find it powerful as a communication tool for special-interest communities. You're probably bored with my adulation of "Did You Swim Today?" a forum for swimmers worldwide; it's still fascinating to witness the global scope of pool swimmers and open water swimmers, of newbies crossing their first pool length, and warriors crossing miles and miles of the ocean's most treacherous and famous crossings.

facebook®™ is the best kind of short-wave radio. I can type a message to a swimmer in the UK, and get a message right back, and have a little conversation in real-time. facebook®™ is wonderful that way.

I have gotten to swim with several people I've met through facebook™®, half a world away. Usually they have had to travel to me in order to make that happen, but still.

On facebook®™ I have met many interesting people, and I like to think that if I somehow lived near them, we could be face-to-face friends.

I also have face-to-face friends who went away, in place or opportunity, and facebook®™ is a way to stay keep connected.

facebook®™ has its limits, though, and overreaches many times every day. I think I may be in the minority here, because what I regard as flaws may be part of facebook's®™ design. It's not good for:

• Politics. It's used for politics, every day, but I'm not sure it's a good medium. True, I have learned more about UK politics than I ever would have without facebook,®™ and I have "liked" and occasionally commiserated with people whose views I empathize with. But facebook®™ is a terrible medium for debate or information.
  
  Much of the political discourse comprises so many slaps of mud on the wall, antagonizing readers to comment or like or rant about. But the idea of carrying on a conversation by following a long string of comment feels anathema to actual debate or conversation, let alone reasoned discussion or a search for information. Which leads to:
• Long discussions. It doesn't take long for me to try and follow a lengthening discussion (about anything, really, though many of these discussions become vitriolic) before I remember I've got matters to attend to in my real life, and this virtual life can and should go on without me.
  
  As with political discussions, I get nowhere. I have neither grown nor helped.
• Personal crises. It's no place for people who need real help. facebook®™ is ostensibly a great and multi-connected community of friends, with vast and instantaneous reach. Yet its immediacy can't overcome its impersonality.
  
  Several times, including recently, someone has posted threatening or at least intimating suicide. I am more or less a stranger except for one tangential common link. I live far away. In short time, more-or-less strangers with the same common ground, more or less, began a lengthy frantic discussion trying to secure emergency help for the person who posted.
  
  By the end of the day, the person posted thanks for others' concern, and something about a small unrelated matter, which spawned posts of anger from others for what they saw as a blithe tone from the person who caused people a world a way to scramble to her rescue.
  
  Occasionally a few post about their hurt lives, and I don't know what to do, so far away, so distant, so ethereal, except give words of comfort and encouragement. I don't know how to ask if they have gotten real, professional help, or if they can get some, or just a real shoulder to cry own.

facebook's®©™ raison d'être is also its weakness. It can't make friendships. It can designate friends, but its definition of friends runs awry of what I imagine of face-to-face friends. facebook®™ friends show me curiosities and breathtaking sunsets and funny videos, which amuse me; facebook®™ friends also show me plates of food, or tell me where they're eating, display vacation videos or show pictures of their children at the amusement park, which makes me uncomfortable.

Please don't take offense if I don't "friend" you on facebook®™— and chances are we already have become facebook©®™ friends, because I post my blog on facebook®™ too, which is probably how you're reading it.

I really enjoy the subject we have in common, and the humor or eloquence or adventure or just the rhythm and cadence of how you share it. But when we become friends in facebook,®™you give me a window into your world, friends and family I don't know, children I wouldn't ordinarily meet and whose lives are best lived away from the window of social media; I give you a window into mine, too, though mine is usually lilliputian and fogged up because it's mostly about swimming.

Your family is your family, and it's fine, and mine is mine, your life your life, and mine mine; if we were face-to-face friends, perhaps our lives would intersect that way, but even then we would keep much private, just like in real life.
 
You could say I don't have to read those posts about people in your world I don't know, and I don't; a thumb flick, and the post rolls away. facebook®™ is about making those connections, and I'm swimming against its tide.

facebook™®© bots, I'm sure, are working on that right now.

Do you hear what I hear?

As usual one morning, I clicked on YouTube®™ to use as my radio for the workday.

That's my habit: Find a song or artist I like, start the song, collapse the YouTube™® page and draw or write to the music.

I can't be the only one who uses YouTube©™ this way, because lately YouTube™ has begun automatically playing other similar songs in succession, without my say-so.

I have to flip a switch now if I want the hit parade to stop.

At first I stopped each song manually as it ended, and found another song I liked. In a short time, though, I was letting YouTube™® do the work, just loading up one song after another. Whatever.

I didn't like Pandora™® for this same reason: Instead of playing the artist I wanted, Pandora®™ algorithms would find songs that math says I'd also like.

Try listening to Iris DeMent with her yodeling helium voice, for example, and your Pandora®™ channel is likely to be hijacked by Alison Krauss. A fine singer, lovely to listen to, but not if you really, really want to listen to Iris DeMent. Math is sometimes wrong.

Now, though, I've surrendered. Sort of.

I choose mixes now. Someone makes these up, I guess. Some YouTube™® fan or subscriber compiles his or her own collection of songs by artist or genre, and posts them to share.

(Here I must confess my part in the ruin of the music industry, and the cavalier nature with which I can click on an artist's entire new album — or even an entire movie! Not that I do! — which someone has posted on YouTube™®, and about which no one seems to be bothered. Including me.

(It's almost quaint now that I click on a YouTube™® music video and told it has been blocked by the publisher.

(That sound is intellectual property rights and creative control and ownership crashing and burning in a chain reaction. Good luck making a living with your art. But I digress.)

Choosing a mix gives me a bit more control about the music chain I'll listen to for that block of work time. Or so I tell myself.

So, on this particular morning, I saw something called "My Mix" on YouTube™®.

"My" doesn't mean much to me in the digital world. Countless applications and devices are labeled "My." Register for college classes, check your health record, chances are the secured page you use starts with the words "My."

"My" sketchbook holds meaning for me, a tangible object I hold dear but which no one else would want or use.  But "My" health record is ephemeral and vague, not really mine; I just happened to type in the write password to get the information. You could also go to your health record, and it would be called "My" health record. Not "Shawn's" health record or "Tom's" or "Belinda's." "My" this or that.

It's nameless and faceless.

So I just assumed whoever had collected this mix just labeled it "My Mix," choosing to be nameless and faceless, and posted it anonymously in the ether, in case someone else — like me — would enjoy it.

I clicked on "My Mix," because the first song was one I'd listened to recently and liked enough to listen again and again, "Holland 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel.

Next was "Let Go" by Frou Frou, and I like the soundtrack from the movie, "Garden State," and had been listening to it in the last few weeks.

Then something by Sufjan Stevens, his new "Carrie and Lowell," sour-sweet and haunting. Then OK Go's cover of the Pixies' "Gigantic," which I found by accident not long ago and listened to repeatedly.

Then it was "Let the Mystery Be," by Iris DeMent, helium-high and yelping.

