So this morning I got an e-mail with the following message:

Thank you for using Shoppers Drug Mart Online Prescription Management services. We would appreciate your feedback on your recent Pharmacy experience so that we can improve our service. Tell us how we did today using the link to our survey below.

I didn't click the link. The story behind it is: I ordered more meds when I needed them. Then yesterday I was notified by e-mail that they were ready for pickup. I picked them up, paid my $4.10 in cash (the standard prescription fee of $4.11 for seniors in Ontario, with a one-cent discount for paying cash, as we don't use pennies any more). I got home, opened the bag and they were exactly what I'd ordered.

So yes, I'd give them a satisfactory rating, for doing exactly what they were supposed to do.

Honestly, though, have we reached the point where we have to pile on the praise just because somebody (or a group of somebodies) acted in accordance with their job description?

There have of course been people in my life who have gone way above the call of duty. Usually they're the very people who are just trying to make a modest and ethical living and who are the least likely to send me annoying e-mails urging me to "Tell us how we did today!"(Ironically I've even gotten the "Tell us how we did today" e-mails when in fact I haven't yet received the goods or services I've ordered from them)

The people I consider worthy of kudos are typically those offering in-person services, either something I've asked for or the neighbour, or even casual bystander, who sees I'm in some sort of difficulty and steps in to ask if they can help.

Also in my e-mail this morning, sent last night at 10:46 PM, was the following message:

The BumblePuppy Press
Good things are heading your way!

But in fact, the good thing supposedly headed my way - in this case an eagerly-awaited copy of Blight, by Rachel A. Rosen - had actually already been brought to my door yesterday afternoon by a friendly young man with a small child in tow.

Then there was the Shaw guy who devoted a good portion of his Sunday afternoon to moving the satellite dish on our roof, out of the way of some overhanging branches of a tree from next door which had prevented us from getting proper satellite TV reception.

Those are just two recent examples.

So yes, there are some good people out there. But please, mega-conglomerates, quit cluttering up my electronic mailbox with your constant nagging at me to evaluate your performance on the slightest little task that was expected of you in the first place!!!

When my paternal grandmother died, I was around nine and we got the news via telegram. About a decade later, my other grandmother died and the news came via telephone, which in those days was a stationary, wired device located in a specific, usually common area of the home such as a hallway.

Back then, those two methods of communication were the most effective ways of conveying important news quickly, if not quite instantaneously, although only the telephone call was interactive. And if the deaths or other important events occurred in another country and another time zone, that could be a consideration as well. Getting a phone call at an unusual time of day or night was generally a clear indication that it must be important. Spam calls and scammers were not so prevalent in those days and overseas calls were expensive, not to be undertaken lightly.

My brother would have turned 79 today, but he died in the summer of 2004, also overseas. I learned the news via a local telephone call from one of our sisters, but she was informed at home in person, after being tracked down through Interpol. The three of us then flew overseas to plan his funeral and piece together what we could of the rest of the story. That story is still incomplete to this day.

Not all important news is bad news, of course. I learned of the birth of my first grandchild via a late-night phone call, and of the birth of my third one via a fairly early morning one, having hosted young grandchildren nos. 1 and 2 the previous day and night. News of the birth of my first nephew, 2 or 3 decades earlier, was also conveyed via a late-night phone call.

I don't remember exactly when we got an answering machine, let alone useful features like call-display (which nowadays is unreliable anyway as numbers are often spoofed), although I do recall getting cell phones in the early-to-mid 1990s. I definitely have a love-hate relationship with them, and the one I use now is still a very basic model.

I do like e-mail, though, because it's easy to properly think through a message, save it and come back and revisit or edit it, and add any necessary attachments before sending it. When our daughter went away to university, it was a good way to communicate because we could keep in touch with her without being overly intrusive or making her feel we were breathing down her neck or cramping her style. The message would reach her, she'd answer whenever she was free. Phone calls were still better for really important news, of course, but by that time we had answering machines and could at least say "Please call back as soon as you can!"

I dislike texting and social media. I have a LinkedIn account that I use every once in a while, and occasionally encounter people I haven't seen or heard from in years. I sometimes wonder what happened to all the penpals I exchanged letters with when I was in my pre-teens and throughout my teens. Nowadays, many folks say the postal service is irrelevant. I say "Keep those cards and letters coming!"

