Say what?

Avast ye, mateys, and hoist yer scurvy selves to a benign bit o' bloggery.

'Tis International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Arrrrrrrrrrrr.

(Thanks to pirate bits like that, th' tongue can be shared across th' Seven Seas...what ye lads and lassies yell te be "intarnashn'l.")

Shiver me timbers, 'tis Anne Bonny!

P-}

(That thar be a bucko emoticon, if yer fixin' to savvy.)


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(chooppy seas)

Also today, perhaps and perhaps not, the anniversary of the creation of the emoticon.  Wired is running a "This Day in Tech" bit about the purported perpetrator of perplexing symbolage, Scott Fahlman.  However, the story of the attempt to concoct symbolry to clarify text communications gets immediately murky, for as Wired points out, typesetters have been pressing (HA!) type-based non-verbal communication upon us for many moons before that.

Oddly, I myself had a bit of an emotical dust-up with the OAITH (Other Adult in the House), when he perceived that a virtual missive I sent came with barbed tongue, rather than gentle greeting.  Why?

:)

That's right, a smiley face.

Apparently, geeks have used this archly, to convey, well, an edgyness, rather than the placid contentment I was trying to convey.

The scallywag was ready to hop aboard the Man-O-War and make sharkbait o' me.

Fortunately, all was cleared up before he blew the messenger down.  But Blimey! who knew I had stepped into a bilge-sucking morass of hempen halter code.

So, I've been thinking on these two things today, Local Talk Like a Pirate But Watch Yer Emoticons Day.

And then of course, fixed it upon myself to link it all to perfume.

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What perfumes have the potential to flub the message between perfume-lubbers?  Or even perfume lovers, for that matter?

I for one hold Chanel No. 19 aloft.  You know, Luca Turin's wire-hanger mother?  The one folks refer to as "cold" and "distance keeping"?  I mean, okay, the galbanum is bracing, but people, there is green flower in there.  I don't wear it as a "buzz off" kind of fragrance; I wear it in the same manner I might pick a pair of Italian shoe boots for the day.  They are both beautiful, have clean lines, and support me when I need to attend to business, but don't quite cross over into bee-yotch territory.

Not to me, at least.

Here, here's another one:  Serge Lutens Musc Kublai Khan.  You know what that says to me?  It says "me and my men have just been out riding on horses and camels for a few days with no shower in sight and we might have rolled in something along the way and we're just going to plonk down next to you here and if you don't like it you better run FAST because we're already enveloping you and if you don't faint you might retch."  You know what I've heard someone else say about it?  "MMMMmmmm, cozy."

Is what we have here a failure to communicate?  In this case, I don't think so; I think here it is simply different languages.  Like, say, German and Chinese.  Phonemes and graphemes.  You say potato, I say rubber stamp.  Because I think we are not even experiencing the same thing, let alone deciding what that something means.  So let me take this moment to clarify what I am trying to find in terms of examples of perfume mis-communication:  We both agree it is a smiley face.  I mean, say, a lily of the valley.  But what does lily of the valley signify?

Speaking of lily of the valley, let's hop to that gem of a note for the moment.  Have you noticed folks waxing nostalgic about, say, Diorissimo?  It is a lovely creation.  I can acknowledge that a) it smells like lily of the valley, and b) it is pretty.  But from there, you and I might diverge.  Because, truth be told (here I go into a Very Quiet Voice, so as not to offend), it is this|close to being, well...simpering.  Blow me down if one of my fiercest friends, she who dons Mitsouko like a cutlass and Femme like a come hither va-voom dress, says it makes her feel pretty.  Me?  I feel like...oh, I don't know, Nellie Olsen, stripped of sass, left with nothing but banana curls and a very clean pinafore.

Hey, speaking of Femme...let's talk cumin for a moment.  There's a note that I frequently find myself nodding along with the crowd when we determine whether or not it is present.  But then...what does it mean, to have it there?  To me, it's generally B.O. or panties, which trust me, in my world does not mean "come hither."  It means hither was reached 3-5 hours ago.  But wait, that's not how I *receive* a message, that's how I interpret what is sent.  Hmmm.

Here.  How about Big Flower Bombs, and/or Big White Florals.  Like...let's go classic here...Fracas.  What does that say to you?  Sexy bombshell coming through?  Or Tennessee Williams character who is slightly unaware of being past prime?  Undulating vixen?  Or flat footed floozy with floy, floy?

It's a problem that has been posed before:  for whom is our message in the bottle?  Sender, or receiver?  Directly connected of course to the question "do you wear perfume for yourself, or for others"?

All I know is, there are times when folks have described what message a particular scent conveys, and my head tilts to the side.  ("Are you talkin' to ME?")  But I know that unless they ARE talking to me, there's room for different translations.

However, if we are trying to talk to each other, it would probably be best if we made sure our lingua franca was all simpatico.