"Huh!" I thought to myself at this point, "Someone else likes my varied choices in music."

I mean, I'm not the only one with an eclectic taste in music. It's just weird that the maker of "My Mix" has the same eclectic taste.

Kate Rusby is next in the mix, singing "The Wild Goose." OK, not so strange: She's a folk singer, in the same genre as DeMent. People who like Iris would like Kate. We're on a first-name basis.

Then comes a song by Jeff Buckley I hadn't heard before, but I like his aching version of "Hallelujah." Maybe this "My Mix" maker is a bigger Buckley fan than I. I let the song roll. Not bad.

Next is John Hartford. Hey, I love John Hartford! There's not enough of him on YouTube™®, nothing at all from his great album "Headin' Down into the Mystery Below." That's kind of a hard shift from Buckley to Hartford, but cool that this "My Mix" person likes them both.

Then Regina Spektor singing "How," and Missy Higgins singing "Everyone's Waiting," and Pink singing "Raise Your Glass." Some of my favorite songs lately, two of them melancholy and heavy with hope, the last a "Who cares what the world thinks?!" anthem.

Then Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring," my absolutely favorite piece of music.

OK, what's going on?

How could this anonymous YouTube®™ poster like almost all the music I do? It's possible, I guess, but so, so remote. What are the percentages?

Seriously, I want to know: What are the percentages?

Then it dawned on me.

"My Mix" is literally my music. Algorithms and software have remembered and aggregated the music I've listened to over time on YouTube®™; more algorithms and digital voodoo found similar songs, then threw them all together into a collection. Just for me.

Creepy.

Isn't it creepy?

No human particularly cares about my music choices — at least, I really hope no one cares — but some humans made it so a Web site would track my movements and regurgitate my choices for repeated consumption.

And pock the music choices with ads I might want to watch. For things I might want to buy.

At the same time, I notice facebook®™ has begun dredging up memories I posted from two years before. Memories that I no longer even remember. I guess I'm supposed to repost and regurgitate?

I guess I'm not supposed to creep out over the idea that something is putting my life into pigeonholes, never quite to go away, but to revisit me randomly, in a way that I suppose is meant to be friendly and helpful but really makes me want to look in the closet for hidden cameras.

 I'm going for a walk now. Take no offense if I don't tell you where. I'm going to hum a secret song.

Conjurers

Wouldn't you want to know the rest of Anna's story?!

Good thing No. 2 about facebook™®: It's a de facto forum of storytellers.

Which ain't surprising, since by its nature facebook™® is a megatool for tales.

Daily — hourly! — you and I read tales there heavy and light, grandiose and haiku, vulnerable and vague, from hither and very, very yon.

I'm delighted that this social medium attracts people who love to tell stories, and tell them so well, whether spun from pure invention or dragged heavily from life.

Also not surprising: Many of the tellers hail from the south — the southern United States and the south of England. Something about those places seem to make it a sin not to tell a good story.

Cressida in England, for example, invigorates a familiar game — imagining the lives and purposes of people passing by in the shopping mall or airport — to another level. She has fashioned hilarious and weighty backstories for fellow travelers on her daily train commute, and dispatches the goings-on among the regulars and irregulars, even if all they're really doing is sitting and reading and chatting.

In the world Cressida has created, they are spies and saboteurs, social and professional climbers, and closet clowns, progressing through their sundry struggles in episodic detail that deepens the lives Cressida has forged for them.

If the real people ever found out about these daily stories … or maybe they're really as Cressida describes and she is a journalist on the front lines of British commuter life.

Zane, an English teacher in Mississippi, can describe the day in ordinary heartbeats, can lay his life open about the struggles of family and faith, can deliver Southern satire, and then can let rip a story so raucous I want to ask — but don't know how without offending — "Come on, did that really happen?!"

(He, politely, says it really did.)

What makes the stories so important to me are their power to evoke images — so strong that I have to stop reading and look out the window, watching the pictures build behind my eyes.

And I just have to draw.

Another wonderful storyteller is someone I have swum with (in fact, Cressida and Zane are swimmers: A connection?). She goes by Anna and I imagine a mug of good hot coffee in my hand, across the table from Anna in a shop somewhere, while she tells true tales of her layered life.

Tales that make me feel I have been standing still all my life.

The illustration above comes from one of her stories from childhood. I could not help but draw it.

Anna's dad once gave her opossum babies, she tells, to care for after mama possum was killed. They became her boon companions, hanging on her while she went through life. They even wound their tails over her bicycle handlebars and rode upside down with her.

See? How could you scrub that image from your mind? Why would you ever want to?

While reading that, I had to pick up the nearest black Prismacolor®™ pencil and put down in my sketchbook what I saw building in my head. Then I photocopied the result onto heavy bristol (thanks very much, kindly FedEx Office® technician near my house; no thanks at all to the FedEx Office®™ person in the next nearest office, who didn't even want to try and help), and painted over with watercolor.

It's one of my favorite techniques, because the toner resists water and therefore color, and the blacks remain black.

OK, enough technical talk.

This is about storytellers. I hope Anna turns that story into a book. I hope Cressida turns her tales into a book too; I see many keep asking her to. I hope Zane keeps enriching us with stories of his time and place, so foreign and now so familiar.

Keep telling! I want to keep drawing.

Confessions of a serial liker

Hello, my name is Shawn and I "Like" facebook®™©. A lot, apparently.

More than I realized, anyway.

"I 'LIKE' YOU! I REALLY
'LIKE' YOU!!"

* … 

Sorry. I've been working to get that under control. 

Do I click "Like" too much? Well, how much is too much? Who can say, really? I didn't even know my "Liking" facebook©™ was possibly profligate until some people recently made note.

People from three different continents.

My proclivities are internationally recognized.

People have been nice in telling me. I think.

I choose to think they were just poking fun.

Here's the thing. I'm not a media socialite. I'm practically a hermit with a computer.

My phone flips open, Star Trek®™ style. The TV show prop probably worked better.

I text my family, and I text people I swim with. And check the time. There ends my relationship with a mobile phone.

I use email on my office computer. Email is the world's finest communication technology, the apex, the zenith, humankind's crowning achievement. Humankind should have stopped there.

But humankind kept going.

I followed humankind as far as facebook™®, and stopped. I even checked out facebook™® for Dummies from the library before using facebook™®. Truly I did.

(Oh, I did open a LinkedIn®™ account once but I don't use it because, as far as I can tell, LinkedIn™® is a site where you practice entering your name and information because nothing happens after that. Except learning someone has been reached another anniversary in his/her job and you should congratulate him/her.)

I don't use Twitter©™ (who'd want to see me yammer in 140-character couplets, and who would I want to follow?), or Pinterest®™ or Instagram™® or Snapchat®©™ or Tumblr®™© or Reddit™ because, although I can name them, I don't understand their use, and don't want to. Most of the vast social media landscape remains unknown and unnamed to me.

facebook™® is what I'm left with, so maybe I "Like" it to death, you know, to compensate for my inadequacies.

