165,789 Words To Go - Open Thread

by Randy on July 2, 2008

Speaking of high verbal quotients, as of this post, the general stats in my sidebar says that I have

1,346 Posts

5,833 Comments

535,835 Words in Posts

370,046 Words in comments

Now I know that I have a high verbal quotient for a man. I am cool with it but… come on … I got y’all beat by almost 166,000 words!

That’s like … three or four books worth or something. And this post is just adding to the total.

Ok ok… you do get some slack in that the first big blog migration decided to send a LOT of comments out into the ether … but we are stable now.

So, here’s your chance to help use up 166,000 words … whaddya’ got to say?

Share on ...
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • TwitThis
  • Pownce
  • Print this article!
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

    Related posts (automatically generated)

Tagged as: Asides, blogging, Books, comments, Cool, Open Thread

Viewing 43 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    ::: crickets chirping :::
    • ^
    • v
    I guess I should have titled this thread "Militant Gay Activists Take Over the World!" We would be at a million words by now.

    ::: yawn :::
    • ^
    • v
    ::::wondering out loud::::

    Do comments added by Randy assist us in our apparently mandated quest of out talking the main speaker of this world of blogginess? Do many, many, many, many, many, many smaller words make up for a short yet well thought out response? Is Randy Thomas actually encouraging us to ramble on and on and on and on and on and on on his blog?

    :::sigh:::

    Hi Randy! Just stopping over to say Hi. Have a great day in the Lord!

    Blessings!
    ChaplainChas.

    <abbr>ChaplainChas.s last blog post..Nothing to Say on ... chaplainchas.blogspot.com</abbr>
    • ^
    • v
    I will attempt one of my mammoth comments the moment that my Old English and Linguistics lesson is done for the day. Don't worry, I've been looking at those numbers with the urge to change them for a while now. Although I'm glad to hear that you cheated by dumping --er misplacing those older comments.
    • ^
    • v
    @ChaplainChas. -
    ::: wondering out loud too :::

    Chas, if all you have to offer is a feeling of mandated rambling, even though I did not mandate or encourage rambling ... I will take it. I was bored and wanted to post something creative that allows for open ended creativity. Melodramatic sigh all you want.

    ::: end wondering :::
    • ^
    • v
    @Ellie -
    I didn't cheat ... I promise! When I first moved from Typepad to Wordpres (or vice versa? ... ther have been several moves) a LONG time ago, I genuinely lost the comments. I downloaded the export, deleted the account and realized later that I didn't have the comments.

    I was very down about that.

    For some reason I think you will be very good at helping to reverse those numbers. And yes Chas. My comments count toward the comment word list total. Post are me talking at you ... comments are us talking together.
    • ^
    • v
    Originally Posted By Randy@Ellie -
    Post are me talking at you ... comments are us talking together.


    Which is why comments are better :)

    I tried using the 'quote' link at the bottom (which is a brave technological step for this little English major), and it worked, yay!

    Now I will make a short but somewhat interesting comment, in order to boost the verbosity quotient of this site, based on my reading for yesterday (luckily this will help to alleviate boredom between my class breaks):

    Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" is very pretentious. She is completely wrong about a lot of things, especially the idea that Mozart and Pope are camp (I mean really!). It also seems that, if she would label them as such, then she really hasn't experienced much of Mozart or Pope, and is merely name-dropping them in order to sound much more immersed in high culture than she actually is.
    • ^
    • v
    Originally Posted By Ellie

    Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" is very pretentious. She is completely wrong about a lot of things, especially the idea that Mozart and Pope are camp (I mean really!). It also seems that, if she would label them as such, then she really hasn't experienced much of Mozart or Pope, and is merely name-dropping them in order to sound much more immersed in high culture than she actually is.


    Very good Ellie. I also linked to the article you mentioned in this comment.

    I got through the first paragraph and decided it was to much brain power than I was actually prepared to invest in. So... suffice it to say that my initial answer is ... wait for it ... wait for it ...

