Music is the Ultimate Time Machine: Book of Love’s Witchcraft

It’s really cool listening to an old song and noticing something that you’ve never noticed before. Hat tip to Nina from You Know Neen for the headline idea.

Recently, I added 90s Techno Tunes to my Spotify Playlists and have been listening to some old school synthpop while running. I discovered a reference to Dark Shadows in a Book of Love song called Witchcraft.

In the second what do you call it, stanza? Refrain? I was not a music major. Anyway in the second set of repeating lyrics there’s a couple of lines:

Angelique takes Barnabas
From Josette

Before the Johnny Depp version, there was a soap opera called Dark Shadows in the 70s. As a kid, I just thought it was a pretty cool show about a vampire, but apparently there was a story arc too.

This is the part of the post where I put in a lot of transitional stuff that ties everything together nicely and earns me a Nobel Prize in Blogging.  Okay here goes nothing.

Listening to old songs from my early 20s brings back memories of a simpler time that didn’t seem so simple at the time.  We use to dance to Book of Love, Erasure, Yaz and other pop music alternative bands at places like The Octagon and Artful Dodger.  Usually I was the extra wheel since I was always Terminally Single and the bouncer nicknamed me Macaulay Culkin because I always went home alone. But this is Free Fun Friday so only light thoughts today.

Sometimes going down a rabbit hole is a good thing.

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Can we move Halloween already?

Last week was unseasonably warm for October; Sunny and temperatures in the 70s, even 80s.  But this week is more season appropriate and on Halloween the expected forecast is 50s and maybe even rainy.  It is time to embrace the practicality of celebrating this holiday on a day other than the last day of October.

Halloween doesn’t need to occur on Oct 31st anymore. Move it to either the last Saturday of September or the first Saturday of October so that more of the USA can enjoy better weather while engaging in Halloween festivities. In most parts of the country, it’s too dark and almost always too cold on Oct. 31 for a proper celebration.  Any historical or religious associations with Halloween are vestigial at best.

Many believe Halloween is a pagan rite dating back to some pre-Christian festival among the Celtic Druids, which split from the mainline Pagan groups over dogmatic changes and a particularly contentious game of Monopoly. I’ll leave all that for the alien anthropologists that explore our post-apocalyptic planet to sort out.  I just want to move  Halloween to a more practical day.

I’m not just advocating for this now because I’m a parent.  When I was a kid, I recall the majority of Halloweens growing up as being cold, dark and rainy. As in sucky weather for trick-o-treating, which was the sole motivation for it being my favorite holiday. I’m not even sure I thought if it as a holiday in the true sense of the word. I just knew I liked scary things and getting free candy. Think how disappointing it is to a kid being told that you cannot go trick-o-treating because it’s freezing cold outside and raining cats and witches.   Or if you do venture out, you have to bury your costume under  a winter coat.

Apparently I’m not the only person to consider the practicality of celebrating this holiday in its present form on the last day of October. There was a petition last year, don’t know how it went but I hope the cause gains momentum.  While we’re at it, let’s move Thanksgiving too (watch for that post next month).

If you like this post, here are some more things we need to move or eliminate.

 

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Why I hate financial services online sites

Financial Services Technical Support….how may we piss you off today?

Like many people, I have two retirement accounts: the one at work because of matching funds and the one that is the culmination of past jobs’ 401K accounts that got transferred once the job terminated.

About once a quarter I attempt to log into my retirement online accounts to see how they are doing. I say attempt because I always lock myself out of my account because I have so many Fucking userids and passwords to remember.

Unlike normal online accounts, you only get 1-2 chances with Financial Services websites for some reason. Fat-finger a password and they lock you out.  And once you reset your password you can never use a previous one again in this lifetime.  I’m pretty sure if reincarnation is a thing, they won’t let you use the same one in the next lifetime either.

Incorrect information was entered in an attempt to log into your account. To protect your account, we have disabled online access to your account.
You can restore your online access by following the instructions the next time you access Benefits OnLine®. Or you can call at your plan’s toll-free number and authorize a representative to restore your access. We take your online security seriously and will notify you of any changes to your login information.

They sing the “for your security” song but it’s really to protect their ass from liability mitigate risk.  I’m sure there is some Federal Regulation that mandates this. To which I say have your fucking lobbyist make their congressional whores change it.

Sadly, there isn’t anything the average consumer can do about it. I have to continue using the work one for the matching contributions and they all are gonna be the same movie. So I’ll call customer support and reset my password to something I won’t remember next week, let alone next time the friendly email reminder about quarterly earnings comes in.  But I can refuse to buy any of their other expensive add-on services like Financial Planning or Wealth Management.

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Blogiversary: 5 years at ChicagoNow

Five years ago this week I published my first post.  295 published posts later, the subject matter has obviously changed.  Whenever the anniversary of our first post comes along, bloggers like to write about it because it’s a clever way to make a post about me we sometimes just cannot think of anything else to write about.

I’m gonna share what I’ve learned either in one not too long post or many smaller posts, depending on how much unsolicited wisdom I feel like imparting.

I’m going to focus on blogging at ChicagoNow, though I’m sure a lot of this advice and experience would translate to other platforms.  We are lucky to have the ChicagoNow audience which is backfilled through the Tribune Ecosystem.  Enjoy it while it’s here because nothing lasts forever.

Cute pictures help too

Lesson Zero:  Do not say you just published a new blog!

When referring to a post that you just published, don’t say “I just published a new blog” or “New blog up at MyBlog”.  Unless you literally went from publishing your posts on Baby Sideburn to Mothers who Drink and Swear, It’s incorrect and just makes you look like a moron.

Lesson one: Don’t set yourself up to fail

One of the gimmicks bloggers fall pray to is the 30 days of blogging challenge or promising a series that is way too long.  Unless you already have half of that content ready to go, don’t make promises you cannot keep.  Life will get in the way.  You will lose steam.

Lesson Two: It doesn’t matter when you publish

The real anniversary of my first post is October 1.  But it doesn’t matter when I hit the publish button, within reason.  Obviously I don’t want to wait until November but the Blog Police won’t come after me if this doesn’t post until the middle of the month.  The thing to remember is that a published decent post is infinitely better than an unpublished perfect post.

Lesson Three:  Keep it brief though

I try to keep my posts between 300 and 600 words because society has the attention span of a litter of concussed kittens.  There are some of course where I have more to say but as I learned from my editor days, most articles can be trimmed by ten percent.  There are a handful of bloggers who can get away with excessive wordiness but I’m not usually one of them.

 

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