But for all my facebook®™ book learnin', I'm still not sure how someone would even know I've embarked on yet another "Liking" spree. Maybe I use facebook®™ differently from others.

Which is thus:

1. Arising early before chores and work, I scroll the main part of facebook™®, the News Feed®©, I guess it's called, and see what folks have posted since the day before.
   
   Sometimes I click on the Trending®™ stories just to the right of the News Feed™®, and almost always regret it. I'm weaning myself away from it.
2. I click on the "Did You Swim Today?" group page to the left of the News Feed™© when I post about my swims, but I "Like" others' swims from the News Feed™®.
   
   Occasionally I follow the thread of comments, but my "Liking" pattern here is hit and miss.
3. When I write a blog, I post a link to it on the News Feed™® and to my "Shawn C Turner Artist" page; I'm not entirely sure why I have a Shawn C Turner Artist page, when I already have a "Shawn C Turner" page, which I don't visit, but I do.
4. I click on the icons at the top when I get a friend request, or a message, or a new post.
5. I "Like" posts throughout the day, but with less frequency.

That's it. Which means I ignore:

• All the other stuff on the left, the roster of groups and friends, etc.
• All the ads, including "Suggested Posts"®™ that run in my News Feed™©
• The running list along the right side, of actions facebook®™ users have taken, "Liking" and commenting on posts, and befriending people
• The roster on the lower right side, of users who are on facebook®™at the moment, and what media they're using to be there, whether by mobile phone or computer.

Maybe it's one of those places where users can parse my "Liking" tendencies. Maybe that's where I would also notice others' patterns of "Likes," because I don't see them. Occasionally I see the little boxes on the lower left appear and dissolve, announcing when someone has acted on a post I have also acted on, but that's not the same thing.

I use facebook®™ as a way to share in others' extraordinary accomplishments, mostly about swimming, and thoughtful causes and amazing phenomena.

And I don't "Like" everything, you should know. Despite apparent appearances, I'm discriminating. Over time I've developed a personal facebook®™ code about what I read and "Like," and what I don't. You have a code too, I'm sure. Maybe you haven't written yours down, but you have one.

Quoting the bard Barbossa, him of The Black Pearl: "The code is more what you call guidelines than actual rules." Meaning, I manage to muck up my own code now and again, as you'll see.

I "Like"

• Posts about swimming, of almost any kind, sometimes even surfing, but not fishing, which I get a lot of, for some reason.
  
  I even "Like" the same post multiple times if it appears on pages "Did You Swim Today?" — the only page on which I participate — and "Train Hard. Swim Fast. Have Fun," "WeSwimBecauseWeCan," "I Attack at Dawn," and the German "Bist deu Hoit Guschwimmen?" which are swim-related pages I don't contribute to but which people have added me to without asking.
  
  I even "Like" posts with accompanying selfies that look like the selfie attached to the swimmer's post the day before that, and the one before that.
  
  I even "Like" posts that seek advice and I don't have any.
  
  That's how much I like swimming posts.
  
• I even "Like" posts from the German version of "Did You Swim Today?" even though they no longer come with automatic translation and I have to copy and paste the posts into another translator to figure out whether to like them.
  
• Posts from swimmers who are also visual artists, and display their works in progress.
• Posts from swimmers who tell witty episodic stories about their terrestrial lives.
• Posts from a small selection of bloggers whom I follow.
  
• Posts from a friend I knew in high school with a penchant for aggregating interesting Internet items about design, visual arts and science. I often set these aside for nighttime viewing.
• Posts from a selection of people I knew in high school. But it's complicated. See Appendix, "Where I'm wildly inconsistent."
  
• The rare post one or the other of my children has made. facebook®™ is not their thing; if I see any of their posts, they originated from some other social medium.
• Posts by those whom I want to cheer on in their various endeavors and walks of life.
• Posts from people I know who share a viewpoint I hadn't considered. Sometimes.
• Posts about political viewpoints I agree with and feel that somehow, some way, I can do something about.
• Posts showing others' creativity, though I'm not very consistent.
• Posts about ocean life.
• Posts someone frequently puts up about national parks, for which I'm a sentimental sucker. The poster is a swimmer, but doesn't post a lot about swimming.
  
  

I don't "Like"

• Swim posts that smack of advertising and promotion. They get a lot of my "Likes" before I realize they're more about money than the shared like of swimming.
  
• Pictures of food, unless the post has something to do with swimming, and even then it takes me two or three reads to make sure swimming is mentioned, and that the food is related to swimming, such as reference to post swim brekkie, as Brits sometimes say.
  
  I'm not a fan of looking at food or drink people are going to consume, or the empty plate where a meal had been. I don't understand this compulsion.
• Pictures of people's children. It makes me uneasy. I generally don't think kids should be on facebook®™, and if grownups are sharing them, I wish they'd fine-tune their filters to be shown to a select few.
  
  I am very glad facebook®™ didn't exist when our kids were young.
  
  Again though, see the "Where I'm wildly inconsistent" appendix.


• Profile pictures, unless they're really, really swim related. Same goes for cover photos.
• Pictures of someone's fabulous vacation, unless swimming is involved, and then not always.
• So-called "vaguebook" posts that require a chain of commenting to glean what the original post is about.
  
• Most illustrated aphorisms and memes, unless they're about something I'm feeling right at the moment.
• Pictures and videos of dogs and cats.
• Suggestions I listen to a song. Music is so subjective and I rarely align with the suggestions.
• Political viewpoints I don't agree with, natch. Though usually I don't comment. I'm not going to change minds and vice versa.
• Almost all "Throwback Thursday" posts.
  
• "Click bait," up to and including quizzes of any sort, the myriad and endless "what country/Harry Potter character/vegetable/god/color/diva/internal organ would you be?" or any of the "You'll never believe what she found inside this buried doghouse!" variations.
  
  It's taken some time and will, but I don't go to these places anymore.
  

Appendix: Where I'm wildly inconsistent:

• I "Like" some childhood acquaintances' posts but not others. facebook®™ is powerful for bringing people together, and sometimes we'll reacquaint. It's interesting to gather tangentially what this or that person has grown up to become — though it feels weird knowing this — and I gather they infer likewise, and sometimes that's good enough.
  
• I "Like" some relatives' posts but not others, and it has a lot to do with the nature of the posts or my relative relationship. I can't imagine I'm unique this way.
  
  I "Like" some relatives' pictures of their children, but not others, which is my wildest inconsistency. I should probably stop "Liking" all kids' photos.

On the whole, I like facebook®™ as a forum to celebrate the life's vast variations outside my little office, even the variations in swimmers' lives worldwide, which you might mistakenly perceive as lacking variation.

I like its power to buoy and encourage, and to share a laugh or a thought.

I like its human kind. Click "Like" if you agree.

Tainted love

An unfunny thing happened on the way to my favorite part of facebook™®:

Up popped a picture of a woman performing fellatio on a man. Various nude bodies took various positions in the background.

Porn has pocked "Did You Swim Today?" which has been just about the only reason I use facebook®™©.

