the pomegranate tiger

(Edited from original post of Oct 7, 2012) The older I get, the more I find my inner musings mirrored in Margaret Atwood's writing. Here's an excerpt from her essay, "Deeper Into the Twungle" which echoes many of my own thoughts about the ever-expanding trend towards social networking: Not long ago, I found myself having a Twitter conversation with a rotating skull. Its picture shows a skull turning around and around against a black background. Its handle is simply @rotatingskull. Its self-description is cryptic: “I am a skull that rotates.” When I asked it how I might make my own head rotate in this attractive manner—something I have always longed to do, as it would be a visual description of my state of mind in the mornings before caffeine—it told me I should view The Exorcist backwards while sprinkling holy water. Then it sent me a YouTube of itself in younger days, when it still had a skeleton, featuring as the prima ballerina—or ballerino—in the 1929 Disney ...

So, younger son says, "Mom, you should check this out." "This" happens to be Tumblr.  Being a dutiful mom, I check it out.   At first, I thought Tumblr was just another blog site. I quickly found out otherwise. The easiest way to describe Tumblr is that it's a sharing site. It's not about words - at least, not so much - but rather about images and the sharing of images. Not that people don't post words, it's just that a large number of posters seem to be, shall we say, young(ish) and words are not their primary means of communication. And yes, there are some pretty juvenile and silly posts, but if you look a little deeper, there are beautiful and thought-provoking images being shared. If by chance you haven't taken a look at the site yet, check it out. At the rate trendy becomes old-hat these days, it may be gone before you know it. I signed up to give it a real test. Here's my brief foray into the world of Tumblr: --> Th...

Sometimes, when I want to access my blog and I'm on a computer that doesn't have it bookmarked, I'll just do a Google search. The other day, I Googled pomegranate tiger and found another Pomegranate Tiger: Pomegranate Tiger , a progressive/metal/rock band It made me laugh because I wondered how many of their fans go Googling for them and end up at my blog? I'm also wondering how they came up with the name. They look like a fairly new band and I've had this blog for quite a few years, so did one of the members stumble upon my blog and think, "Hmm. Cool. Hey, guys. Whaddya think? I found this site by an elderblogger with this really cool name." Nah.

I'm lazy,so I'm posting something I've done elsewhere. The following is a piece I wrote for an online forum group that was given the prompt, "Fair? You want fair?" It started out as a dialogue between characters having an argument about the fairness of life, but it sounded so full of cliches that I scrapped it. Then I read a piece by Margaret Atwood that got me thinking of trying it as an assertion rather than a question. This eventually led me to try writing it in the second person. I almost never write in the second person. But here it is. Fair. You want fair? Of course you do. Everyone does. All your life you’ve been told to be fair, play fair, act fair, and you expect fairness in return. You build your life around being fair. You speckle your speech with statements like “to be fair,” it’s only fair,” “in all fairness”. You build a fairness cocoon around yourself. It envelops you and all those around you. The cocoon is layered with all the fairness you’ve s...

After more than seven months away from blogging, I decided to post something yesterday (Monday) and was greeted by the above, followed by: Blogger is unavailable right now. We apologize for this interruption in service. I ruefully mentioned the irony of this on a forum I frequent and an online friend noted how Catch-22 it sounded. It was a rather Zen-like experience. I mean, the blogger me had been unavailable, but now was available, yet apparently currently unavailable. It makes one think. In reality, I should have posted the above disclaimer in my banner these last seven months.

I've found a new-to-me site for playing with words. Susan from Stony River says: Welcome to Microfiction Monday, where a picture paints 140 characters, or even fewer. For Microfiction Monday #34 "What's the matter?" "You always go first." "No, I don't." "Yes, you do. You’re doing it now." "Then you go first." "No." "Why not?" "I don’t know the way."

Last night, Lydia dreamed she was a robot. Not a mechanical, metallic, C3PO robot, but a sentient, humanoid robot that thought she was human. She, along with others of her kind had been rejected by society and their human families. They were being switched off. The robot Lydia made a tearful and eloquent plea about love and yearning to the blank stares of human faces . . . Lydia hadn't written anything in over two months. Correction. Other than grocery lists, calendar appointments and a point-form chronology of her vacation, she hadn't written anything in over two months. In a funk, not in the mood, too busy, preoccupied with real life; all of the above, none of the above. What did it matter? No thoughts had gotten onto paper. Yet lately, her dreams had been getting more vivid, more surreal. Just at the point of waking, she would control them, manipulate them. Lucid dreaming. That's the term. She wondered if the not writing had anything to do with the dreams....