Then there's blogging. I do like to blog when there's something on my mind. But that's another blogpost for another day!

Yes, this is a story about an actual watch. And yes, I know that nowadays it's only old fogeys like me who actually wear a wristwatch (as opposed to pulling out their smartphone) to make sure they're on time for stuff.

Anyway, this relates to the watch I received as a long-service award for 30 years in the federal public service. That was around the time my position was eliminated and they gave me some busy-work for a couple more years until I retired for good.

It's a Birks watch that runs on a battery. Back in 2007, I would go into a Birks store whenever the battery went dead, and the Birks Folks would give me the royal treatment. They'd offer me some bottled water and invite me to browse all the merchandise I probably wouldn't have been able to afford until I got my 40- or 50-years-of-service award, then spirit my watch down to their workshop to change the battery, reset the time and date and buff it up so it looked all shiny and new, emerging 5 or 10 minutes later to return my watch. No charge.

Around 10 years ago, that ended. There was still no charge to change the battery but instead of changing it on the spot, they had to send the watch to some central location (possibly in Montreal?) and contact me a few weeks later when it was ready for pickup.

Determined to continue taking advantage of this perpetual battery deal, I went with the flow. However, this demanded that I get myself a back-up watch to wear during those weeks that my Birks Watch was incommunicado. But wouldn't it be awful if Backup Watch was dependent on a battery too, and Birks Watch Battery and Backup Watch Battery failed at the same time?

Undaunted, I went to The Bay (maybe you've heard of them?) and bought myself a solar- and light-powered watch that needed no battery and no winding. At that time, they actually had on-site jewellers at The Bay who ensured the watch was working properly and removed several links in the bracelet for me, as I have a rather small wrist.

So when Birks Watch's battery failed recently, I put on Backup Watch. That was fine at first, except that the little pin attaching the watch-face to the bracelet fell out and got lost. Luckily I noticed when this happened, so I still had the watch. I put it into my pocket temporarily - which is not ideal for a watch that's powered by light - but fortunately it's still getting adequately fed and is keeping good time for me.

As another little wrinkle, I dug out a really old wind-up watch from a drawer. It still runs, but it doesn't keep good time - it runs unacceptably slow.

Anyway, today I took Birks Watch to Birks in the Rideau Centre. The salesperson politely informed me that their policies had recently changed again, and there was now a $25 charge to replace the battery. I was annoyed but knew it was not her fault. And to be fair, that now-dead battery had lasted well over two years, so if they were going to replace it with one as good as its predecessor, that didn't seem like such a bad deal.

Next step: Ms. Saleswoman asked me to produce a receipt or proof of purchase to show I had in fact bought the watch from them. I told her I had never even had one, as it was gifted to me as a long-service award. Though honestly, I'm pretty sure the watch has Birks written right on the watch face, so that should have been at least a good clue.

That was OK, she said, but did I know roughly the age and value of the watch? Well, I knew the age fairly accurately. I had no idea how much the Government of Canada had paid for it, but I seemed to recall that the last time I needed the battery changed, they had assigned it a value of $200.

So we filled out the requisite form together, I signed on the dotted screen with my fingernail, and she said she was e-mailing me a copy. Could I just check now that it was in my e-mail, in case there were technical problems?

Well, no. I do have a cell phone of sorts, but I don't do e-mail on it. She wrote her name down on a little card and told me to phone her if I didn't receive a copy, so that she could then re-send it. I didn't have to pay the $25 up front.

I got home, and fortunately the e-mail message and copy of the form were there.

What a rigamarole! I still haven't decided what I'll do next time the battery dies.

"Rouse up, sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we're lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!"

It's Election Day in Canada! We get to choose the politicians who will represent us in Parliament and form our next Government. Will they come up with suitable remedies for what ails our country and our people, or will they have to be sent packing, maybe even before four years are up?

We're also at the tail end of National Poetry Month, which is why I thought it apt to cite the above lines from the Robert Browning poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

While the poem dates back to the 19th century, the legend is much older. In a nutshell, the town of Hamelin, plagued by rats, hires the piper to play his pipes and lure the rats out of town to meet their doom. The town doesn't pay the piper so the piper strikes up a new tune and lures the town's children away to THEIR doom. Kinda like the Sixties Scoop, you know? In fact, back in the day when I memorized the poem for school, the sixties scoop was ongoing, but I didn't know it then. Instead, in history class we were fed a highly expurgated version of the evolution of Canada, through romanticized books like Fair Domain and One Dominion (yes, those are the actual textbook titles).