Porn's sudden presence where no one expected it — and I trust most don't want it — has sent ripples which may spell rifts. I'll watch and wait.

When I started on DYST?, as users often call it, there couldn't have been more than a couple of hundred users, but they came from far and away — many parts of the United States and the United Kingdom mostly, but elsewhere too.

They have all to this point fulfilled a simple mission, as espoused here on the page:

Here's a place for swimmers (NOT SPAMMERS) to report on their daily swims. Did you? Where? Was it in the open water or a pool? Was it hard? Did something cool happen? Who was with you? Did somebody tell a good joke? Do you have a good tip to share? Is there an event coming up? Did you rip a good time?

And that's what has happened. Simple sharing, simple support. From a first time across a 25-yard pool, to multiple times across the English Channel, swimmers on DYST? have described their swim and how they felt, and others have encouraged and advised. Swimmers ask many and varied questions, and other expert swimmers, having been there and done that, answer in kind.

Swimmers have been funny, have been vulnerable, have been sympathetic and even teary, but in almost all encounters I've encountered, the conversation has been resoundingly, unremittingly in favor of everyone else's shared passion, no matter where, no matter what.

I have met some of them, from in the state and around the globe, and celebrated those visits.

Some have promoted themselves, or causes, in various degrees and fashions and frequencies — more than, "Hey, look, I swam here!" — but I take it there's a tacit agreement that it's all good in the name of swimming. Pursue it or don't.

About the only time I've seen swimmers get worked up over topics, it's been about swim technique and training devices or nomenclature; some argued a year back, for example, about "wild swimming" as a term some British habitues use for open water swimming, as perhaps implying vulgarity or lack of discipline. Everyone has an opinion on these kinds of things. But it's never gotten snarky or dismissive.

I'd bet the house that "(NOT SPAMMERS)" was not part of the original credo. It's a late addition.

I wasn't paying attention until complaints arose about the porn spam that DYST? now has more than 11,000 members — exponential growth since I started contributing and sharing less than two years ago.

As it's grown, I guess, DYST? attracted spam. Occasionally some person or entity will try to sell sunglasses, sometimes sofas (?). Some swimmers will try to cheekily shame them into going away, and I sometimes join in. Eventually the spammers will go away, though I doubt the shaming caused it.

Now the porn. I saw the complaints first and not the actual porn, so I wondered at first whether DYST? users might just be extremely sensitive. I mean, these people pictured in their swimsuits look pretty darn good.

Then I saw it: Yep, porn, standard explicit variety. No swimsuits.

Some have complained about it on DYST? Others say they still have not seen it. Some of those who have are threatening to leave the page, or have bid their adieu, prompting responses.

Here's where the whole concept of social media gets weird for me.

Some of the responses, in the spirit of DYST? have expressed sympathy for the feelings of the person leaving, and wishes that the person would reconsider.

In our fear of the unknown, some have said even hovering a cursor over the porn will invite a virus on your computer, or open access to private data, or stash porn secretly on your computer as a kind of rogue server.

Others, breaking wide of the DYST? ethos, have said in essence, "Good riddance!" or "Lighten up! It's just porn," or, "That's reality. Live with it."

All of which have spawned their own responses, and the discussion has acquired an acid tinge. Meanwhile, the guy who created the page, and someone on DYST? who seems to be in a position to know, said they're making efforts to get rid of the porn, which may or may not have been put their by people or entities that had gained access to the page.

The DYST? creator recommended maybe not using the page for a couple of weeks while spammer control ensues.

Which I'll probably do, being just about the last person who has any idea how facebook®™© works, nevermind how to root out spammers among more than 11,000 users.

Forgive me for sounding like the late Sen. Ted "The Internet is a Series of Tubes" Stevens when I say that facebook®©™ has seemed to me like a boundless cocktail party, only with generously distributed time-space portals. Except each is by him or herself in front of a screen, really, and any cocktails are B.Y.O.

One schmoozes at this or that klatsch, and one says something and others chime in, "I like that!" or comment as if in conversation. Someone shows you a plate of chicken vindaloo she's eating, or pictures of the vacation they're somehow concurrently enjoying, or produces a baby in a cute new outfit, or another handy offspring with a medal around his neck, and seeks your review and approval. And you give it or don't, and since you're really in a room alone in front of a screen, it's hard for the approval seeker, likewise alone, to infer by your lack of "like" whether you like the food or baby or medal.

Ads run in constant display about the perimeter of the cocktail party, along with alerts about what others in a vast corner of the party are doing. A nearby portal whisks you there to like and comment, or look and do nothing.

Now that I know that more than 11,000 people are on DYST? —and I know I haven't encountered more than, say, 200 different people in all the time I've been on DYST? — I wonder where all the rest are.

So now I imagine a boundless cocktail party divided into limitless banquet halls, each connected by open doors. I'm in the hall with the subset of 200 I see most every day, and the rest are in other halls somewhere, sharing and conversing with each other. The chance exists that I may see and encounter some of those in other rooms, but I think it's slim.

Someone, somewhere, brought porn to share or infect or anger or disgust or delight or whatever. The stash hasn't made it to all the rooms; the battle is met, apparently, to keep it from doing so.

I'm hoping the DYST? defenders win. It's another pressing issue over which I feel helpless. DYST? is important for me, even though it's difficult each day even to visit the posts of the seven dozen or so DYST? members whose exploits I see regularly.

I like to go to the Irish Sea with them, or the storybook stream beneath the stone bridge near the Lake District of England, or Lake Geneva or Lake Michigan, or myriad points along the California coast or the ascendant St. Johns River or the glacial depths of Argentina. I like the painless close encounter of jellyfish or moray eels, the vicarious wonder of dolphins arcing.

I'd be heartbroken to lose it.

• • •

In other news: I'm keeping it.

Or keeping losing it. Thanks to old friend Robert Zint who hollered all the way from Texas, "Use an electric shaver, you barnacle-domed dolt!"

He didn't say it really. He merely and in the most friendly way suggested the shaver, which is so much better than scraping with a razor over the bumps. I'm just trying to sustain the melodrama.

• • •

In still other news:

Déjà voodoo

It's stunning and horrifying footage, no doubt: A shaky camera captures a stunt plane racing straight up to the sky then diving straight down, when suddenly a wing comes off.

Frantic voices scream and caterwaul as the plane spirals down, the camera operator desperately trying to keep the terrible image in view. After frustrating moments, the plane appears again, now riding parallel to the ground, its remaining wing held aloft like a dorsal fin.

Finally the pilot somehow manages to level the plane before bringing it to a short bouncy landing on a runway. Someone runs into view toward the plane, where the pilot opens the hatch and is just about to get out before the video stops.

So miraculous.

So fake.

So last year.

Literally.

It's not the fakeness that confounds me. In fact, in the year since I first saw this on facebook®™©, the German crew that made the film posted video showing how they tried to deceive viewers using model planes, computer graphics and clever editing. I'm not sure why they did it; maybe an elaborate portfolio to attract the movie industry to their talents.