:)

image of Anne Bonny taken from Hanging Cup Pictures,

also found at the delightful Geography All The Way

engraving apparently by the peripatetic "anonymous"

oil painting of a message in a bottle by  Nancy Poucher at Daily Painting

Channels and noise

Do you tweet?  How's your RSS feed?  IM'ed anyone today?  What's your junk mail percentage in your e-mail inbox?  Whose pet performed some antic and ended up with a picture of it up on Facebook?

My answers:
Yes.  Not maintained.  No, but I Skyped my kid the other day.  Way up, over 50%, since some "friend" sent me a link to a coupon site.  (Raises hand in affirmative response).

And that's just the citizen me.  ScentScelf tweets, keeps a Facebook page, and blathers in a blog on a regular basis.

Time for some meandering.

****
Once upon a time, there was a summer of adolescent awakening.  No, not that kind.  But, among other things, I:

• temporarily swapped away my books #1 and #2 of Nancy Drew, which had been my mother's, and were first edition WITH their jackets, for a couple of Dana girls mysteries, so each of us could experience the other series;
• swam in an in-ground kidney shaped swimming pool with a diving board at one end;
• rode my bike to the edges of my town and into another;
• went to slumber parties, a phenomenon now dissed by Tiger Mothers and studied by cultural anthropologists;
• was snuck into a friend's father's den, an area of the house oddly dim even in the bright midday, and warned twice warned to NOT TOUCH before a panelled wood door was opened, so that I could see this:

Breaker break one nine, good buddy.  Did I know what this was?

Such was life in certain suburbs before the great divide that I could hazard an educated guess.  Sure, that was...a CB radio.  Which another friend had told me about, because her dad used them in his truck, and by truck I don't mean Ford F-150, but a serious Mack, baby.  On my block, truck drivers, line chefs from the GM cafeteria, engineers from Ford, electrical salesmen.  Down the street, kidney shaped pools.  On the other end of town, where I rode my bike for slumber parties, a favorite "ride by": the house that had a heliport.

Hold that thought.

Meanwhile, return to the hushed plush carpet quiet of the dim house and the cupboard housing a magical communications device.  One that was "don't touch," because one shouldn't turn it on before knowing the rules of operation.  By which it wasn't meant so much how to actually operate the thing, but the conventions of participating in the conversation.  You didn't just hop on an start talking, you made sure you had a clear channel.  Once you had a clear channel, you weren't supposed to yak about what cookies you were making, or what Uncle Don brought home last night.  That was telephone talk.  You could discuss the weather (potentially useful to travelers, such as truck drivers).  And you could simply listen to the appropriately focused conversation underway.

I hushed to carpet quietness.  This was Serious Business, and while I grasped that the reason this particular radio sat in this particular location had plenty to do with why there was an inground pool in the backyard and an expensive sports car in the driveway, I still held respect.  For it seemed that the radio's power was being used for good and not for evil.

My guide then proceeded to turn the device on.  I nearly gasped.  She shot me a look of shush, which I did.  "I know what I'm doing," she said.  It was okay.  She found a channel, said all the proper introduction phrases.  Respectfully listened, answered a question.  Moved to another channel.

Then tossed her long hair out of her eyes and said in a voice I would later learn to call "coquettish": Hey good buddy, how's the weather where you're at?

There wasn't much talk of rain.

Lady breaker...

***
ScentScelf writes this blog, keeps a Facebook page, and maintains a Twitter account.  In this blog, my chapbook of sorts, I mostly write.  It is a place to assemble ideas and data and discoveries into more coherent chunks, sometimes more so, sometimes less so.  On the Facebook page, I link posts from the blog -- a kind of Facebook user friendly RSS feed, a heads up, or warning, that there's fresh material here.  I'll also post links to articles I think are interesting, that I'm ruminating over, to things that I find interesting but veer beyond whatever I think the edges of the blog should be.  On the Twitter feed, I'll put up posts that are either blog-type-material expressible in 140 characters or less, or items related to my passion for fresh water.

All of which is a way of saying I see them as somewhat different creatures, with perhaps overlapping but ultimate different character.  I *do* think about it, somewhat.  Because I can't see why you'd want the same noise from multiple channels.

Breaker break, good buddy.  Baby blog bear here.  Brush your teeth and comb your hair, catch ya on the flip flop.  Nice to have you in the chain gang.

**
Not only does the same information repeated over and over again read as "noise" in my head.  So does blathering just to keep fresh content in your feed.  And so does shilling.

As a case study, let's look at Roger Ebert.  Ebert is prolific.  He is a curious guy who bothers to process things and then write thoughtfully and engagingly about them.  He blogs on all sorts of stuff, has a ton of good leads to other interesting material, is thoughtful, and a good writer.  As a result, he has received many accolades for his blog.  He also writes a newsletter, to which I subscribe.  And he has a regular gig as a movie critic. These things bring him a variety of rewards, but not surprisingly, only one brings him real income.  Should I need to point this out, it is not the blog.  As a result, Roger found himself addressing the same question many bloggers and writers find themselves facing:  How can I make money at this?  His answer was to put up an Amazon link on his blog.  Amazon links work on a simple principle:  post one, and you will earn a percentage of sales that result from traffic entering through that link.  Pretty straightforward.

