OPF

Other People’s Flowers

I love them.

I do not have a green thumb. It’s not even faintly chartreuse.

Plants, typically, do not do well around me. (Except for a brief and inexplicable period in my thirties when I maintained seven house plants for a period of about four years. And then they went the way of all plants and died on me.)

Now, this is one of those things that is a mixed blessing.

When you are hopeless at growing things, you get to save a fair amount of money and muscle fatigue by not even attempting it. However, I do think I might look into a small herb garden—and maybe some radishes.

And I would like to have more flowers than I do.

The canna lilies that were here when we bought the house—they seem fairly indestructible. Likewise, there’s a vinca that’s held on rather well.

The redbud tree and the fringe tree both bloom yearly.

I have some crepe myrtles, too, that were here at the start and a couple that I’ve planted that may have made it through the winter.

On the other hand, my carnations croaked, the begonia may be frostbitten, the poinsettias bit the dust along with a couple of other flowering things I tried to grow.

But, the neighbors!

The neighbors have orange blossoms and azaleas and dogwoods and tulip trees and this hedge that’s full of big pink flowers. There are geraniums across the creek and rain trees in the surrounding developments and a bottle brush tree along the road I take for my (with any luck) daily walk.

And here’s the thing about other people’s flowers.

You can look at them and smell them and enjoy them just as much as if they were in your own yard.

So, today, I am thankful for other people’s flowers.

270!

I win.

Not a presidential election, unfortunately. (Or fortunately! Who would want that job?)

I’m not talking about electoral college votes but consecutive days of blog posts. 270 consecutive days! Three-quarters of a year!

Cake!

I look back, and I wonder how I did it.

I look forward, and I wonder what comes next.

Today, however, I wonder will I make my quota?

One post in front of the other. That’s how it’s done. There are no shortcuts.

If your goal is 30 minutes of exercise a day, you can’t achieve it in 25 minutes.

It’s an interesting point. And something I will remember in future goal-setting endeavors. A goal based on churning out some regular quantity isn’t subject to streamlining. I mean, you can shave minutes off a distance goal. All you can do with a time goal is add distance to it. It still takes the same amount of time.

I foresee a review of my monster To Do List to see which projects are open to efficiency improvements and which just take the time they take. I suspect the latter would be good candidates for outsourcing. You know, if I had a staff—or the money to pay them.

I wonder how such a review would turn out. I think I’ve already gotten things down to where I’m as efficient as I can be—but maybe not. Maybe there are a few more hours for mumblety-peg.*

I also wonder if that really loud sighing noise my air compressor makes is okay, but that’s probably a whole other topic. It does seem to be working very hard on this cold, cold morning, though.

That’s one thing outsourced to technology, however.

I don’t have to cut firewood.

Instead, I can sit here in moderate warmth, plotting my 271st blog entry and wondering when the heater can take a rest.

* mumblety-peg = whatever you want to do. (It comes from Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth—a wonderful book about their family life with Frank B. Gilbreth, Sr., a pioneer of motion study. )

Someone once asked Dad: “But what do you want to save time for? What are you going to do with it?”

“For work, if you love that best,” said Dad. “For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure.” He looked over the top of his pince-nez. “For mumblety-peg, if that’s where your heart lies.”

Down with the ship

Try not to do that.

In honor of the MotH,* who although unhurt, was involved in a near maritime disaster yesterday, today’s Smith Sunday will focus on Edward J. Smith.

Of course, the MotH is not a Smith—and his near disaster was nowhere near as disastrous as that of Captain Smith. It’s just that I don’t really know how he, the MotH, escaped injury when the ladder he was on fell off the dock onto the canoe and into the water. So, it got me thinking about other people who went down with the ship.

One of the most famous of these—although you might not know his name—was Captain Edward J. Smith of the White Star Line.

That’s right.

The Titanic.

With all the many Smiths in the world, you have to figure a good portion of them would be involved in some disasters. Hard to think of very many more disastrous disasters, though.

Now, Captain Smith was acquitted, posthumously, of being responsible for the shipwreck. It does seem like there are some remaining questions as to why he never slowed the ship in spite of several warnings about icebergs.

Nobody will ever know, I guess.

A, probably, unrelated fact about Captain Smith is that the ship he piloted before the Titanic also met with bad luck. A British Royal Navy cruiser crashed into the Olympic and damaged her. I think she managed to stay afloat, however.

