Whim says I'm a Superior Scribbler!

Whim from The Babblings of a Whimsical-Brainpan has presented me with an award! That makes two awards in two days in a row!

Whim has actually presented me with a number of awards over the past twenty-two months or so since Tiffany pointed me in the direction of Whim's blog with this post. Some I've acknowledged, a few I've displayed here, but some I just never got around to doing anything with. I've been feeling kinda bad about that lately, and I've been meaning to make up for it. This is as good a place as any to start!

The Superior Scribbler Award has been passed from blogger to blogger, but I decided to go to the website listed in the image. After taking some time to read a few posts and follow some links, I found my way to this post, where it all began. Included in a brief history of the award is a list of rules, reproduced here:

• Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.

  
  

  Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.

  
  

  Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.

  
  

  Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!

  
  

  Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I'm very bad at these pass-along games - memes, MySpace apps, Facebook things like Penguins and Good Karma and god-knows-what usually just bounce right off me. But this one looks earnestly done - and considering it has been passed on to me by Whim, who is a writer with considerable talent, particularly when it comes to telling the story of an incredibly painful life-changing event and how it has affected her, I feel that I just can't let it end here. So I will be passing this along, and doing all the other things stipulated in the rules. Eventually.

Eventually I'll also get around to writing about this:

But you'll just have to stay tuned to see what that's all about!

I've got a Golden Squishy!

Ed Powers, the writer of the comic strip My Cage, has awarded me with a Golden Squishy as part of the 1st Regular Golden Squishy Awards! The award citation reads:

The next winner is D.B Echo, who wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper suggesting 'My Cage'. You can read said letter on his HERE on his blog.

I am so thrilled to have received this prestigious award!

My Cage, written by Ed Powers and drawn by Melissa DeJesus, is a fun comic satirizing the daily tribulations of human life through the mechanism of cute (and sometimes sexxxay) anthropomorphic animals. You can read it online here, but after you check it out why not write to the editor of your local newspaper and ask for it to be added to your funny pages? That way you can get the analog, wireless, cordless version delivered to your door every day - no booting up or logging on required! Plus, it will definitely up the game of all the other comics on the page!

My Cage blog
My Cage press release from King Features Syndicate
My Cage Wikipedia entry by fellow Golden Squishy recipient Fenris the Wolf
My Cage on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website
My Cage fan club, created by fellow Golden Squishy recipient Lóng Zhàn Qí Shì
Fellow Golden Squishy recipient yukiyuko's My Cage poll on gaiaonline.com

Check it out!

Award: Gratitude With Attitude

This Friday I was presented with another Award by Whim: The Gratitude With Attitude Award. I was a little bewildered at first, because I wasn't clear on what I might have done to deserve such a thing. In her post she cited this reason: "D.B. Echo, who is always willing to share what he is grateful for."

I guess I do, in fact, do this. But never enough.

If I were to try to enumerate a list of things I'm grateful for here, it would be woefully incomplete. But I'll try a few.

I'm grateful for my friends - both the bricks-and-mortar ones and the online ones. I learned during my period of unemployment last year just how massively dependent I am on my friends for my continued health and well-being, both physical and mental. I hope that in some way I serve a reciprocal function to them.

And I am equally grateful that these friends have put up with my crap. I know I'm sometimes a ridiculously unreasonable person who demands accommodations and considerations well beyond the bounds of ordinary politeness. Most of my friends haven't called me on this - yet. I will try to be a better person in this regard.

I'm grateful to have been a part of the global conversation these last few years. In my last post I expressed a concern - hardly anything new - that blogging's time has come and gone. Jen opined that people are spending more time (= Blogging Energy Units) on texting and social networking sites. These are essentially closed conversations, one-to-one or one-to-some, while blogging is an open conversation - one-to-many in the posts, many-to-one (or many-to-many) in the comments. Is the conversation over? Will it resume? I don't know. I'll keep waiting for it. And I'll do my best to keep up my end of things. But even if it were all over today, I would be happy just to have been engaged.

I'm grateful for the traveling I've done and the adventures I've had. Financial realities - among other things - may dictate that my travels are, for the moment, at an end. I expect they will resume again, perhaps sometime soon. In the meantime, each of those travels, each of those adventures, has left a mark on my being that has changed me in some way, usually for the better. And I'm grateful for that.

I'm grateful for my family. Everything I said about my friends applies here too, only a hundred times more.

I'm grateful for my job. It's given me the opportunity to learn, to grow, to network, to work with interesting people (including three fairly major celebrities who personally took part in putting their creative works to DVD), to save for my retirement, and to have enough money to buy a house, a car, to travel overseas three times, to travel to Florida numerous times, and to visit my friends all over the country. Even when I lost my job, the company dealt with the situation in a way that was pretty classy and probably well beyond any reasonable expectation. And then, nearly six months later, they brought me back, to start the journey all over again.

I'm grateful for the people I've worked with.

In the last group I worked with before I lost my job, I worked with an elite fighting force dedicated to turning around clients' projects in unreasonably short times with unreasonably high levels of quality and attention to detail, all at the lowest possible cost. We should have failed, time and time again, as our numbers were reduced and reduced and reduced again over the years. But we held together through sheer bloody-mindedness and a fanatical dedication to our work, to our clients, and especially to each other. Even now, the remnant of what was once my group still carries on, a four-engine plane improbably flying on with three engines gone and half a propeller on the last. I'm grateful to have been a part of such a group.

In the group I worked with when I came back, I was the slow learner that everyone took under their wings, the kid that everybody explained things to over and over and over again, the guy who everybody stopped what they were doing to help. Nobody had to do that. Everybody could have said "Sink or swim, pal." But they didn't. And I'm grateful for that. And I will remember it.

