Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Tag, I'm what???



There is this thing in blogger-world called “tagging”. I don’t fully understand tagging, but I spent most of last night, (while I wasn’t sleeping), wondering what tagging was about, and what its purpose was. I was tagged by Ekovox, who seems to be a great guy, just about anybody would be glad to have him as a friend. I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it a try, but first I have to understand it, and figure out how it works.


What I been able to figure out about tagging, just by wondering about it, is that it must be something that bloggers do when there is nothing really going on to talk about. Kind of like newscasters waiting for a breaking story that seems to drag on forever, so they start interviewing each other.


The tagging question was: “post seven things you probably don't know (or don't want to know) about me...Well my life is an open book, so if there are seven things that you don’t know about me, you just haven’t been paying attention.


So, if I’m allowed I’ll just bend the rules a little bit, and I will just tell you a few things about myself with out regard to how you may or may not feel about it.


1- I don’t follow rules all that well. I spend a lot of time wondering how a rule might fit me, and whether or not that rule should really apply to me. I find that most rules really shouldn’t apply to me. So, I make up most of my standards as I go along. I have a rule to never participate in a chain anything, not a chain letter, not a chain gang, not a chain blog post. No chains for me.


2- I’ll do almost anything that someone else asks me to do. I’ve done some really stupid stuff for people because I respect them, like them, or if they ask real nicely. I’ll even participate in a chain post, as long as I think that I’m making somebody else happy. I don’t know what that say’s about me, but I like making other people happy. Even if I have to bend my rules a little.


3-Everything has to “Work” for me. Everything is a machine to me. When someone tells me that God made the heaven and Earth, and on the seventh day he rested. I totally believe it, but in order for that to “work” for me I have to ask “Where did God come from”. I’ve never gotten an answer that works for me. I have a lot of religious friends, but I like them because they are inherently good people, not just because they are religious. And, oh… There are a lot of religious people that I know who are not good people, and I don’t like them a lot.


4- I believe everything that anybody tells me. As long as they look me in the face and use a little sincerity. I’ve never been able to figure out why somebody might lie. I don’t include politicians in that statement, but then, they can’t pass the look me in the face part. So, I guess that they are really not lying to me. They are just trying to get elected.


5- I can’t carry-on a meaningful conversation with most anonymous people, but some of the most thoughtful posts that I’ve ever received were from “Anonymous”, to the point that I wished desperately that I knew who they were. The just-plain-bitter anonymouses, I have no desire to know, I just wish that they would go away, I have even been known to bleep their nastiness. I can’t do business with anybody wearing mirrored sun glasses. That should be a separate subject, but I will have enough anyway.


6- I greatly admire wit and humor, and I find wit and humor in most people that work with their hands, and have a poor education. It pains me if I can’t have a meaningful conversation with another human being. I’m a lot like Will Rogers, “I’ve never met a man I didn’t like.” I found gold in talking to people that most wouldn’t talk to. People that you know had to learn everything that they know the hard way.


7- I don’t like imposing on other people, so I’m not going to pass this letter on to anyone, but I do find that I like replies better than making posts. I make no rules on my blog, and I don’t care if somebody changes the subject, or asks a question on another subject, as long as somebody has something on their mind, I want to hear it. I know by talking to other bloggers that they would way-more provide a forum for a conversation than make posts that the people want to read and leave. So if you want to post your seven things here, please do so. If you want to do it on your own blog, you can say I tagged you. So, Tag your it.


7 ½ -I love this canyon that we call home. But I guess everybody knows that.






13 comments:

Anonymous said...

SEVEN... cha cha cha.

Kym said...

Ernie, Tagging like this is actually useful to generate traffic to your blog. The way I understand it the more links between your blog and others the more the search engines route traffic to you.

I think you're right though, mostly it is a slow blogging day sort of thing.

ps. I love this valley, too.

Ernie Branscomb said...

Anonymous 10:32

Cute, but posting what I said seven times gets a little too tedious for the gentle reader. I did appreciate your humor though.

USelaine said...

I'm not a fan of the "awards" and "memes" either, so I try to make clear that passing them along is voluntary. I'll just treat this as part of the conversation, and take you up on the invitation to leave it here.

1. I’ll be 50 in February, and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

2. I have a big head. Seriously. By the time I was a teenager, my grandfather’s felt fedoras fit me perfectly. I resent that men’s hats have calibrated sizes, and women’s hats are “one size fits most”. With grandpa’s hats as a guide, I wear about a 7 5/8ths or 7 3/4ers. Someone tried to give me a women’s bicycle helmet recently, but the sizing guide said it was for heads up to 58 cm. I measured, and I need 60 cm. I hate cramming too small of hats onto my head.