So, there it is. An object lesson in something. I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s about enjoying the moment to the fullest. I’m sure Captain Smith was delighted to have been put in charge of such a grandly famous ship. I guess we can be happy, at least, that he was at the height of his career when he went down with the ship.

R.I.P.

* MotH = Man of the House

Good grief!

A little communication would kill you, WordPress?

Totally silly, and not in a good way—what I am about to tell you.

I try to schedule blog posts in advance. The main reason for this is I was not enjoying the jolt at 11 pm when I would suddenly think, “OMG! I forgot to do my blog post for tomorrow!” Life—and blogging—has been much more pleasant since I have mastered the “Schedule” function of WordPress. (Always remembering that when I say “mastered,” I really mean “figured out how to make it work more than half the time.”)

But here’s what happened as I tried to schedule yesterday’s post.

I admit it was not my finest hour. (It was actually only a minute, for one thing.) But that minute could have gone so much better if only WordPress had decided to communicate more clearly.

I had been happily galumphing along scheduling posts for February 26th and 27th. I didn’t have an idea yet for the 28th, so I skipped that. There would be time. (I’m ahead! Yay!) Two days after the 27th comes the 29th, right?

Except not, of course, in February—unless it’s Leap Year—which, you know, still confuses me. What, exactly, is the necessity? I can never remember. Something about clocks, and losing seconds every hundred years, so that if we didn’t have Leap Year, along about 2250, it would be dark at 10:30 in the morning and December 25th would be in August. Or something.)

Anyway, there’s no 29th of February this year.

But does WordPress tell me that?

Oh, no.

It just freezes.

(But not in August, at least.)

It freezes, and apparently nothing can be done.

Horror! Dismay! Will I lose the post? (Admittedly, it’s probably not one of my better ones, but still—I spent time on it.)

Fortunately, and to my surprise, the Save Draft button still worked. So, good. I wasn’t going to lose the post. However, the Publish date now read Feb 1st. Already rattled by the freezing of my PC, I tried again to schedule the post for February 29th.

Another round of freezing.

This time, however, I paid attention to the tiny little red border around all the date boxes.

Is that…? Could it mean…? Oh! Of course! There is no February 29th!

Reset to March 1st, and problem solved.

Or so you would think. But, no. Now, it appears the post will be scheduled for March 1st, 1970. Really? 1970?

Did somebody invent a time tunnel and forget to tell me?

So, I fixed it, of course, and the post will appear as intended and scheduled on March 1st of this year. In fact, it already has. (Maybe it’s me who invented the time tunnel?)

But would it have killed you, WordPress, to display an alert that said, I don’t know, something like “Invalid Date?” You know, like almost every other software package in the world.

And maybe I’m being overly demanding, but I think you might just have mentioned that 1970 was a date in the past. I didn’t need you to scream, “That’s forty-two years ago, you dummie!”—but a little nudge would not have come amiss. “This date is in the past. Are you sure?” could have been murmured in a little pop-up box.

I just mention it, you know. Because communication is the key to any successful relationship.

Symmetry

The key to beauty?

Our next guest, Jaclyn Smith, has frequently been named to various list of the most beautiful people of all time. “All time,” in this context, surely refers to “within the recorded history of photography.”

I read somewhere that it’s because she has a very symmetrical face. Most people’s faces show distinct differences between the left and right sides. Jaclyn Smith’s has very few—as does Denzel Washington’s. Hence, according to this thing I read somewhere, the “most beautiful” tag. Human beings perceive this symmetry as beauty.

I’m sure that’s not all of it. You could have a completely symmetrical countenance that was otherwise abhorrent to the human eye in some way. Nonetheless, Jaclyn Smith carries that title with all the baggage, good and bad, that goes with it.

She is most known as Kelly Garrett on Charlie’s Angels. That show, jiggle-factor aside, was important to women of my generation. I know it was controversial in the feminist realm because of the jiggle factor (they did seem to end up in bathing suits more often than most private detectives do) and because, at the end of the day, they still had a male boss, but it did give us images of women pushing the boundaries of traditionally female roles.

After her time as an Angel, Ms. Smith became a fixture on TV throughout the 80’s; during the 80’s and 90’s, she grew several successful businesses, pioneering the concept of celebrity-developed brands with her clothing line for Kmart. Now, in this decade, she has been seen on TV quite often in guest spots, as host of Shear Genius and a recurring role on The District.

