Here’s what I want for my birthday this year

One of the best things about joining Facebook is that once a year, on your birthday, you hear from dozens of people, from just about every stage in your life. And all of them want to celebrate the day you were born, in one way or another. Facebook makes it easy, too. Not only do

Teach them how to say goodbye

  While the COVID-19 disaster grinds on, with no real ending in sight, everything seems to be getting harder. Although there’s been lots of songs written in the past about Hard Times, none of them could ever foresee the world we’re in right now. 33 million Americans have now applied for unemployment benefits, and the

The Gambler and the Bungler

I was sad to hear that Kenny Rogers died at age 81, even though I’ve never been a fan of Country music. The Gambler was an engaging story of doing what you can, while you can. The best that we can hope for is to die in our sleep. A few years ago I would

Unleashing my inner History teacher

I was a history teacher in a previous life, as I like to think of it. It was all during the same life I have now, of course, but it feels like I’m not that person anymore. Will I ever teach again? Who knows? But yesterday I presented something of a lesson to a small

Life after Facebook

I first joined Facebook back in early 2009, right after Barack Obama was sworn in for the first time. I had lots of fun through the years, reconnecting with classmates, neighbors, former colleagues, students of mine, and assorted cousins and family members. It was–and still is–ubiquitous among all the different forms of social media. So

Friends and family–the final part

After a day of downloading and deleting from Facebook, the final round of images appear below. I don’t really know what, if anything, Facebook was planning to do with these images once I agreed to their new Terms of Service in 2015. But I’m not going to find out, either. They’ll have billions of images

Friends and Family–2013

Another set of refugee pictures from the land of Facebook, circa 2013

Friends and Family–2014

Facebook is going too far by wanting to montetize all images on their website. I’m not giving in that easily.

Link to a post on ChicagoSideSports and in the Chicago Sun-Times

Baseball has been a big part of my life since the mid-1970s, which is as far back as I can remember anything. Twitter, on the other hand, has been in my life for just a few years. What better way to fuse the old and the new but to write about the two subjects together?

Likes and Follows

Image stolen from The Oatmeal, which never fails to make me laugh A piece I wrote earlier today about a sunrise and a handshake with my younger daughter has had several people indicate that they Like it. I don’t use quotes around the word, although that’s the way some people probably write it out. Rather

An agreeable memory

Facebook is an amazing thing. It allows people to reconnect with almost anyone they’ve ever come into contact with: classmates, neighbors, colleagues from old jobs, and lots of other variations that I can’t think of right now. People who had previously disappeared into the mists of time can reappear in an instant, in the form

The social media president

Over the next four years, there will probably be many instances where I can look at President Obama and say “I like what he just did” It was like that when he sang “Sweet Home Chicago” at the White House recently. When Mick Jagger hands you a microphone, and Buddy Guy wants you to sing,

An old poem made new again

April 26, 2012 was National Poem in Your Pocket day. I wasn’t aware of this until I saw something on Facebook about it. After all, that’s what grabs our attention anymore, isn’t it? I’m not always a follower of this kind of thing, but I wanted to participate in this. It was probably the poetry

Where the traffic comes from

After checking my Gmail and Facebook accounts when I get online, this blog is usually the third thing that I look at. A guy from Jersey Shore, which I’ve never watched, has something that he calls GTL–gym, tan, laundry. Mine is a different type of progression altogether: GFB–Gmail, Facebook, blog. Not nearly as much fun,

Then and now

After taking my little one to skating practice this morning, lacing up her skates and listening to the details from a sleepover party last night, I went out to the car and found a penny in the parking lot. As I have written about before in this space, I picked it up and looked at