Today Clio (pictured above) went to the vet to have her teeth cleaned. Unfortunately, several of her back teeth will also have to be removed, which is not uncommon in cats, although not all of them have teeth problems. My theory is that cats who were strays tend to have worse teeth than their house-born counterparts.
With Clio gone, Elektra and Zephyr took advantage of the sun. Like Clio, Elektra spent time on the streets and had to have several teeth pulled, whereas Zephyr, who was born in an apartment (his mother was a stray), did not. More proof that so much of our lives are a result of contingencies beyond our control. (Veiled argument for universal health care, among other things.)
This morning I looked out the window, where I saw the sun illuminating the trees on the street. Like stray cats, street trees also have a tough life, but some of them manage to scrape by.
I didn’t bother to check, but I’m pretty sure that I started blogging in November of 2007, which means I’ve been doing it for forty million years. It’s hard not to feel nostalgia for the early days, before social media destroyed blogging. Today I received a newsletter from the New York Times called ‘The Secret to Great Online Communities.’ It’s all about a FB group called Vaccine Talk 🙁 which doesn’t seem like a place I would ever would describe as ‘great.’ To me the best online communities were found in pre-Twitter blogosphere and, to some extent, on Tumblr before it was sold and corporatized. Lately I’ve been thinking about why these communities were so great — meaning why was it possible to meet and enjoy people — and I think the answer, which was not discussed at all in the NYT newsletter, is that there was NO advertising in much of the early internet.
It’s an idea that makes me think about how the commercial (advertising-driven) nature of the internet today is — or was — a choice, and how, if we were stronger, we could reserve some significant portion of the internet for non-branded communities and communication. Don’t ask me for details, but I’m sure we could do it. I’ll start: Here’s a columnar oak tree whose leaves are turning brown and red. And yellow, which is the least exciting fall color.
You can feel comfortable reading this with the knowledge that nobody is trying to track your eye movements or sell you anything.