I have a lot of respect for people who can take a role in a phenomenon and build on it. I respect the loyalty that kept her with the show throughout its entire run. I respect the ability to diversify, to take the opportunities that have been afforded and build businesses outside of show biz. And, let’s face it, a lot of us just have a soft spot for Kelly Garrett. She was the most thoroughly nice Angel, after all.

Safer surfing

Don’t click before you look.

Most of you know that it’s not a good idea to click on a link in an email from somebody you don’t know.

Many of you know that it can also be a mistake to click on a link in an email from somebody you do know. Hackers sometimes manage to break into your friends’ and colleagues’ email addresses and send spam out to everybody in their list of contacts.

In some email software, just hovering over the text of a link will cause the URL to which it is actually going to send you (not always the same thing as the text) to pop up at the bottom of your screen. That’s one way to tell if the email that looks like it’s from Microsoft offering you an urgent security patch is really sending you to Microsoft (unlikely) or to SomeFakeSpammySite.com

However, there’s one kind of link where that won’t help you—and, you guessed it!—the spammers have figured this out.

There are sites out there which will take a long link and shorten it into something that will fit on Twitter or display better in an email. This is a very useful thing when used for legitimate purposes, but it can mask the identity of a site you don’t want to visit.

It turns out, however, that these URL-shortening sites have got you covered.

This excellent information is brought to you courtesy of Hmm…, the owner of which has given me permission to link to this page, http://www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk/twitter/short-url-check-they-are-safe.shtml.

I encourage you to go to that link to read more and to see the examples. Meanwhile, a brief summary appears below:

You can add a + sign to the end of a URL that begins with bit.ly to go to a page which displays the real URL and some statistics on page visits, etc.

You can stick “preview.” in front of a URL that begins with tinyurl.com. So it would read preview.tinyurl.com/WhateverTheShortCodeIs, and you will go to a page which displays the real URL.

Google’s URL shortener lets you add “.info” to the end of the link to get to a page showing the real URL. You recognize those shortened URLs because they start with goo.gl.

(When I say the URL starts with these text strings, I mean after the “http://” part.)

It’s a really good idea to use these tips any time you encounter a shortened URL.

And many thanks to Hmmm… for helping us all stay safer on the Internet!

Producing without pain

Or money

Producing, in the theatre, is a risky business. Most shows never recoup their investment, so losing money is a very real possibility. We still have producers, though, because it is also possible to make a lot of money. They say (I’m not sure who “they” is), ‘You can’t make a living in the theatre, but you can make a killing.’ So, there’s that. A high stakes gamble.

But, mostly, we still have producers, because it’s a lot of fun. A challenge.

I like almost everything about producing except for the part about raising money. Which, unfortunately, is probably about 90% of the job. In the course of trying to get my play, Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us, off the ground, I got involved in an organization called Theatre Resources Unlimited. TRU is devoted to helping producers learn to be better producers. I found their seminars and readings and boot camps to be enormously helpful.

I wouldn’t mind being a producer.

Except for that part about the pesky money.

So, it is a miracle that I get to do a lot of producer-type things with Round Robin Shakespeare. Finding a space, making sure that all the needed materials are on hand (needed to acquire a few copies of The Collected Works, remember?), doing the PR. I don’t have to cast it or find a director or get a set built, and I’m not heading toward opening night and make-or-break reviews, but it’s a really good way to start small.

Playwrights are always their own first producers. Nobody will back your script like you will, nobody knows it better. We have to learn those skills, much as some of us might want to be left alone to write.

You can do that. Got a room? Got a pencil? A little piece of paper? You’re good. But if you want anybody to see it, there’s going to be at least a little marketing involved.

Learning all I can about that can only help me.

So, here I am, with this other kind of “production.” The library as “co-producer,” gets us a free space. Choosing Shakespeare gets us royalty-free material. Choosing a round-robin format spares us rehearsal costs in time and money. But the organizing and preparing and publicizing?

That’s producing.

And I get to do it. And I don’t have to ask anyone for money.

And that’s a miracle.

Trade and Mark

The Bearded Brothers

It’s flu season and an unusually bad one, they say. Therefore, today’s Smith is really two Smiths who are never thought of separately, so perhaps they are one, after all.