Here's Wikipedia's entry on the pied piper legend:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin

And here, from Gutenberg.org, is the Robert Browning poem with illustrations by Kate Greenaway:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18343/18343-h/18343-h.htm

So anyway, my partner and I voted today. I hope you vote too, if you're eligible.

It was actually quite quick and straightforward. We set out for the polls just after 10:30 AM and were out of there by 10:45. On the way back home, the mail truck was parked by our community mailbox and we were able to pick up the mail, such as it was.

Back home, we had lunch and for dessert, we went out and treated ourselves to our first ice cream cone of the season (Muskoka Mocha for me, Key Lime Pie for my Companion). I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.

I may scream even louder once the election results come in. I just hope it won't be a scream of pure agony!

School-aged kids in Ontario get their spring break this week, while those in Quebec had theirs last week. Across Canada, with a few exceptions, we had to move our clocks forward an hour this past Saturday-into-Sunday in the semi-annual ritual of time-shifting.

It wasn't always quite like this, even in my lifetime.

Early in my school career, our spring break began on Good Friday, regardless of when it fell in that particular year. It might be any time between mid-March and late April. That, of course, made it challenging to plan the school schedule and curriculum, as the second term could be shorter or longer depending on the vagaries of the Easter holidays. It also probably mucked up some family travel plans - or maybe it made them easier, since kids across Canada were typically all on holiday at the same time. And it made for a long holidayless stretch between Christmas and Easter. But it did mean that by the time Easter rolled around, the weather might actually be nice enough for us to get outside on our bikes or roller-skates, in an era before helicopter parenting was quite so prevalent.

Looking at the changing of the clocks, we used to spring forward on the last weekend in April and fall back on the last weekend of October - Halloween was always post-fallback - making for equal portions of the year on Daylight and Standard time. At some point we decided we wanted more daylight at the end of the day, and started springing forward on the FIRST weekend in April. Later still - I was in university by this time and I think it was the oil-price shocks and threats and threats of "freezing in the dark" that provided the impetus - we decided we had to harmonize with the Americans and spring forward even earlier, the second weekend in March. So now we only have about four months of the year on "standard" time and the other eight months on daylight "saving" time. If we're going to eventually dispense with this ludicrous seasonal timeshiftimg that wreaks havoc on our health, safety and circadian rhythms (and I hope we do), it would make more sense to adopt Standard time as our year-round standard. It would also have helped my six-year-old self who could never fathom why the sundial at the Experimental Farm always seemed to be an hour slow!

I think the practice of school breaks always being in March began some time while I was in the intermediate grades, by which time I was more independent and no longer as concerned about being able to go out and play in my immediate neighbourhood. Even so, the break (in Ontario, at least) was typically scheduled for later in March than it is now. I remember one year when Easter was in late March and the Easter weekend fell at the end of our March break.

At the Log Farm in Ottawa, which re-creates 1860s life for kids and adults of the late 20th to early 21st century, I remember going to a demonstration of sugaring off in which one of the guides said something like "That's what your March break was for!" Of course, he was just helping to make history come alive for all the wide-eyed kids in our group, but I wonder if he was aware that for most of the years of my childhood, sugaring off was pretty much over and done with by the time our spring break rolled around. Still, he had a point. I've been told that the reason kids even now get two full months of summer holidays is that in the olden days, they would have been kept at home as they would have been needed to help with the harvest.

We need to adapt to the times, of course, but the changes we make aren't always the most sensible ones.

Although I'm not quite as old as Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, my contemporary music of choice has long been of the genre(s) that emerged from the 60s coffee house scene.

Last Friday, dianora and I had the pleasure of attending a cosy house concert featuring Natasha Liard, Erika Lashbrook and Libby and Cal. And five cats, although all but one had been spirited away to a back room to avert attempts to escape.

Natasha was a gracious host who said she organized intimate concerts like this one because her music was quiet and folky and didn't always find a suitable home in an often-rowdy bar environment.

Libby and Cal wrote something similar in the most recent edition of their newsletter:

​​​​​Bars Are Not the Only Venues
Our last few shows have been in alternative venues, or should I say, not bars. It's hard to make money, whether you're a musician or a venue owner, but I feel very lucky to have had a variety of performance experiences. Last month we played in a church basement and a living room. As one attendee remarked, "I found it had a strong old coffee house vibe."