What bugs me is that I saw this last year, as one habitue and then another shared it.

The first time around, I followed the myriad comments to whomever posted it, which evolved into a long string by amateur forensic videographers, pointing out how fake the film really was. I may even have contributed a comment of my own, something like, "still, it's a really good job of faking us out!" (my strong suit on facebook™®© is useless comments.)

Then the video disappeared, with the generally accepted idea that the film is fun and frightening and fake. The world moved on.

Then last week the video reappeared, posted by someone new who commented, "Have you seen this? How scary!"

And the world moved back.

The world in fact seems to be circling the same path over and over if facebook©™® is part of your life (and it is, admit it).

Once the fake stunt plane video re-emerged, I began making a list of other posts that merry-go-round on my facebook©®™ news feed, having been on the Internet for a year or more without indication they'll go away. This list is incomplete. I do not even have to link to any of them, because you will probably know them by their descriptions:

• The cat dressed up in a shark costume and riding a robotic vacuum cleaner around a kitchen, blithely zigzagging across the floor on the machine while a woman nonchalantly works at the sink.
• The commercial (for cheese?) of a mouse that gets caught in a trap and instead of dying turns the trap into a bench press.
• The Miami-Dade police officer who takes pity on a hungry mother and, instead of arresting her for shoplifting, gives her $100 so she can buy groceries.
• The Bruno Mars "Marry You" lip-dub proposal a man orchestrated two years ago by putting her fiancée in the back of a slow-moving station wagon and enlisting dozens of family and friends in an elaborate dance to the song.
• The video from 1988 of a gymnast named Paul Hunt who performed a hilarious parody of a woman gymnast.
• The video, also purposely deceitful, of an eagle attempting to pick up a toddler from a park.
• The dog happily diving and emerging from a gigantic pile of leaves.
• The elegantly dressed models photographed under water amid wrecked ships.
• The subway staircase that someone had turned into working piano keys, inviting the public to play with the music on their way to work and shopping.
• The flash mob in a town square in which musicians play Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
• Any flash mob, for that matter.
• The black swans that surf ocean waves.
• The photo of scratches cleverly placed in the sand of a beach so that from a distance the scratches look a three-dimensional seascape, complete with real people sitting in a rendered boat.
• The rider's-eye view of a mountain biker navigating a narrow mountain ridge, inches away from precipitous death.
• The video showing a member of Congress sneaking in a rule that disallows Democratic dissent on legislation.
• The violists from the 18th Century suddenly breaking into an AC-DC before shocked patrons at a concert.
• The fifth-grade boys, dressed in caps and goggles, performing a synchronized "swimming" routine using blue tarps as water and concealed mattresses, before a howlingly enthusiastic school talent show audience.

OK, I've grown tiresome, and I know I tired myself out just listing these. You can doubtless add some yourself.

Perusing swim-related pages as I do, I come across similar perennials:

• Some visual variation of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: "Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air." Every two months or so, someone posts this.
• An animation of a skeleton swimming. With each different stroke, muscle groups appear showing how they contribute to the swimmer's movement.
• Variations on "save the sharks" posts, including the photo of a shark and diver with the caption, "This is the most dangerous animal in the world, responsible for millions of deaths every year. By his side we can see a shark swimming peacefully."

OK enough, I've made my point.

And it's not about the posts themselves. The lip-dub proposal is fun, gymnast Paul Hunt is funny. The others are in their own way enlightening or encouraging.

My point is they never go away. They're asteroids swirling in their own growing belt around my computer, appearing and reappearing without abatement.

Part of it is a function of facebook®©™, which by definition connects users and urges them to share, and as new users share what older users have seen, the same material gets passed around. And around and around.

In that way, facebook®™ hasn't advanced us much farther than when I was a kid and my parents and their friends — in those rare moments when they could be adult friends and not our guardians and keepers — would swap crude jokes which had been mimeographed on heavy slick oily paper. The jokes were usually typed, and simple stick figures illuminated the raunchy punchlines.

(By the way, how far has personal printing advanced, that just a generation ago personal copies of anything were largely the domain of government workers who had access to clunky machines making dim images of the original after great time and expense?! Now my parents could have printed their jokes in 3-D!)

The papers were folded many, many times, concealed in pockets and purses from prying curious children. The papers were torn on the edges, their oily lamination having come off at the folds; the jokes were barely legible when they reached new hands.

"Oh, this is a good one," an adult friend would say, carefully unfolding a joke and laughing. "Here's one," he'd say, producing a folded paper, "have you seen this one?"

facebook™®© is like that in a way.

Or is it designed that way? I've heard a critic on the radio describe facebook™®© and similar applications as "distractionware," not only filling up our free time but spilling into the time we used to use for other things.

Does some algorithm keep the same posts floating and whirling before our eyes, keep us from being interested in Ebola or the Islamic State or U.S. companies cheating us of taxes by taking their legal offices offshore … or imperiled water worldwide or impending natural disasters or the need of our attention at the neighborhood school board?

What are we doing, exactly?

Misadventurous

Complacency kills nerve endings.

I zoom along freeways at 67 mph (don't tell the highway patrol), in tight NASCAR™® formation with everyone else going everywhere, calmly gauging openings in the moving mass. Occasionally I become aware that I'm hurtling in a metal cage, vulnerable to the laws of physics and vector forces that would become tragic at the slightest miscue.

Shod in Crocs©®, I climb to the roof of my house, minding the guy wires that tether the aerial, kneeling awkwardly and upslope while reaching low to scoop the muck out of the gutters. One wrong step …

Many, many times I swim my beloved lake alone — cold water, cold wind, stealthy rowing craft, blinding sun, eerie dark, what have you. It's still a shock when once in a while someone points out, "That doesn't seem very safe."

I know the risks, decide I can work with them, settle into the hum of self-assuredness and deaf to the drone of danger. I am in control, even if I'm really not.

No such thing for me, however, swimming in the ocean.

All I can control in the ocean is my mind, to impel my body to enter, and to go through the motions. The ocean sings of a living planet, moving, heaving, immense, breathing, unsettled. Unknown. Hungry, maybe. Maybe angry.

I must surrender.

The part that impels outlasts the part that withdraws, and I head into the waves, as I did this weekend.

I met Marta Gaughen, a fellow facebook®™-er for a tour outside the breakers at Doran Beach. I had been there a couple of months before, my brother-in-law walking the beach alongside while I tried out the water, and demanded to know on facebook's "Did you swim today?" page why no one seemed to swim this quiet beach. Marta posted that she swims the beach frequently, and after a time we finally arranged to travel from our far-flung towns to dive in together. Nancy, my sister- and brother-in-law and niece and mom-in-law came along, with our little old dog in tow.

Doran Beach rings Bodega Bay, a shallow cove a patient couple of hours' drive northwest of San Francisco. Think of Bodega Bay as the unhealed scar of the San Andreas Fault, the edge of the continent, which infamously readjusted in 1906 to level Santa Rosa and San Francisco.