Confused? You won’t be after today’s episode of Smith Sunday!*

The Smith Bros. have one of the most famous trademarks and logos in history: the two bearded brothers facing each other from either end of the cough drop box. Remember?

Coincidentally, the story goes, the word “Trade” appeared under the picture of William Wallace Smith and the word “Mark” appeared under the picture of Andrew. (Can you tell their family emigrated from Scotland?) This gave rise to one of the only bits of whimsey one could imagine from such dour-looking figures. The brothers became known as Trade and Mark and were referred to by those names by customers and newspaper articles alike.

The company, started by their father in 1847, became known as the Smith Brothers in 1866. It still exists although it has passed out of the family’s hands and left Poughkeepsie, NY. (Not only Smiths, but New Yorkers!)

If you want to know more about the Smith Bros., you can go to their website (and you should, because the thought of the Smith Bros. even having a website makes me giggle). And/or you can listen to a Talking History recording of a NYS Dept of Commerce radio program on—you guessed it!—trademarks and, of course, the Smith Bros.

Either way, you should get a flu shot, if you haven’t already, and avoid a closer relationship with the products of Trade and Mark.

* Tag line borrowed from the brilliant 1977-1981 TV comedy, Soap. Never seen Soap? What are you waiting for?

Brush up your Shakespeare

Start quoting him now*

I am very happy to announce the launch of Round Robin Shakespeare!

We’re going to embark on Thursday, March 21st, on a 3 year mission to read the entire canon of Shakespeare’s plays aloud. All of them!

This is a community project, open to anyone in the area, organized by me (!) in association with the Clay County Public Library. I am especially pleased to be doing this with the Library because my grandmother was the very first employee of the Clay County Library system. She put the first books on the first shelves, and she worked there for decades. I rode the bookmobile with her when I was seven.

I never thought I would be living here in the area of my grandparents’ farm—I was only a summer visitor throughout my life until now—and I certainly never thought I’d be working with the library. It does almost seem like fate, however.

Anyway, I think this is going to be fun!

I have a lot of work to do. Press releases, reaching out to local high schools and community theatres, maybe senior centers. I’m thinking a notice on Craigslist and maybe a Meetup. Certainly, I need to set up a Facebook page. If you’ve got any other suggestions for getting the word out, perhaps you could post a comment.

I have faith that this will go well once I get over the initial announcement hurdle. It may start small, but I think there will be enough interest to keep us going until we make it through all 38 plays. (Some people say 37, but I intend to be large-minded and inclusive about this.) The big hurdle will be getting folks out to the first meeting. I really hope I don’t have to do a solo rendition of Henry VI. For everybody’s sake, we’ll hope a future Monday Miracle post reports massive attendance for Part 1 of Henry and Round Robin Shakespeare!

* Cole Porter, Kiss Me Kate

See Brush Up Your Shakespeare in concert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIpp2Jj8AQ

Things are not always what they seem

Or, maybe they are.

I’m sitting out on the dock today working on some blog posts in advance. It’s truly a beautiful day—although, by the time you read this, it may not be. But, right now, it’s about 76° and sunny, the very best kind of Florida winter day.

So, I’m thankful for the weather. And I’m thankful for the wireless technology that allows me to sit out here and work. I do need, perhaps, to get a more comfortable deck chair—because this one is designed more for lounging than typing—but why quibble? I mean, there are a lot of people with no deck chair at all.

Another thing for which I am thankful is the mystery and the drama of the coots. As I sat here, a solitary coot went paddling by me. Now, you must understand, a solitary coot is an unusual thing. They travel in packs.

At first, I thought, “Aha! Straggler! You better hurry up.” This coot had a lean and hungry look, different than the usual cheerful rotundity of coots, that made me think, perhaps, he was always a straggler, always just booking along to catch up to the rest.

But, then, I saw the rest of the flock way down the creek far behind this one.

I thought, “Aha! Scout! You’re the advance guard.”

But, then, I saw the rest of the flock turn and go the other way.

So, now, I don’t know.

Has there been a falling out among the coots? Has my fast feathered friend, perhaps, departed in high dudgeon over some slight, real or imagined? Is the rest of the flock too conservative to dare the shining waters beyond the bridge, or is the lone swimmer fearful of some alligator the rest have decided to brave?

It’s a mystery.

Quick! Call CNN! We need an investigative journalist. There are stories to be told at the creek.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

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