I'm grateful to the Toyota corporation for making the 1996 Toyota Tercel DX, a fantastic car that still gets 35-40 mpg after over 286,000 miles.

And, last but not least, I'm grateful to you, dear readers, without whom I would just be talking to myself. Thank you for visiting, thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, and thank you for coming back.

I'm supposed to pass on this award, but I do not feel worthy to judge anyone in this regard. If you feel grateful for something, a little or a lot, please claim the award for yourself and post in on your site. And once again, thank you !

Two more awards, and a song

I wanted to do a longish post on the whole Barack vs. Hillary thing, but Blogger is going down in a half hour and I don't have time. I'll try to do it tomorrow. So let me encapsulate it: Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, Scene 1. I don't know if the relevant line is contained in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that excerpted this scene, so check out the Branagh version if you can, or just grab a copy or read it online. See if you can pick out what I'm referring to.

Whim has awarded me two awards in the past month, and I have failed to acknowledge them. Let me do that now.

Back on February 18 Whim passed this award along to me. It's very cool to know that I have made someone's day! I'm supposed to pass this award along to ten people, but I've been so slow to even accept it, you can count on me to be at least as slow to pass it on.

Today Whim informed me that she had presented me with this award. (The symbol means "heart" or "love" in l33tspeak.) (I had a longish bit here, but it wound up getting reduced to <3>. Now I can't remember what I wrote. But thank you, whim!)

I have to admit that I don't really "get" what awards are all about. When I first saw awards floating around the blogosphere, they were being presented by groups or organizations (or individuals posing as groups or organizations) and were often presented after a competition or a voting process. But now it seems that lots of people are making up awards and passing them around...which is totally, totally cool. I may actually do some myself. I have one in mind that would be awarded to a single person, and could be awarded by anyone to anyone at any time. But that may take time to cook up.

In the meantime I have another award that has no button: the "Blogs Worth Reading" award. That goes to all the blogs listed along my right-hand sidebar, which are there not because of some reciprocal-link agreement or anything like that, but because these are all blogs that I read, and I wanted a convenient way of getting to them. If I read them, they're worth reading.

And now the song:

"Elvis Presley and America" is from U2's The Unforgettable Fire, and was the last song on side 1 of the cassette if I recall correctly. It was a legendary song among U2 fans: the mumbled lyrics, the strangely familiar music, the non-repeating structure of the vocals. Stories and explanations sprang up around it, most of which turned out to be true, more or less. (The Wikipedia entry on this song has what I believe is the true story, though it omits the bit that I heard about Bono being drunk during the recording.) I spent a lot of time in college with fellow U2 fans trying to figure out just what the hell Bono was saying, and what it meant.

(The video, by the way, is made of edited, mixed, faded, desaturated, and grain-added clips from the film Solaris. If you haven't seen that movie, you should, and maybe you should get the book by Stanislaw Lem to try to figure out what the hell is going on. The video was created by the YouTube user handstoheart, and it's a really nice piece of work.)

I'm out of time. I'll close this post with lines from the song:

You're through with me
But I know that you'll be back
for more

See you when Blogger's back online!

Another award, courtesy of Whim

It's been the better part of a week since Whim chose me as one of the five people to be awarded "The Spreader of Love" Award from her site. I am supposed to pass it along, in turn, to five other bloggers. And...well...I'm stuck.

One blogger who comes to mind immediately whenever I think of such a thing is Ashley at Ink On Paper. Ashley is one of the most selfless people I know, willing to put the happiness and well-being of family, friends, and even total strangers ahead of her own. If that doesn't result in love being spread - well, it's certainly not for lack of trying.

Lauren (whose current blog as of this posting is Things I Carry, a.k.a. Memoir) is all about the love. People, dogs, fish, customers, love flies everywhere over at her blog!

Debra Pasquella's Let Me Go On And On! looks at love, and life, and relationships, and spirituality from a more serious, almost professional point of view.

An odd site to cite for spreading love is Josh's The Comics Curmudgeon. This is a site whose core consits of snarky comments about the day's comic strips. But somewhere along the way The Comics Curmudgeon rekindled a love for the comics in a lot of readers and commentors, as best seen in the post announcing the passing of They'll Do It Every Time artist and writer Al Scaduto.

The fifth blog...well, this is the toughest. In the end, considering what I'm going to post next, I thought I might just cite YouTube, for helping to connect people with the songs that mean so much to them, in a manner that benefits both the viewer and, indirectly, the artist - far more than a music download site would. So instead, I'll award it to the blog that first got me interested in YouTube: Michael Plank's Content.

Now, let's make with the love:

Some artists and labels are more restrictive about posting (or more active about removing) videos on YouTube. Looks like Barenaked Ladies is one of those, because I can't find a posting of their video of their cover of Bruce Cockburn's "Lovers In a Dangerous Time" anywhere. Here's a live version, from their Barelaked Nadies DVD:



Here is Bruce Cockburn's original. The lip synch is awful, and Bruce looks verrrry yuppie-ish - this was 1984, after all. But it's all in stark contrast to the story of the song.
This song is brilliant, and pure poetry, but I - forgive me - prefer the BNL version. In Bruce Cockburn's voice, I prefer "If I Had A Rocket Launcher", from the same album, inspired by the same situations.

UPDATE, 10/28/08: Here is the BNL Version.



I heard this song while getting an oil change today. Lee Ann Womack, "I Hope You Dance":

I had to turn my head so the other people in the waiting room couldn't see me mouthing the words...

Time
is a wheel in constant motion, always
rolling us along

Tell me
who
wants to look back on their years
and wonder
where those years have gone?

...and to keep them from seeing how shiny my eyes had gotten all of a sudden.

That's it for now. I hope you dance. And kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.