    Huh?
    • ^
    • v
    Well, basically she is saying that she is going to try to describe and define camp, because nobody has ever done it before. Unfortunately, she actually seems to define 'camp' as anything popular in the gay sub-culture in the mid-twentieth century, especially if it allows her to demonstrate that she has read/experienced some part of high culture as well. Which means that a lot of what she said was incorrect, and it's not ultimately a very good guide to camp at all. Especially since much of what she defines as camp is demonstrably not, see the Mozart and Pope examples above, along with Swan Lake as pointed out by Paul Varnell (he pointed out the Mozart and Pope too, but I knew that was wrong independently, so I don't really need to cite him).

    Her other problem is that she seems to consider Oscar Wilde, if not as 'camp,' then certainly as the great arbiter of it. This displays a shocking inability to realize the seriousness that Wilde was hiding behind his flippancy, reminiscent of a freshman English major reading Wilde for the first time.

    Anyway, since apparently this is "the most important thing" she ever wrote (it's also the first important thing she ever wrote) I don't think that I'll be taking Sontag very seriously.
    • ^
    • v
    @Ellie - @Ellie - That makes sense and I agree. Believe it or not I think I am following you. Camp and Mozart are completely different. However, I have heard it argued that Camp is a lot deeper then people give it credit. I personally don't believe that but I know of some very serious "camp" people that see are insulted if you reduce it solely to the "artifice."
    • ^
    • v
    I do think that camp (or at least an appreciation of it) can be deep. I don't really know if I could intellectually defend that position, (but I probably could do it better than Sontag). "True camp" is supposed to be unintentional, and appreciating it takes a certain awareness of duality that allows the person experiencing it to have both an understanding of what the work is supposed to convey, and what it actually conveys, simultaneously. Grasping that can be a deep experience (if it's something worth grasping). I think, though, that much of what is considered camp now is intentional, and, one could argue, not true camp.
    • ^
    • v
    Well,

    if the idea is to get as much words as one could possibly write here, I'd say that you people are well on the way to reaching that goal of using up 166,000 words on this blog.

    If I get into the zone perphaps I could help with that one but today I'm not in the zone.

    This is a great blog.

    SJ.
    • ^
    • v
    Okay, we haven't even made a dent in the post to comment word discrepancy. So I shall try again. But first I have to get something out of our garage.

    :::travels to and from garage:::

    Alright, now I'm back.

    Let's see. I think that I will write about clothes. People seem to like clothes; the people whom I know tend to wear them, at least that's what I've observed, and so I presume that they like them. But it seems like people, even though now we have much more disposable income and clothes are more available, people spend less time getting dressed up, or making sure that they look good when they go out of the house. I don't understand that. Especially when I go to the opera, and there are many people there who are wearing jeans and a t-shirt. It seems like it would be desirable to dress up, because it is enjoyable to do so, and the opera presents an opportunity to do so, but instead many people just go in whatever they normally wear. I don't understand that.
    • ^
    • v
    @Ellie - You are very good at coming up with stuff to talk about. You should blog :).

    I agree about clothes. I am not a legalist about clothes. Meaning I am not a clothes snob. I know what looks good and what doesn't. I know what is appropriate for what situation and I expect to follow those "cultural customs." However, it almost ticks me off when people refuse to dress appropriately for certain situations. I call it the google effect. Just because Google let's their employees where whatever, not comb whatever and ride tricycles around (that's what I have heard at least) people should be black tie at the Opera. It's honoring the beauty being made available as well as participating in that beauty.

    Does that mean I would turn my nose up at someone showing up in jeans? Absolutely not. I have no idea why they showed up like that. I would assume that they love music and can't be kept away. Also, I don't have a tux and if I had a chance to go to an Opera, I would go in a suit if I couldn't afford to buy or rent a tux. That doesn't mean that I don't feel it is appropriate to be in black tie and that be the standard.

    Good topic :).
    • ^
    • v
    @Randy -

    Exactly. Usually in LA when people go to the opera they wear suits and nice dresses, rather than tuxes and formals (except opening night, which is black-tie). I don't see why people don't maintain the older standard of black-tie, though. And it really surprises me when I see men wearing Hawaiian shirts and their wives wearing dresses. I think maybe it's just because people are lazy, but it still bugs me.
    • ^
    • v
    @Ellie - I think people have turned into consumers instead of people who appreciate something for the sake of that something. People no longer see the social benefits of "high" art.