The shape of the bay follows a straight and true line southeast forming Tomales Bay, the trough of the fault, plain as day.

No one swims, several people told me, because great white sharks cruise the waters. Marta says sharks pup in the waters outside Bodega Bay in their season, and sharks are all around us. Whatcha gonna do except manage the risks?

I'm slowly, slowly learning the bay's ways. A beach like this in Southern California, it seems, would teem with swimmers and boogie boarders on the gentle waves.

Their absence here at Doran Beach alarms me. But not enough to stay out.

Following Marta's lead, I dive into the waves, and dive again, finally beyond the breakers, and swim parallel to shore, north to the spit of land that forms the jetty for the fishing boats of Bodega Harbor.

The water is 55 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than in my Lake Natoma these days, and clear to a couple of feet past my down-stroking arm. It is olive green and shapeless beyond that, revealing nothing.

Soft and slightly salty, the water lifts and drops me gently. I count strokes, sighting on some distant building, wondering about where the current is taking me, wondering all I don't know about the water I'm swimming. In the lake, I am moving, the water holding still. But in the ocean, the water moves me, moves around me, despite me. I'm moving, but ultimately the ocean lets me move.

As the smell of fish intensifies toward the jetty, Marta suggests heading back and past our starting point. My body's fine: the water is comfortable and I'm not tired. My brain is the one hiccuping and sputtering; it doesn't want to go back, it wants to get out. My mind decides we have pushed our luck; my mind is quickly laying out the argument that no swimmers were hurt in the undertaking of this endeavor so far — why go father and risk an unhappy outcome with whatever's out there?

Body trumps mind this time and I follow Marta again. She is drawing a bead on a point well wide of the beach where we started, well out into the deeper water. The current, she says, will push us in a curve toward the sand. After a while I trail closer and closer to shore from her angle, and I push out trying to get back out to where she is. With every stroke I think, "OK, I'm OK. OK. I'm OK." My mind is still arguing.

The current has pushed us both back in line with our starting point, and Marta advises swimming straight to the beach and mind the waves.

I have done this enough times now to believe I'm expert, timing the waves to lift me onto the sand. I have managed the risks. I am in control.

Even if I'm really not.

I watch the wave, the one I should have been riding, lift dark and green behind me, then above me. I know enough not to put my back to it.

My mind has made me realize its bulk will fall directly on me, which it did, pounding me to the sand. I force my head straight up in the froth thundering about me, shaking like an astronaut at launch, waiting for the pummeling to subside, then walk up and out of the beach. Safe.

I'll never be comfortable in the ocean.

I can't wait to go again.

how do i love facebook™®? let me count the way

From Dave Mulcahy, all the way from Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland!
Photo taken far from there, calm Lake Natoma, Sacramento County,
California, United States of America.

For all its faults — of which we need blame ourselves; it's only the monolithic messenger, after all — facebook™© is wonderful for one reason:

It turns my world into one well-knit neighborhood of swimmers.

The virtual neighborhood became real last month. More on that in a bit.

I belong to a facebook®© group with one simple purpose — to share each member's swim that day.

(Technically, the page asks members to tell whether they swam that day, but thank goodness few are so terse.)

My daily routine includes checking the page to learn the latest.

A small number of posts are lists of pool sets (distance, number of repetitions, type of stroke or kick, intervals between repetitions, target time, etc.) Those reports look something like this:

200 Choice Swim
200 Pull
200 Choice Swim
200 Kick
6x50 drill w/:15 rest (1 Sailboat/1 Catch-up/1 Fist)
1 x 100/200/300/300/200/100 @ 2:00 per 100 (First 100 is always FAST!, pull second half of ladder)
300 w/fins (50 Kick/100 swim, repeat)
*2600 total*

I don't really understand what they mean, but I "like" them anyway, to acknowledge "Hey, that's your thing and right on! Swimming is swimming®."

"Swimming is swimming®™" is a registered trademark of the aforementioned facebook™© page. All rights reserved.

Most posts, though, describe vividly swims from across the globe, no matter the water. On a given day, the group will share about a summer swim in the now-frigid, now-warm waters of Lake Ontario … the winter threshing of surf off New South Wales, Australia … another tarn (mountain lake) "bagged" in the Scottish Highlands … and an exploratory swim of St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Fla. as part of the fight to save it.

We read reports of swims in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, England, Ireland, Greece, South Africa, American Samoa, New Zealand, Russia, Tunisia … Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Washington, Utah, Florida, Hawaii, and up and down California. Pool, lake, river, ocean and sea.

Every once in a while, the group talks of swim caps.
Here's one of my proposals. dyst? is the acronym,
"Did you swim today?"

That's a woefully incomplete list. I left out Zane Hodge, for example, an English instructor in Greenwood, Miss., who swims in swarms of catfish for his open water experience, then raises diabetes research money each year by swimming 14-plus miles of what appears to be an ancient bend of the Mississippi River.

Group members are treated to photos of storybook cottages in England along little smooth green rivers in which swimmers splash with their orange "butt buoys" floating along behind … the hyper-real Technicolor®™ of sharks and fiddler rays and creatures from a Ridley Scott movie swimming beneath swimmers off Manly Beach near Sydney … garibaldis (California's state fish) and tide pool denizens just below the daily swimmers off Laguna Beach in Southern California … and swimmers laughing above the froth with Coney Island swirling and whirring behind them.

A doctor in San Diego swims the ocean at 5 a.m. and reports the sea life he finally can see when the sun rises.

No fewer than 70 swimmers (and usually about 200) meet each morning at Manly Beach in neon pink gear under the rubric Bold & Beautiful. The Laguna Beach crowd, calling themselves the Oak Streakers, make sure to dress appropriately for all the big holiday swims and festoon themselves with glow sticks and blinking lights for full-moon swims.

Almost left out the Seabrook Seals of Dorset and Big Ricks Swim Team. So many to mention and this list is still so incomplete. 

We share it all each day, like sitting down at a collective kitchen table and recounting concisely our concurrent days of swimming. When a swimmer bemoans his/her loss of mojo or gets stung by jellyfish, others quickly provide advice and condolences. New swimmers get encouragement and virtual back pats. Congratulations bloom immediately when swimmers reach major goals, whether a 25-mile race or

Here's another design proposal. The discussion on this topic
has gone dormant, as it does from time to time …

their first mile, whether by a globally renowned open water swimmer or a schmo like me.

Our communication is instantaneous, another thing I like about facebook™©®.

We also commiserate with one another. A swimmer named Jonathan Joyce, a Web entrepreneur whose energy and love of life shone through the tiny windows of facebook©® posts, died on a swim in June. An English Channel swimmer named Susan Taylor died last month in her attempt. Swimmers on the group page mourned their loss. Many wrote the swimmers' names on their arms and photographed their arms, posting the pictures on the page.

Swimmer and St. Johns River advocate Jim Alabiso even created another group page, celebrating "vicarious swimming" in which swimmers write others' names on their arms, for various reasons, and celebrate them on their swims. 

