Weekly Photo Challenge: Escape

Dory: [Reading a sign on a door] Hey, look. “Es-ca-pay”! Hey, it’s spelled just like escape.
- Dory the Blue Tang fish in the movie ‘Finding Nemo’ -

I always thought that Ford Motors should have used Dory’s mispronunciation of ‘Escape’ to promote their Ford Escape.  ‘Es-ca-pay’ sounds so much more daring than plain old ‘escape’.

When we were living in the Middle East, I drove a bright red Jeep Cherokee. One day a British women approached me (and my Jeep) and said, “Oh, I just love your Chur-o-key!” It took me a few seconds to realize that she was referring to my car. (Cherokee, to me, starts with a ‘chair’ sound, to her it starts with a ‘chur’ as in church sound.)
The lesson I learned from my years overseas is that there is more than one way to pronounce a great many words, and the sooner you accept that, the more fun language becomes.  I can ‘es-ca-pay in my chur-o-key’ – what words are you willing to liberate?

There is a hill behind the cabin and at the very top is a huge pasture. We often see horses up there, yet we never see them down in our valley. I don’t really understand why they don’t escape from their confines – the fence is down in many places.

I suppose, to the horses, the grass is simply not greener on the other side of the fence. They do not want to ‘es-ca-pay’!

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Other barbed wire photos: Macro Monday – Poked

Surprise in the Ditch

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Other Photos for this Challenge: Weekly Photo Challenge: Escape

Cna Yuo Raed Tihs? (A Spam Story)

How often have you received this email, or one like it?

Can you raed this? Olny 55 people out of 100 can. If you can read the following
paragraph, forward it on to your friends with ‘yes’ in the subject line. Only great minds can read this.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

How often have you read the email and then sent it off to your friends to show them that you are one of those 55 folks with a great mind?

I’ve received this email more times than I can count, and each time it is embellished a bit more. The one in my inbox this morning told me that it was a test for Alzheimer’s.

The Afterlife

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife — a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it’s being held.
- Woody Allen

I’ve been thinking about Death lately. Not mine, specifically. Others. We’re spending part of the winter in Arizona, and most of our closest neighbours are considerably older than us. I fully expect to see a decline in the number of occupants at any time.

Emergency Services/The Fire Department have been on our street twice so far, but one time was to remove a rattlesnake from a garage and the other was to put a new key in the lock box just outside our front door. The Fire Department seems to only have one daily driver – a big shiny fire truck – so when the truck, and two or three burly young firemen arrive in our tiny cul-de-sac, it is quite the production.

I’ve also been thinking about the Afterlife.  I’m not inclined to believe in Heaven and Hell – not as locales I will be spending eternity in, at any rate. No, I’m thinking of Data Afterlife. Thanks to the Internet, little bits of my life will float around forever – or at least until Google figures out how to put an expiry date on blog posts that detail how much snow there was at the Red House during the great storm of ’11.

In addition to all those bits, there are the websites and accounts that require you to register a username and password before you can access any information. If left unattended, long after you have departed this world your Facebook Account will be sending your Email Account Happy Birthday messages.

Clearly I need to have an Exit Strategy in place. If my ultimate demise is slow enough, I will have time to cancel all those online accounts. But if my death is sudden, as it surely would be if that big saguaro cactus next to my lawn chair toppled over while I was engrossed in reading a book – well, I just wouldn’t have time to react, let alone post my farewell on this blog.

I started my Exit Strategy with a list. First I thought about all the Online Accounts that create a Public Presence. My list included a few of the following (you can likely add many more to this list):

• Facebook
• Myspace
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• eBay
• special interest websites
• blogs
• business websites
• gaming accounts

Then I thought about my private accounts, such as:

• email
• news readers
• banking
• credit cards
• retail purchases
• cloud web storage

Once I had my list, I thought about which ones I would want to close down (or have someone close down for me if I did suffer Death by Cactus). The most important one could be my email accounts. If they were hacked in my absence, all the addresses in the account would be fair game to the hacker – and all my friends would receive Viagra Spam.

Any account that had access to any of my banking information should also be closed down.

Any personal information that is stored on the web should also be removed. That would include personal photos and documents.

As for all the rest, I thought about:

• What content I was willing to leave in the hands of all the insensitive, inappropriate, mischievous people who might take advantage of my absence.
• Who was going to tell my Facebook friends that I wouldn’t be reading my timeline any time soon?
• Who was going to say goodbye to all my faithful blog followers?
• If I leave an account open, how long does it remain the property of my survivors? When does post mortem copyright expire? (This doesn’t actually apply to my content, but it might to yours.)
• How do I want my online presence dealt with. Do I want all the information removed? Do I want it left online?

Last, but not least, I am working on an Action Plan (if the Canadian Government can have an Action Plan, so can I:

• I’m making a list of all my internet accounts, with their URLs and my usernames.  I’ll state what I want done with each account. I’ll print this document, then hand print in my passwords and file it in a safe place. I’ll try to keep it up to date.
• I’ll decide who will carry out my wishes. (I have no problem with The Car Guy or one of my children seeing all my online content.)

That pretty much wraps up my thoughts this week about Death and the Afterlife. How about you?

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

Charles Darwin

A Responsive Theme

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
- Charles Darwin -

Mooch

This is Mooch. He is a very large cat (see story The Cat Compendium) that may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but he certainly was extremely responsive to change. It took him about a nanosecond to accept that he no longer lived at our house and had been adopted by the people next door.

But Mooch isn’t what this story is really about. This is about my blog, and your blog, and how everyone reads our blogs. Did you know that more and more people are using their phones or digital tablets to view our ever so entertaining stories? And did you know that a blog that looks just fine on a computer screen can be much more difficult to read on a tiny phone screen if the theme of the blog hasn’t been taught to be Responsive?

My blog uses a WordPress.com theme, and WordPress has recently introduced a number of themes that will morph into whatever shape works best for the machine that is being used to look at the blog. (You can see that your WordPress blog is already a shape shifter by looking at your WordPress Dashboard under Appearance.  ‘Mobile’ and ‘iPad’ are two of the options that set you on your way to being Responsive – if you turn them on!)

Which WordPress.com themes are fully Responsive? Hop over to the responsive width Theme filter to find one that appeals to you. For now, I am using a responsive theme called ‘Bouquet’, but I’ll be test driving a few others because, really, how often do you get to move to a new abode (where the food is better and you get to sleep on the bed) with the simple click of your mouse?