Well this is weird. On a whim, I decided to check to see if my FatCow account had magically come back to life, and what do you know… it had.

Dunno what the deal is there, but what the heck, I will take advantage of serendipity and write this blig entry in the interface to which I have become accustomed.

Writing in a Tumblr window is not too bad. It has a lot of the same little HTML helpers that a WordPress input window has, although in not quite as sophisticated a form.

But what I really missed was the constantly updating word count that a WordPress window has right in the lower left of the text input window. I have spent the last three years or more training myself to write to a specific word count every day, and until I lost my WordPress access I had no idea how handy that little word count thing was for that and how much I would miss it when it was gone.

Honestly, for a while, I was a little mystified as to the popularity of Tumblr, to be honest. Seems to be that even Livejournal has a better blogging system. I mean, Tumblr doesn’t even have comments. What kind of crap blogging system lacks comments?

But then again, presumably most people do not shop around when looking for a blogging platform. They just go where all the other cool blogs are, and deal with it as it is.

And while Tumblr may be lacking in features, it does have a very clean and user friendly interface, making it the low entry ramp for people to get into the world of blogging.

In fact, what it is best for is not blogging in the sense of “writing words like I am doing right now”, but simple content sharing. It makes it super easy to share a photo, a link, a video, or whatever with a minimum of hassle. And that is why, I think, it has been ground central for things going viral. A person can blog some cool content and then everyone following them can “reblog” it to their own blog, and their follows can reblog it, and so forth and so on, all with each person just having to contribute a few clicks. Could not be easier.

Plus, the fact that each user can start a new blog on a whim, and have as many blogs as they like, makes it a great incubator for wacky ideas. If a person had to register a whole new domain name and set up a whole Wordpess (or whatever) account for every little idea they had, they probably would not bother.

But if it just takes a handful of clicks on Tumblr, why the heck not? Make a blog to extoll your love of asparagus. Or to talk endlessly about Spirit of the West. Or vent about how much you hate taxis that smell like patchouli. Or whatever.

And who knows, you might find like minded people and start a whole thing going!

In the news, the world is saddened today because children’s author and full time cantankerous curmudgeon Maurice Sendak has died of cancer at the age of 83.

He was mostly known for the seminal children’s book Where The Wild Things Are, which has sold over 17 million copies worldwide and which hold a special place in the minds and hearts of many of today’s grownups, as it was published in 1963. So many generations have grown up with it.

I suspect the fact that he was mostly only famous for one book he wrote over fifty years ago (as of this writing) might have contributed to his being a tad grumpy. He would have been like Leonard Nimoy saying “You know, I have done many things since Star Trek. Want to hear about my poetry or my big books of pictures of naked fat chicks?”

But no, people just want to talk about that One Thing You Did, if they talk to you at all.

Myself, I remember Where The Wild Things Are from when I read it as a kid, but it made no special impact on me. I did not identify with Max, the protagonist (it would be many years before I found my own “wolf suit”) and his adventure did not resonate with me at all. I wonder why.

Maybe it was just plain because I was such a weird kid. I was always, to borrow a phrase from Anne Of Green Gables. “too old for my age”. I was a very civilized and well behaved (if very stubborn) kid. I never ran around the house screaming shooting my toy raygun slaying imaginary bug eyed aliens. I never spent hours playing with action figures making up scenarios of battle and victory. I never even played with toys hardly at all.

I was a strange, quiet, yet precocious child. Definitely not like the other kids at all, a fact to which they responded with predictable ire.

So a book all about how little boys are in many ways closer to the animals and wild things was not going to work for me. I was not a little wild thing. I was a very tame thing.

Ergo, for me, my reaction to the book was somewhere between “Meh.” and “Ick.” I certainly did not like the art. The wild things were weird and sort of scary to me. It made me want to go read some of my beloved Doctor Seuss books again. Nice, clean, wacky, yet adorable art. That was more my speed.

Then again, at that time I was already reading Asimov and Bradbury and had a certain amount of contempt for the “kiddie books” in that section of my elementary school library.

I mean, those books talked to me like I was an idiot! Like my brief exposure to the Dick and Jane books. Am I the only one who thinks these two are retarded?

Apparently, the answer was “yes”.

Man I was a weird, weird kid.