All these reports send me to Google's map function, to find their swimming holes, and someday to go there. Places named Sonning on Thames, Buttermere, Wastwater (though I proposed changing that name), Allerthorpe, Lac Memphremagog, Loch Lomond.

Great Britain's pools are often called lidos (pronounced Lie-dohs, I believe), where many of the posters swim. I found it funny that one British swimmer demurred at my calling tow floats "butt buoys" when she and others find it perfectly unfunny to call one of their swimming pools Tooting Bec Lido.

Their reports also send me to slang dictionaries to learn that brekkies is breakfast and cossies are swimwear in Great Britain, and "knackered" is bad and "I'm gutted" is about the worst one can feel, probably from missing a swim. Several of the British declare their swims "cheeky."

We have our own slang this side of the pond. More and more posters are describing their swims as "pootles," easy and un-exercise-like.

I add my almost-daily report from Lake Natoma and try to describe the something new that each day's swim brings, and I do so in the spirit of self-deprecating humor most of the swimmers use.

(We forgive the swimmers who report, "Not today (did I swim), but yesterday I swam to France in 14:32." English Channel crossers earn their cheek. 'Tis the season now for the famous marathon swims, the 21-mile English and 20-something-mile Santa Barbara channels, across Lake Tahoe, and elsewhere.)

Yesterday, for example, I noted the turkey buzzards overhead, who missed their chance at getting me for leftovers. I always describe the water and list the temperature, in Fahrenheit and celsius, just in case someone besides me cares. The compendium of reports lets me know the arcing rise and fall of Lake Natoma's temperature as we swim it year 'round.

I seldom post photos, and when I do they're swim buddy Doug Bogle's. I'm terrible with cameras, and one would soon be at the bottom of the lake, joining two of my car keys, if it were left to me.

Which is why I was so surprised that two swimmers came to visit last month, based on my mini missives.

Suzie Dods, known well in the open water community for competing in some of the longest races held, and the one who led me on my first swim of Aquatic Park in San Francisco, came over with a friend to swim the chilly upper part of the lake. We wandered upstream against the current, past three bridges, feeling tiny amid the giant granite boulders through which the water coursed.

Then a man named Dave Mulcahy, from County Cork in the south of Ireland, let me know he'd be traveling to California and would like to join me at Natoma. I've come to know the Irish as fiercely passionate about open-water swimming, in some of the most challenging conditions.

OK, let me know when you're in town, I wrote back. See you when I see you. Out of sight, out of mind. I didn't really think it would happen.

But after a long hot day of work three weeks ago, resolving to skip my swim for the day, I got home to a text message.

I'm in town, Dave said in the message. Are you still up for a swim?

Someone really came all the way from Ireland to swim with me! I grabbed my stuff and headed out, finally finding Dave and his family in the labyrinth of roads at upper Natoma.

Dave's family had planned a trip from San Francisco south to visit relatives, and carved out a side trip to see the lake I described.

But almost everything in Ireland is a three-hour drive away at most, said Dave's wife, Brigid, so it was a culture shock to realize how far from San Francisco their side trip would take them. But they came anyway, even got lodging nearby.

After a tour of upper Natoma, our zigzagging courses crossing each under under the new bridge and back, Dave pronounced the swim "lovely."

Think of it: A swimmer with whom I share words about a shared love. And from those few words, half a world away, we came together. To swim.

Dave presented me with a hat from his swim club, which I'm wearing in the picture. A perfect host would have worn the hat on the swim, but I am a perfect oaf instead. I wore it next day and posted the picture.

Dave and his family made their way down the coast, Dave to swim in all the places I have yet to get to — and I live here! This week I saw another post from Dave swimming near his Fermoy home, and noted his safe journey back. I have a new urgency to make it to Ireland.

Today, as always, I check the world's swims by the world's swimmers. Their joy is best captured by this post, from a swimmer in England who goes by Plum Duff:

"A delicious dawn dip in a blissful French river. Soft water, stillness, birdsong, raindrops; followed by a simple riverbank breakfast eaten to the sight of a pair of kingfishers and their reflections rolling and tumbling across the mercurial surface of the water.

It is fair to say that not all swims are created equal. This was one of the finest."

Swim on!

Hope as a four-letter word

How fascinating is this week's work by World's Best Editorial Cartoonist Pat Oliphant? Let me count the ways:

(Fanboys and girls of editorial cartoons — ye tiny but zealous lot — commence salivation …)

1. It's vintage Pat Oliphant:

Artistically, it's the cartoonist, two or three bottles of ink and a brush, and get outta the way! The result: A maelstrom of lines and squiggles and scribbles and scratches and the blackest blacks and the most delicate and telling of details, gelling into a complex serving of cold gall that few besides Oliphant can pull off.

Politically, it's Oliphant in the dark recess of his citizen heart.

Cynics could say Oliphant, the elder statesman of great cartoonists at 77, simply wanted an excuse to draw the villains of the Golden Age of editorial cartoons; I know it's a trope among several top cartoonists who joke they wish they had Nixon to kick around some more.

But here Oliphant unearths this lot for grave purpose. In fact, I think this cartoon is a personal appeal to President Obama; he's not trying to mess with the minds of the shrinking op-ed reading public; he's trying to mess with the president.

At heart, Oliphant is a patriot who regards his work as duty, ever vigilant to our country's flaws, ever hopeful that we do what we can to mend those flaws.

This cartoon suggests to me that Oliphant is about to give up hope in the president — as I am about to — dismayed that rather than ushering in change and progress and rescue of the Constitution, Obama instead carries on more of the same opaque imperialism he replaced, only moreso.

Oliphant has penned one (last?) wake-up call. Will President Obama see it from Senegal, where he's traveling?

Oliphant has been moving toward this statement for a while. Shortly before calling Obama out as just another crony, he produced this one:

Completely devoid of laugh lines, this cartoon is simply a severe interrogation, questioning President Obama's grasp of his office. It is cold and hard and cutting. Oliphant is fed up.

2. J. Edgar is wearing high heels. An Oliphant never forgets, and never foregoes a chance to pierce with his fiercest stereotypes.

3. It's raw art, no attempt made to erase pencil lines or to scan and Photoshop®™© it for clean clean contrast. It's as if the cartoon missed a step toward reproduction, as if Oliphant or an assistant rushed it to dissemination. It's full of smudges and extraneous pencil lines, reminding me of editorial cartoons I've seen in museum exhibits, warty and coated in Wite-Out™® blobs to hide mistakes from the press; we've been let in to where the wizard works the levers.

•••

So appropos of nothing you'll miss it: Suppose California voters passed a proposition outlawing interracial marriage. You'd be horrified, or should be. But say it passed anyway, and proposition supporters argue (without any proof) that children deserve to be raised by a mom and a dad of the same color, that parents of different races will just not provide the correct upbringing required. Then let's say the governor and the attorney general decide that the proposition, though approved by voters, violates the Constitutional protections for all under the law, and do not support it.