3. Number 2 probably covered about six things, but I’ll press on. My favorite high school phys ed activity was water ballet. Balls and sticks didn't interest me much. I can still float pretty well.

4. I love Nat King Cole's voice.

5. My great grandparents immigrated to San Francisco directly from Denmark, and met and married in the City in the 1890s. He was a sailing captain, and among his many worldwide journeys, he took on lumber on the Mendocino coast. I have a letter he wrote to his wife, written in a mix of Danish and English, with Point Arena indicated as the place of writing.

6. I never learned more math than was required to graduate, then I forgot most of it.

7. I had English style riding lessons for two years in my youth, but I never owned my own horse.

Anonymous said...

Ernie, I hope you are using some kind of hand sanitizer after tagging so many people.

I blame it all on Monica at Radio Radio Radio Radio Radio......

Ahhh, Kym has a point about the blog traffic. Perhaps I need to put up a Yield Sign over at 299.

Oh, by the way, my valley is better than yours.

Indie said...

What fun this is to read, Ernie!

I read several blogs a day, but yours is the one that always makes me laugh out loud, so that someone in my family asks me what I'm reading.

From working in schools and being a mom, I know a ton of young people, whom I stay in contact with on MySpace. That's where I first encountered tagging about a year ago. I have no clue if that's where it originated, but the kids on MySpace are very concerned with and very good at defining their identities.

I think tagging, for the kids, is a way of doing a little self-inspection/reflection, noting how you are different from others within your community. And people recognize something of themselves there and boom, you have a conversation or a community.

Anonymous said...

het ernie, i read your blog alot. i was curious if you could post some more info on the old days of weott. i am a current resident and i enjoyed you previous post along with the historical photos of the flood. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

aw cmon Ernie everybody knows that god came from RUby valley... He and it were hear before the universe existed.

it was like a timeless erternity back then, sunbeams slanting through the reddwoods, insects buzzing, not much generator noise ... LOL knowhatimean? then god stubmbled out of the Country tavern one day and and a woman wearing a cowboy hat came out after him swearing a blue streek, 'yuo sunofabitch lying bastard i shd have known!' and throws a empty beer bottle at him and he ducks and it smashes on the Briceland raod so god says thats dangerous someone could get a flat tire so he says "shazam!" and turns the little bits of glass into Redway Briceland and Garberville and he lookd upon his work and he said "it is good!" LOL ...Right there you know somethings suspect. But he was stonedrunk so "it was all good" as they say. So he created Leytonville and Fortuna... and the rest of the universe... Hello?


But its a controversial subject matter you know so dont just believe Suzy without investigatin yrself... (and investigatiing yrself is the hardest thing youll ever do) LOL ... but its worth it. ONe version of the story has it that the beer bottttle hit him 0n the head and broke his mirrored sunglasses and thats what the universeo is made out of -- the fragments of gods sungalasses ... but then the qeustion arrises of who is the girl in the cowboy hat? LOL! some say its all her fault. But when they say that --Suzy just mysteriously asks em "what was her fualt???" and they are stumped. But dont ask them where teh stump came from unless yuo wanta here the whole history of logging in NOrthern Ca.

btw mom says she was gazing at the miraculous air cooling unit on the cielling of the country tavern and she had a vision of how the universe really works but then she couldnt remember exactly the design after singing along with jimmy buffet and a drunk fireman the rest of the night ...ttt -- wasted away agian in Margarittaville.
I wonder if anyone has a picture of that bueatiful "chandelier"?

amen,
s

Robin Shelley said...

I don't have any pictures of the chandelier, Suzy, unless you want the Chandelier Tree photos which I doubt because that would put us right back into the good ol' glory days of loggin' the Redwoods... but I could probably find us a pitcher of beer. I buy all of your story as the gospel truth except the part about God creating Laytonville... doesn't seem like a likely scenario to me at all!

Anonymous said...

Robin; what came to Laytonville first? mashed potatos? or gravy?

luv paece and accoutrements
s

Ernie Branscomb said...

Well thank God that beer bottles were made out of glass back at the beginning, God would never have been able to make the Heavens and the Earth out of plastic like in the “Accoutrement” thing.

Robin, don’t mess with Suzy, she has connections in High Places. If you get my whiff.

Robin Shelley said...

I'm pretty sure the accoutrements pre-date both the mashed potatoes & fried gravy.

Anonymous said...

fried gravy --LOL!

In the beginnning... was the plastic picher of beer. and it was one ...and it was one with itself --but that didnt last long . . .

onword,
s