And Erika Lashbrook, a self-described "queer, undisciplined multidisciplinary artist and musician" exuded a kind of raw vulnerability characteristic of many of the musicians I like. I particularly enjoyed her song "Sit back down", even though it was quite critical of folks of my generation, who unfortunately are wont to assume that young people today just don't know what they're talking about!

I had never heard Natasha or Erika before, but I'd absolutely go to see them again.

Then yesterday, after picking up my new glasses (appropriate for my post-cataract operation eyes), I decided to drop into the nearby Compact Music shop. Of course, I should have realized that it would not be a brief, drop-in kind of visit. I got caught up in the Folk section of the second-hand vinyl section. It took a fair bit of discipline to whittle down my selections to the following records, which ranged in price from $5.99 to $16.99:

The Famous Melodies of Stephen Foster
Colleen Peterson
Rehearsals for Retirement - Phil Ochs
Lillebjörn & Steinar, recorded live at the Nordland Fest, Sioux Falls
Mary Black - Collected
Civil Service Songwriter - Nancy White
American Stonehenge - Robin Williamson & his Merry Band

To round things off, I glanced at the CDs by local musicians at the front of the store. I chose one CD by a local singer/songwriter, Craig Cormier. I hadn't heard of him but I loved the cover, which was a black-and-white photo of someone stroking a cat, in front of some grocery store shelves. The album was entitled Bodega Cats and was recorded at Ottawa's Lycanthrope Studios in April of 2020. At the height of the COVID lockdowns. Plus, I think it's important to support independent local artists. I haven't actually listened to the CD yet but I'm looking forward to it.

Tomorrow I'll enjoy the music of another era with the Ottawa Bach Choir.

Since today is Valentine's Day, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at 60 years of computer-aided dating and mating and matching and possibly dispatching.

Sixty years ago, computer dating was a cool new idea. If you wanted to meet someone and there weren't enough in-person opportunities, you'd probably look in the Personals ads of your local newspaper. OK, I'm showing my cultural bias here, because I know there are still vast areas of the world where arranged marriages are the norm, and where go-betweens may or may not give due consideration to interpersonal choices and preferences and overall compatibility. But I digress.

On the BBC site, I found an interesting article about a couple of early computer people-matching programs:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250206-the-rocky-1960s-origins-of-online-dating?at_campaign_type=owned&at_medium=emails&at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_ptr_name=salesforce&at_campaign=essentiallist&at_email_send_date=20250214&at_send_id=4287976&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2fculture%2farticle%2f20250206-the-rocky-1960s-origins-of-online-dating&at_bbc_team=crm

The TACT (Technical Automated Compatibility Testing) program involved asking the participants a number of decidedly tactless questions that in many cases were irrelevant in pinpointing the criteria they considered essential or desirable!

Are things any better now? Certainly a lot of people are meeting online these days. I suspect it's technically possible to match up compatible people with a greater degree of precision, assuming they're open and honest about who they are and what their expectations and motives are. Here's another BBC article which discusses a more modern scenario:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7zxgxdggjo

I've never used any dating apps myself so all this is pure speculation on my part. Anyway, I think the risks nowadays are much higher, or at least much greater precautions and technosavvitude are called for!

Back then, if you consistently got dud-matches, you'd probably just stop using the service and maybe fight to get your money back. Privacy and confidentiality were easier to preserve in those days but the online environment has brought things to a whole new level of scariness.

I met my long-time partner back in the 1970s. It wasn't via computer, although computers did play a role. We were both employed keypunching information into those 80-column computer cards that were used in a mainframe environment.

This land's not your land, this land's not my land,
Tho' I was born and live here, right on Turtle Island,
Does it really matter how and when we got here?
This land preceded you and me!


I think I was probably around 7 or 8 when I first heard either the Woody Guthrie original or a Canadian version of this song. At the time, I just assumed it to be some boring patriotic song that we had to sing at school or during camp singalongs. I don't recall ever going beyond the second verse in those days.

