In a little more than a week from now, this weblog will receive a makeover...and it may just be in time. The software I've been running it on has become hopelessly outdated and has started to malfunction in small ways. To upgrade it would involve at least as much labor as starting from scratch so I've designed a new site with different software (Wordpress) and I've been testing it offline. I plan to switch it online around New Year's Eve, give or take a day. Prior to that, you may see odd things pop up here...well, let's say "odder than usual." Last night, in a semi-homophobic gesture, it decided to insert the letter "s" a couple of extra times in the post of the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles. That was not me effecting the lisp. It was the software. Honest.
The page design here will change a bit. On the date I switch over, the weblog will only go back for about ten days. Older postings will be viewable via a separate link but they may be offline for a few weeks before that part is configured.
I will warn you all in advance that the new site may not work well with real old browsers. In the past, I snapped to attention and tried to fix things when someone wrote in and said the page looked funny on Internet Explorer 2.0 or some browser of long-defunct origin. My new policy is that if it's okay on the current Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera, then any problems are on your end. I have one oft-complaining reader who seems determined to not take the two minutes it would take to upgrade what he's using. I think he's viewing this site on an Etch-a-Sketch.
One feature of the new page will involve me making a series of seemingly-impossible judgment calls and assigning categories to the posts here. This will enable you to search for only the messages about Comics, only the messages about Theater, only the messages about Laurel & Hardy, etc. The item you're reading at this moment will go into a category called Blogkeeping.
The new filing system will enable you to only read the messages about Current Events (e.g., politics) but it will not enable you to read everything but them unless you just search for every other category. I'm really tired of folks who can't cope with a page that contains an opinion with which they disagree — and this includes the Etch-a-Sketch guy — and it bothers them so much, they can't even move their eyes past it to the next item. I wonder how these people survive on an Internet where there are sites that compare George W. Bush to simians or seek to prove Barack Obama is a white guy from Kenya...or worse.
Justin Alexander joins in the discussion of how rows are numbered in theaters...
I have never encountered all three of those features in the same venue, but I have encountered them separately while working as an usher. Or, more commonly, what happens when the venue doesn't do it.
Z -> NN: People see "AA" on their ticket and they think "A = 1 = I'm sitting in the front row." Then, when they get to the theater and discover that this is not the case, they argue about it. You'd think the NN thing would cause the same problem if they thought they were sitting in row 14 only to discover they're in row 27, but apparently people don't get that emotionally invested in the idea of being "14 rows back."
I haven't actually seen a venue that skipped I or O, but I have had patrons tell me they can't find row I. Instead they'll say, "Here's H1, here's J1, and between them is seat 11." So while I think it would be exciting to sit in seat OO7, I suspect this is why they eliminated those rows.
With that being said, it probably backfires more often than not. When I worked in a venue which skipped a row letter in one section for completely unrelated reasons (because of how the seats were laid out), it would frequently result in people sitting in the wrong row because they predicted their row from a distance ("this is H, so four rows up should be L") and would end up one row off.
I often find it hard to find my row in a theater because the rows are so poorly labelled — microscopic placards that have sometimes been there for 50+ years and have faded over time. So if I'm heading for (let's say) Row "G" and I can read the label on row "M," I start counting from there. It occasionally gets me into the wrong row but only because the label on my row is illegible or the person in the aisle seat has his coat over it or something.
This is the time of year when carollers carol, sidewalk Santas go "ho ho ho" and folks on the 'net link to my Mel Tormé article.
Some actually don't link. Last year, quite a few just stole it, reposting it in full on their blogs or pages, sometimes without even crediting it to me. Over the years, at least a dozen sites have reposted it in a way that made it seem like the webmaster was telling a story that has happened to him. Most have seemed like innocent errors but last year, a right-wing blogger — on an "Impeach the Kenyan Socialist in the White House" blog that now seems to be defunct — posted it in full and claimed he was its author. I wrote to the guy and got back a message that basically said that since my site was so full of Godless Commie "hate America" propaganda and I was going to spend all eternity in Hell anyway, he had no qualms about stealing from me. Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Man.
It's the most-read piece of writing I have on the Internet and it even brought me nice messages from two of Mr. Tormé's kids, one telling me they'd heard him excitedly tell his side of the story and were glad to read my account. That alone makes me happier about it than all the other hits and links.
December 23, 2011