Then say U.S. Supreme Court decides that since the governor and California attorney general will not defend the proposition, there's nothing to decide on and the proposition has no merit. Then say the proposition's supporters decry the Supreme Court's decision, saying the court has taken away our vote. Wouldn't you counter that even though the majority of voters approved the measure, it's still blatant discrimination and violates the Constitution? Wouldn't you? (The answer is yes.)

The same for the Supreme Court's take Wednesday on Proposition 8, which would restrict marriage to between a man and a woman. Now I'm hearing the same arguments, that the high court has taken away our vote. Ah, the essential barely fathomable beauty of our democracy: That just because most people may vote for clear discrimination against those they find different or loathsome, checks and balances protect us from our stupid selves.

Moreso utterly appropos: Why do people take pictures of the foods they're about to eat and post them on facebook, et. al? You could explain it to me, but it won't make any less silly.

Amaze imagination of your girlfriend!

Morning coffee comes with a middling ritual — ridding my email of bilge.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds email yields more weeds than fruit.

The important stuff chokes amid the solicitations to purchase discount drugs from Canada, various sex enhancements, and mail-in college degrees.

Russian women tell me I, and I alone, am man enough to marry them.

Almost every morning urgent messages warn that the package I didn't ship requires additional payment to reach its destination, that the job I didn't apply for puts me at considerable risk from cyber terrorists if I don't click here, that the flight I didn't book will be canceled unless I act immediately.

These phishing expeditions change over time. Nigerian princes have long since stopped asking me to help them dislodge their offshore assets for a cut of the booty. Fake facebook notices don't pop up as much either; they stopped shortly after I joined facebook and might have been fooled by the notices; almost was, too, except that the logo bore something almost imperceptibly inauthentic, a tiny truncation of letterform, a slight fuzziness. The facebook phishers had only a brief window before I figured out how facebook really notifies me, and they phailed to get me to click where they wanted.

Of the junk email that still bombards my inbox, I've noticed a decline in their vigor. They appear to be copies of copies of copies, and something additional falls apart with each iteration that loops through.

"Pharmacy" becomes "pharamcy" and "Canada" turns into "Canadiana." "Viagra™©®" is almost always "Vigara®©™" now. The Russian women, struggling heroically with a second language to begin with, are having more trouble than usual with English. The more urgent the warning, the more likely and frequent the misspelling, right at the start, with the most common words ("teh") tripping the phishers' phiendish desires.

Now the degradation is nearly complete, the recombinant DNA shredded to unlinked electronic proteins, made senseless.

For wonderful example, I received these two messages this week. My best guess is that I could purchase products that would render me anatomically irresistible and unwavering, if only I would click the link provided.

In the message line of the first was this:  "I have tasted, at me it has turned out. And you?"

The message? "Men have bought 150 000 packings, and you where were?"'

I am missing a huge opportunity (pun probably intended), but I don't know exactly what.

The message line for the second: "The small... It is a shame.? Look and operate"

The message: Amaze imagination of your girlfriend.

It's licentious and prurient and inviting. And funny, unfortunately for whoever sent it (or whatever web bot kicked it to me). This makes sense in some language, and I'd love to know what.

My only recourse is to wait out the waves of wanton email until the source materials degrade completely into random syllables — and never ever use the Internets again.

Look and operate.

(Ignoring the 9/11 show, by the way. I have said all I can say about it … and nothing has changed, inside or out.)

Instabillion

Instagram of Nancy and me visiting our son and his girlfriend in Chico.
Not in 1972, as you might be thinking, but in 2012. That's what
$1 billion will get you.

I'm getting old, I confess, and more confused by the minute. Must be the great Powering Down that eases me into an eventual life of apoplexy and prune pudding.

Leafing through magazines at the hair cutter's or the dentist's, for instance, I frequently see page after page of celebrities I've never seen or heard of before.

They appear without context, without an explanation or justification for their celebrity. They're just there, demanding me to recognize them, but I don't. In the pictures they are marrying or divorcing or having babies that they name after a combination of colors and farm implements.

Or they are selling their Taos mansions (never buying, always selling … why?), or on the islands they own, rocking bikinis made by the fashion icons I have never heard of either.

Burger made, picture taken, 21st Century.

If context ever is provided, it's a disappointment: Usually the celebrity is someone I'm supposed to know from a reality television show in which a woman dates a bunch of men — or vice versa —on camera, and never really does marry the one he/she picks to marry — surprise! — because the Bachelor or Bachelorette really wants instead to appear on "Celebrity Apprentice" or "Dancing with the Stars." Again, the snake eats itself. (No, I'm not linking to those two shows.)

Fabulous rivers of money move beyond my notice, and vast unknowable people dip refreshed in their nourishing current.

Can I get a "Come again?"

The death knell for me is Instagram®™©, an app that facebook just bought for $1 billion. Dollar sign, the number one, and then nine zeroes.

And why not? With Instagram, users can take a perfectly good digital picture, run it through a filter to make it look the awful of their choice — poorly lit, yellowed, scratchy, abused in someone's back pocket, chemically color mismatched — and share it on their various social media.

That's what it does, right? Did I leave out something? Did I stomp on a nuance?

Meet Simba, keeper of our son's
girlfriend. I think the film roll
data is part of an Instagram filter.
That sound is broke Kodak™®©
retirees gnashing the nubs of their teeth.

In other words, with the same technology that rocketed us light years away from the era in which bad things could often happen to good photos, we can make good photos bad on purpose — for the enjoyment, no doubt, of legions who never had to make do with actual, physical poorly processed/colored/lit photos that came by snail mail order.

My son loves Instagram; it's how I know about it, through his facebook posts. These are his photos. To be fair, he's studying photography, knows computer graphics through-and-through, and also lives the social media, just like his peers, not merely dabbles in them. Also, he doesn't have the bad photos of which I speak — until the time of my prune pudding when he gets some of the photo albums for his inheritance.

He takes some good pix with Instagram, excepting the galoof at the top next to the lovely woman. He also takes pictures of foods he will eat, or roads he will drive on. Birds of the air. Leaves of the tree, and such.

When I first saw Instagram photos, I said to myself, "Hey, that's … ok … "

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home in
Scottsdale, Ariz. Also an architecture school. Wonder
what the master might have said about Instagram …

Not something I'd ever use, but I've seen it, and I move on. Which is the mantra I deploy for most tech tools I encounter. I'm old, I told you. (Also, why is the Instagram website address spelled "instagr.am?" with the dot in the middle of the word? It's not like I don't understand too much already.)

Not sure I ever, ever, ever would have said, "Hey, Instagram has gotta be worth $1 billion, easy!"

Because it isn't. Unless the market says so, so I'm wrong.

Instagram will keep on doing what it's doing, its creators announced. Ten people total work at Instagram, which by the way has no profits. Each employee could get $100 million in cash and facebook stock options if they divided the purchase price evenly. Which they probably won't.

CEO-founders gotta eat, after all. Where have you been living, under a rock?

With me?