I’m saddened today by the news that President Jimmy Carter is beginning to receive Hospice care at home. I think he’s among the best, most compassionate of notable people during my lifetime. Stories about him and First Lady Rosalynn Carter, along with their actions through the years, helped me believe, as I said to Jim and Tim earlier, “His is the soul of a humble giant.” Also, I’m so grateful for Hospice workers and the care they provide to patients and their families.
It’s all made me quite contemplative today, just when I’d finished a moody section of the novel and was about to embark on a happier one. I guess it’s not sexy or hot or sellable in these times, but it’s been my effort to write characters who try to embody the best of us, even as I so often read and hear about the worst of us. I don’t believe people used to be better because times used to be better. Times have always been problematic, and I believe good people are still in the majority.
So I go forward to create and love and appreciate my playlist of blues, pop, rock, country, whatever shows up as I write. These are from yesterday and today.
Happy birthday, Yoko Ono, who turned ninety today.
And, it’s the L when I figure out you have organized your solo artists by last name, while mine are by first name and both surrounded by band names of the letter.
You can take the girl out of the summer job file room, but you can’t take the file room out of the girl. If it’s any consolation, on the Concordance I have to create to keep up with every person and place name used in five-sixish-counting novels, the order is by first name. I often forget my characters’ last names, but never their first names.
It’s easier if artists are famous with first names only, right? Madonna. Cher. But then there’s Prince. What do you do when he’s Ƭ̵̬̊?
I would place that wherever the computer sorts it for me, unless I can think of some other relation.
OS/2 used to use ASCII, but those letters with accents weren’t aligned with those without. Once that changed, an ‘è’ equaled ‘e’ and suddenly a database failed because those filenames suddenly matched! The Macintosh iTunes insists on placing numbers after the letter ‘z’. And Linux could use just anything depending on what options you picked, yet some file browsers differentiated between a ‘-‘ and another ever so undistingushly and yet incredibly magically different’-‘ making those separate filenames that can’t be typed easily. So I had to write a script to clean all that nonsense up. We just can’t win, but one day emojs will truely replace only American English words.