    Most art has become about them, their benefit and experience instead of being a part of something larger or more social. You don't have to dress up when your only expectation is to be entertained.

    It's the difference between consuming and participating ... I think.
    • ^
    • v
    That's probably at least one of the reasons. Part of what I don't understand about it is that we are all so tuned in to fashion now (ok, not necessarily you, or the average man who would wear a Hawaiian shirt to the opera, but most women certainly), and yet we don't capitalize on a situation where we can make use of high fashion. Oh, well. I will keep wearing my nice clothes.

    On blogging. I know I should blog, and I actually have one, but I very rarely use it. I should start again, and maybe I will. One problem that I have is that it is a vox blog, and I don't really like their whole social networking cum blogging format. I had a blogspot blog, but it lay dormant for so long it seemed silly, and now I have this issue w/ 'DansGuardian' being occasionally active on my home network, and it bans all blogspot blogs (it's a really long story how that happened) so I didn't have full access to it. The best thing for me, if I really wanted to blog, would probably be to hook onto someone else's blog as a co-blogress. Who knows, maybe I will marry a cute blogger someday and I'll be able to do just that. Or maybe I will finally start actively using my blog.

    Alright, new topic. Ooh, I know. Do you ever drink sweet tea? I was reading an article about sweet tea and how wonderful it is, and all I could think was that it seemed like all that sugar would be absolutely horrible as a drink. So, do you like sweet tea?

    That reminds me of regional food differences in America. People (like my ultra liberal geography teacher) are always complaining about how modern, capitalist culture has obliterated all of the diversity that used to exist in our culture(s?), and now we are just one mass of WalMart shoppers all wearing the same clothes and eating the same food and becoming homogenized automatons. But people in the South still drink sweet tea and eat okra and catfish (or is that just in Arkansas?). And people in California eat double-doubles and tacos from taco shacks and vegan ice cream (trust me, it's good). So obviously we still have a lot of local color, even though some of us shop at WalMart.
    • ^
    • v
    oh, and could the box that we type our comments into grow so that it fills up both sides of the column?
    • ^
    • v
    @Ellie - I can't respond in full right now but I already had the expansion of the text box on my list of things to do. I just did it.
    • ^
    • v
    @Ellie -
    Clothes - Keep wearing them and dress to inspire.

    Blogging - Get a wordpress.com or stand alone wordpress (like mine) blog. Wordpress is truly the best... and believe me ... I have tried them all (several times.) You have a gift and it should be blogged! :).

    Sweet tea - Growing up in Tennessee, sweet tea is a default (or was.) Whenever anyone ever ordered a "tea" at a restaraunt it was always iced and always sweet. My first day waiting tables on Long Island taught me that this default did not translate well into the Northeast. Their default was hot tea with sugar on the side ... if they ordered it. Sweet tea is full of sugar ... tons of sugar. Because I don't work outside nearly as often as my grandparents, I can't afford to drink it even though it is *really* good.

    My grandparents, extended family, made home made everything and none of it was supposedly healthy. Yet, they were not fat by any means. I love southern food. My Aunt Sara makes the best home made banana pudding and fried okra. My Aunt Judy ... pork chops! My Great Granny would make me my own home made chocolate pie every holiday.

    I am really hungry all of a sudden.

    the book Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlausser (sp?) is really good. He makes the case that your liberal professor does in a really well articulated argument. He even says that more people around the world recognize the golden arches of McDonalds than do the Cross of Christ. That said, I just don't believe that traditional foods will ever disappear or evolve. They will ebb and flow like everything else. Humans like their sentimental foods and feasts.
    • ^
    • v
    Don't worry, I will continue to wear clothes.

    I'll have to look into wordpress.

    You're right, I don't think traditional food will ever really go away. If I ever go to the south you can introduce me to sweet tea. And if you're ever in LA I'll take you out for vegan ice cream ;) The last time I was at the vegan ice cream shop, I had chocolate celery ice cream, yumm.
    • ^
    • v