But I later realized, probably around the time that his son Arlo penned some more modern social commentary with songs like Alice's Restaurant Massacree and the Motorsickle Song, that This Land is Your Land was not quite the paean to the glorious greatness of America that I had naively believed it was. The later verses in particular point to a rather different narrative:

https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm

Does anyone know who wrote the Canadian lyrics? Or maybe there are several versions by several authors? Do all the verses have Canadian versions to them? I did find this site, providing some Canadian lyrics in both English and French. Offhand, I prefer the French ones as they at least give a token nod to the indigenous folk, sort of like the way we now begin public events with a land acknowledgement:

https://www.canadianspecific.ca/this-land-is-your-land/

Mind you, I'm not terribly fond of some of the current woke terminology we use either. Settlers? Colonizers? Are we to be forever branded by the sins of the fathers or the great-great-great grandparents?

But there's one thing I will readily concede. Although this land preceded you and me, it's up to us to do our best to curb our destructive habits and ensure it also follows us to nourish future generations.

Listed in the order I read them. F= Fiction; NF=Nonfiction; A=Anthology

1. The Cat's Meow: How cats evolved from the savannah to your sofa - Jonathan B. Losos (NF)
2. Charlotte Illes is not a detective - Katie Siegel (F)
3. I go by sea, I go by land - P.L.Travers (NF)
4. Les prénoms épicènes - Amélie Nothomb (F)
5. Rilke: the last inward man - Lesley Chamberlain (NF)
6. Torrid tales from the creative trenches: Instant classic that no one will read - various (A-F)
7. Waiting for Gertrude - Bill Richardson (F)
8. Midnight Sweatlodge - Waubgeshig Rice (F)
9. Moon of the Crusted Snow - Waubgeshig Rice (F)
10. Moon of the Turning Leaves - Waubgeshig Rice (F)
11. Myth and Mayhem: A leftist critique of Jordan Peterson - various (A-NF)
12. The Library of Heartbeats - Laura Imai Messina (F)
13. Two Solitudes - Hugh MacLennan (F)
14. Your Brain On Art: How the arts transform us - Susan Massamen & Ivy Ross (NF)
15. Bookworm - Robin Yeatman (F)
16. Not your child - Lis Angus (F)
17. A Different Kind of Evil - Andrew Wilson (F)
18. Legacy - Waubgeshig Rice (F)
19. On Rereading - Patricia Meyer Sparks (NF)
20. Anna O. - Matthew Blake (F)
21. Le Påtissier d'Hitler - Peter Bevore (F)
22. Barbara isn't dying - Alina Bronsky (F)
23. Blue Notes - Anne Cathrine Bomann (F)
24. Library for the war-wounded - Monika Helfer (F)
25. The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections - Eva Jurczyk (f)
26. Agatha - Anne Cathrine Bomann (F)
27. Wonder World - K. R. Byggdin (F)
28. Where's the mother? Stories from a transgender dad - Trevor MacDonald (NF)
29. La définition du bonheur - Catherine Cusset (F)
30. Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Döblin (F)
31. Beauty and the Beat - Lisa Whittington-Hill (NF)
32. The Call of the Toad (Unkenruhe) - Guenter Grass (tr. Ralph Mannheim) - F
33. Health for All: A doctor's prescription for a healthier Canada - Jane Philpott (NF)
34. An elderly lady must not be crossed - Helene Tursten (F)
35. Kallocain - Karin Boye (F)
36. Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood (F)
37. Mr. Norris changes trains - Christopher Isherwood (F)
38. Siblings - Brigitte Reimann (F)
39. The Wall Jumper - Peter Schneider (F)
40. Félix et la source invisible - Albin Michel (F)
41. I love Russia - Elena Kostyuchenko (NF)
42. Tough on Crime - David Holdsworth (F)
43. Perilous Passage - Arthur Mayse (F)
44. The girls dressed for murder - Lynn McPherson (F)
45. Case of the Curious Collection - Carolyn Keene (F)
46. Paradise Pending - Kris Purdy (F)
47. Secrets in the Water - Alice Fitzpatrick (F)
48. Laughing on the outside: The life of John Candy - Martin Knelman (NF)
49. The Vampire Cat & Poems by Robert Thomas Payne (A)
50. Mike Harris made me eat my dog - Linwood Barclay (NF/humour)
51. The Secret History of Audrey James - Heather Marshall (F)
52.The Mystery Guest - Nita Prose (F)
53. Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck (F)
54. The Paris Network - Siobhan Curhan (F)
55. Let sleeping cats lie - Louise Clark (F)
56. Altered Boy - Jim McDonald (F)
57. Meeting my treaty kin: A journey toward reconciliation - Heather Menzies (NF)
58. The Fells - Cath Staincliffe (F)
59. Death in Fine Condition - Andrew Cartmel (F)
60. The List of Suspicious Things - Jennie Godfrey (F)
61. Not a novel: A memoir in pieces - Jenny Erpenbeck (NF)
62. Dandelion Daughter - Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay (F)
63. Café Babanussa - Karen Hill (NF)
64. The Circle - Katherine Vermette (F)
65. Bury the Lead - Kate Hilton & Elizabeth Renzetti (F)
66. IRL: Finding realness, meaning & belonging in our digital lives - Chris Stedman (NF)
67. Kukum - Michel Jean (NF)
68. Death at the Sign of the Rook - Kate Atkinson (F)
69. Woman of Interest - Tracy O'Neill (NF)
70. The Wall Between: What Jews & Palestinians don't want to know about each other - Raja G. Khouri & Jeffrey J. Wilkinson (NF)
71. Murder crossed her mind - Stephen Spotswood (F)
72. Teach me, I can learn - Alice Martel (NF)
73. In all things: A return to the drooling ward - Ed Davis (NF)
74. What she left behind - Ellen Marie Wiseman (F)
75. Women in Prison - Joan Henry (NF)
76. Lizards hold the sun - Dani Trujillo (F)
77. Swiss Sonata - Gwethalyn Graham (F)
78. Book and Dagger: How scholars & librarians became the unlikely spies of World War II - Elyse Graham (NF)
79. Crooked Seeds- Karen Jennings (F)
80. Honor the Dead - Amy Tector (F)
81. The Mistletoe Mystery - Nita Prose (F)
82. The Foulest Things - Amy Tector (F)
83. The Grey Wolf - Louise Penny (F)
84. Memories before and after The Sound of Music - Agathe von Trapp (NF)
85. Montréal-Nord - Mariana Mazza (NF)
86. Double Vision - Peggy Blair (F)
87. The Lost Book of Bonn - Brianna Labuskes (F)
88. Breaking Canadians: Health care, advocacy & the toll of COVID-19 - various, ed. by Nili Kaplan-Myrth (NF)
89. Norman's Conquest - Don Butler (F)
90. Vampires of Ottawa - Eric Wilson (F)
91. I who have never known men - Jacqueline Harpman (F)
92. How to protect bookstores & why - Danny Caine (NF)
93. Shapes of Wrath - Melissa Yi (F)
94. How to solve your own murder - Kristen Perrin (F)
95. The Diapause - Andrew Forbes (F)
96. Fatal Harvest - Brenda Chapman (F)
97. Everyone in my family has killed someone - Benjamin Stevenson (F)
98. The Hard Road Out: One woman's escape from North Korea - Jihyun Park & Seh-Lynn Cho (NF)
99. Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North - Rachel Joyce (F)

