[sic]

About 45 seconds in, “Billy C” may or may not be someone you recognize:

Hey now! The photo below (click to humongify) of a passion flower and carpenter bee that I snapped on the way to work this morning (and posted to L.A. Metblogs) was found by Mark Fraunfelder and posted on Boing Boing. Dang Dang!

Too bad he thinks my name is “Will Mann.”

Even more too bad are the coupla buzzkillers out there in the comments accompanying the Boing Boing post who have little better to do than feel it necessary to negatively critique the image — one of whom is apparently a professional photographer named Deniz Merdanogullari who shows his mastery of the artform at the following website.

Fuzzin’ internestians.

So if you’re wondering why the blog looks a wee bit different it’s because I was thinking I’d like to go back to a two-column format and so I clicked on an option via the presentation section of the Wordpress control panel and blammo. Done.

I was actually thinking that it would give me a preview option before making it permanent and eliminating a bunch of the little tweaks ‘n stuff, but apparently not.

So there you have it.

GreenLAGirl Siel does an awesome job with the enviromental blog Emerald City at latimes.com. Well, turns out I just found out that she found my tree recycling post from yesterday at Blogging.la and found it worth noting:

(click here to visit)

 The only thing to clarify is that the 12 trees of the Flickr photo set she mentions at the end of the post were entirely unrelated to the trees I picked up and delivered yesterday.

Technorati Profile

Nothing to see here folks. Just following my blogbuddy Jo Gillis’ lead and going through the motions of doing something I shoulda done years ago: making my blog visible to the spideys of Technorati. Move along.

A few weeks ago, in response to my posting on YouTube a somewhat painstakingly and successfully achieved timelapse of a nocturnal cactus flower blooming, I got the following comment from a viewer whose username is 74mr in response to what he deemed my mistake in identifying the plant as a San Pedro cactus:

That cactus is not an Echinopsis or Trichocereus species, it is a Cereus specie. Tricho means hairy and cereus means candle, all Trichocereus flowers have hairy flower stalks, that is a way to ID them. That plant cannot be San Pedro.

Today, as part of Blogging.la’s collective effort in presenting the “Top 25 Greatest Dead Angelenos” an extensive post on one of my favorite of all-time film stars, Buster Keaton, went live after some pretty extensive effort on my part. Not long after I got the following comment from a fine fellow named Don (who came with me for the first 17 miles of my walk across Sunset Boulevard last February) who correctly noted I had incorrectly listed Keaton’s age as 69 when he died:

Umm, if Buster Keaton was born in 1895 and died in 1966, that makes him 70 when he died (well, 70 and a half if you want to get picky), not 69. Unless he did some relativistic travel sometime in the 1940s courtesy of Navy experiments with electromagnetism.

While I disputed 74mr’s robotic assertion of a mistake on my part, I had no such qualms about the factual gaff Don cheekily pointed out and repaired it immediately, explaining its source (”PBS: American Master,” no less) and thanking him for letting me know.

But how I interacted with the critics is not the point. The point is the reaction I’m having to both of them ignoring the overall result of my work and going straight to rather petty points of order. With my timelapse I captured a remarkable sight and did so somewhat by the seat of my proverbial pants not having done much previously in the way of extended timelapse capture. With the Keaton post I provided what I think is a pretty decent overview of his life and career, replete with rare photos, a video montage and a personal angle. Hell, I even snooped around and found an event tie-in at a local theater next month that will feature Buster Keaton’s first film appearance! But none of that mattered to these two. In both cases neither of these commenters could even be bothered to give me even the briefest benefit of an attaboy before zooming in for the neener.

Please don’t mistake this as whimpering that I’m not getting the credit I think I deserve. Pffft. I’m not hungering for validation. But what I am hungering for is insight into what is it that’s allowing this type of nerdish tactlessness toseemingly be more acceptable? What’s happened where it’s more and more OK to be so narrow and unaware? Is it the internut? Absentee fathers? Nutrasweet? Duh-bya?

These two examples certainly do not a trend make, but if by chance the days of “Good job, but…” are going going gone I’ll try to get over it, but it’s gonna take awhile and in the meantime I’ll still be an active proprietor of politeness and encouragement. But I can’t guarantee I won’t be triply tactless in response to any future incidents of inconsideration.

Hey, a submission of mine of a roadside sign at Jefferson and Adams featuring extraneous quotation marks found a home today on The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. Woo hoo!

So my webhosting provider encountered some serious technical difficulties that pretty much left wildbell.com offline from around midnight to just a short while ago. Longest outage in the six years I’ve been with Dreamhost.

Fun stuff, but hopefully we’re back up and running steady — and at least there was one occupant in the house who wasn’t stressed out by the downtime (click to quadruplify):

In my inbox this a.m. was the following urgentspam call to action regarding my “G MAI L” account (click to doublify):

Yeah, as soon as I stop pffft’ing and snickering I’ll get right on that.

I have no words. I’m just amazed. At the power of the internet to connect.

It’ll be 14 years or so this next October when I wrote a column for the Pierce College Roundup about a lady who died after throwing herself off the Mulholland bridge over the 405 Freeway. That column went on to win a first-place award at the state journalism conference the next spring and even long after this whole internest thing came along it remained just an aging clip in an aging box in a series of closets.

I can’t remember when I finally transcribed it and tossed it online here, but it’s been linked by the “Forgive Me Evelyn” headline over there on the far right column under “Other Pages” for over a year. Maybe two. Maybe you’ve read it or maybe you will or won’t.

A person who did read it yesterday submitted the following comment signed only with the first name of Don to what I posted last October on the anniversary of the column’s publication and like I said, I have no words. I’m just amazed. At the power of the internet to connect:

I also remember that day, but as a family member who lived a continent away at the time, but who was affected far more than any morning commuter.  For most of them, it was a morning’s inconvenience.  For us, it is a lifetime’s sorrow.  I live in San Diego these days, but say my own silent prayer (to whom I don’t even know) on the now-rare occasions that I pass under that damn bridge.

Thank you for having written so sensitively about someone who was kind and gentle and might, just might have made it through a dark period.  We knew her as Ruth.

Never could I imagine that someone from the woman’s family would ever read what I wrote. While I’m proud of that piece and humbled by Don’s appreciation, it makes me wish all the more that Ruth had made it through those dark times.