But here's the rub.  Roger started using his Twitter feed to post links to products available on Amazon.  Mind you, he's a clever guy, and generally devised a tie-in to something he had discussed or was discussing in his writing.  However--and this is an important however to my sensibilities--what had been content rich was now 50% junk mail.  Chatter had become noise.  And Roger sounded like a shill.

He's taken some guff for it, and has answered the complaints.  He believes he is right.  He wants to earn money from his efforts.  He is disappointed the more people haven't voluntarily signed up to subscribe to his output (something he admirably offered on a sliding scale basis), and has decided that advertising is the way to go.  Subscription versus sponsorship versus advertising.  (We don't seem to have old world patrons anymore; a MacArthur grant after a years of effort for a notable few is about as good as it gets.)  Old story.  I get it.  (I wonder if Octavian is paying attention?)  It's a tough balance.  Time is spent.  Effort is made.  Ebert has a day job, one which cushions the blow.  In that case, his employer (The Chicago Sun-Times) does the dirty work of soliciting and charging for advertising.  That's what lets them hire people.  Which allows someone to be a "salary man."  Which comes with its own costs.

There is no easy way out.  No clean, pure solution.  Roger drew a line in the sand.  He thinks he is right.  I don't.

My line?  Shilling is shilling.  And noise is noise.  It seems to me, while our tolerance levels may vary, there is a way to moderate the traffic so that we turn on and tune in, not tune out.  If the content provider can't respect that, the only choice for the listener is to tune out.

There is no clean shot.  Best get dressed for the ball before you drop the hammer down.  Right now, it seems like everybody must be walking the dog.  Too much jaw jacking and you're going to put us all in the mud.  


Don't want a SNAFU from that sonnet.

*
When I first started having control of who and when I had conversations with, my choices were:  Walk to their house and see if they were home.  _OR_ Pick up the phone and see if the party line was open to make a call.

At one point, I used a dial-up modem (listen to the tones! wait for the connect sound!!) and could share interests with like minded folk on a BBS.  And, oh, joy when the day came...you could pay for an e-mail account with AOL.

No, the point is not how complicated communication is these days.  Though it kind of is.  So was an awl and a tablet, in its way; just more in the production than the reception.  The point is that there used to be all kinds of visual and context clues for what kind of sounds you were about to hear:  meanderings about nothing with friends were when your were hanging out.  Using the phone to determine where meetings would happen, and who had a parent that could get you there.  Hallways were for finding out who was on the basketball team.  Classrooms were for pretending to learn but really passing notes; libraries were for pretending to pass notes but really learning.

Advertising wasn't signified by a jump in volume on your television set, or a banner across the front page of your newspaper where a headline used to be.  Not that there weren't overlaps in advertising and editorial content.  But that was generally seen as poor form.  Or so my mythology goes.

Today, you sit with these devices, this input, this constant ready state for the next bit.  Byte.  What have you.

There is power in these new communication forms.  Twitter and Facebook helped a revolution, they say.  They've also led to suicides, career and actual.  With great power comes great responsibility.

My copies of The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase are still not on my shelf.  Waiting next to the incomplete set are both Dana girls books, ready to hand back.  I have a feeling I'll be holding on to them for a while.

But I hold out hope.  And I try to mind my communication manners.  My glass is generally half-full.  So I like to believe -- time to retrieve that held thought -- that we can all get along.

Like Rodney King said.  When a truck driver made the news.

I know, I know.  Meandering.  Miscellany.  But there it is.  Modern communications, older communications, keeping the input clear, grabbing the randomness at will, finding order.

Pass the numbers.  Ten-Ten, we'll do it again.




Get help with CB Slang at CB Gazette.  Learn why Concrete Blonde is not just a band.
Photo of Louie Louie's CB station found at The High Desert Cobra 200 Club.
Algorithm for deciding whether or not to follow a Twitter account created by Dan Shapiro.


Didn't think you were going to get away without a link to C.W. McCall, did you?  Watch a 45rpm disc of Convoy played on a turntable in a Magnavox console, because there hasn't been enough nostalgia for those who remember, or cabinets of curiosities for those who have no idea what I'm talking about.  But if handheld makes you tipsy, try this link and enjoy the Kristofferson/MacGraw movie poster.  Of course, you can shake your head and try to figure out why movie geeks (including Ebert) have praised Sam Peckinpah.  It wasn't because of the movie adaptation of the song, that's for sure.  I do miss that United Artists logo.  I wonder what Fairbanks, Pickford, and Chaplin would have thought about Rubber Duck.  Their producer sides might not have minded.  I'm pretty sure D.W. Griffith wouldn't have.


If you've made it this far, maybe you'll want to follow me on Twitter after all.