In my November 17 post, I deliberated whether to renew my paid account or take a temporary or permanent leave of absence from blogging on Dreamwidth. Well, I'm still here, folks, at least for now. My paid account lapsed on December 11 but a week later, a kind-hearted Secret Santa renewed it for another year.

This crisis of faith was sparked by an upsetting comment I received from another Dreamwidth member. I have successfully banned this person from commenting directly on any of my posts but they are still out there, woven into the warp and the woof and the meow of our dysfunctional Dreamwidth family. Well, it's a truism that you can't choose your family, nor can you help it if you're a bastard. And if you tug on a loose thread and oust it from the fabric of a family or a community, there's always the risk that the family or community could eventually unravel completely.

OK, enough of that dreadful extended metaphor. In addition to banning the person from commenting on my blog, I also asked a Dreamwidth administrator to investigate what I believed to be a violation of the Member Code of Conduct. The administrator informed me that Dreamwidth encourages expression of a wide variety of views and that derogatory comments are not considered a violation of the Code even if they are rude, aggressive and insulting. To their credit, they did also say that if I was dissatisfied with their services or felt there were certain things they could be doing better, I could send my suggestions to their Feedback mailbox. I'm considering doing just that.

So there it stands. I'll probably continue mostly as I have for the past 13 years, except that I may be a little more circumspect when it comes to posting on hot-button issues.

That concludes my end-of-year update.