MERMAIDS HAS MOVED!

This blog is now located at HTTP://JACKCURTIN.WORDPRESS.COM.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Packing up, moving on.

I am combining Mermaids with my Great Disconnect site (I may or may not be able to move all of the content here over there) to make life easier for me. I find that the recent improvements at WordPress make it a more desirable host so that I will be using that URL and this logo. Sounds weird? Hey, you knew the risks coming in, right?

Use this URL to continue to be part of the Mermaids family. For the squeamish, I'll make it easier for you to identify and skip over my political rants in the new digs, so it's win/win.

The Great Disconnect.

Alert visitors to this site (they're the ones walking around the room and talking and not slumped against the wall texting) will notice that I have added a feed/link to my latest web adventure, The Great Disconnect, in the column at the right.

I am moving the bulk of my political commentary over there, effective immediately (the site sort launched itself while I was getting prepare to do so). I'm sure there will be some crossover and the bit of snark here that I just can't hold back, but the idea is to do what I said I was going to do several times in the past, make Mermaids an "everything else" site (with the exception, of course, of beer, which I devote my attention to at Jack Curtin's Liquid Diet).

Just below the Great Disconnect link is one to Outside Looking In, the cartoon website done by artist Rob Davis and me. That too will be mostly political and updated with a new cartoon several times a month. You can access the latest cartoon by clicking on the date shown in the link or the entire page by clicking on the link title.

More to come. Those "changes coming next week" that I promised at the Curtin's Corner site way back in August will actually happen in November.

I hope.

Comin' round again.

I need you folks, especially those who come here primarily for the political stuff, to go over and click on the "Follow This Blog" link at the revived Great Disconnect site so that I can get it networked via Facebook. It's down at the bottom of the column on the left.

If you were with me way back in the day, you know about the Great Disconnect. If not, "revived" will be explained on the About page over there as soon as I can get to it.

The site as it stands is pretty Beta and it will be somewhat different when it formally launches. I expect that to happen November 1, the night before the election which will save the world or destroy it, depending on your perspective, but it could be sooner.

In fact, tell you what, let's make it a challenge. As soon as enough of you, ten or 12, I believe, have gone and clicked that link, I will go live. How's that?

As for what happens here, more of the same old personal stuff (Buddy and the rest of my everyday world), more on books, TV and comics, more on everything but beer and politics. As has always been the case, though, all my sites are intertwined and crossover when that seems like a good idea.

Further thoughts on why this, why now in the days to come, as well as telling you why that, aside from business needs, I am giving up social media.

Is the best browser I've found totally unprotected against spyware?

I have toyed around with Google Chrome for brief intervals a few times in the past, but over the last ten days or so, I committed to it, made it my default browser, spent a lot of time time setting up my bookmarks to work with its somewhat limited structure.

I loved it. I really did. It was faster than Firefox, my previous browser, and more efficient and functional (in an intuitive sense) than Internet Explorer.

But tonight I am back on Firefox.

I noticed almost from the start that I was getting lots more spam mail in Gmail and then, when I ran Spybot, the search & destroy software that protects my hard drive, that there were a whole helluva lot more adware every time I had the disk checked. This stuff is not necessarily malicious but it is intrusive and annoying.

I did various checks, including running Spybot and cleaning the disk and then, alternately, running Chrome and/or Firefox afterwards for an hour or two and then having Spybot scan the disk system again. In every instance, the amount of adware, which varied from none to 20 instances, was increased following a Chrome session. Ditto the spam in my email.

Is this a common problem? I cannot find any indication that this is so in an (admittedly simple) web search. I know that Spybot makes clear that it is checking out my Firefox and IE browsers (all of the adware is identified as being browser-oriented, by the way) and it does not seem that I can do anything to make it include Chrome in that search, so the evidence is strong that this should not be an issue specific to me but to all users.

Input, people, please. I am most annoyed and we don't want that, do we?

Lo, there shall come a dragon....

This is my first post here using my new Dragon Voice Recognition Software, my second post overall. The first one was done over at the Liquid Diet website and posted without any corrections at all to show how difficult it's going to be to get some of the names and terms from the Philadelphia craft brewing world to be recognized.

I bought Dragon version 10 from Amazon at a good price. Version 11 has just been released and is apparently a quantum leap forward, but I figured I'd start with this cheaper older version on the theory that, if it works, I can upgrade to the new version a bit down the road. So far I'm using Dragon on my desktop computer but I suspect I'll find the notebook a better fit. I can see me sitting out in the backyard enjoying the weather and dictating my posts. A man's gotta dream right?

I've done all this without reading any of the instructions or looking at the tutorial because that's the kind of guy I am. When I get some time to be the kind of guy I ought to be, I'll check those things out. I'll keep you all informed about how this goes.

Where I've been and why.

I am back to trying to upgrade my Liquid Diet site again--I do hate unfinished business--so posting here has suffered. Ill try to get back in gear this weekend.

Vibes. Good ones requested.

My friend Rob Davis learned today that he has cancer. Many of you will recognize his name because he was the co-creator with me of the online cartoon series The Dubya Chronicles, born out of another series we did for a now moribund website (they still owe us money) called Cartoon Caucus. He and I have in recent times been doing, in fits and starts, a series call Outside Looking In, which began as part of Mermaids and now has its own website.

It's prostate cancer and he sort of knew this was coming; a biopsy report today confirmed it. They have apparently caught this very early on and Rob is very positive and confident about the situation as is clear from his response when I asked him if I could share the news here"

"I'm a believer in the more people who send me positive vibes the better. Share this with whomever. I'm gonna lick this. We've caught it early (can't say that enough!). I'm not looking forward to ANY of the possible treatments, but we do what we must."

I just thought you should know. Send those good vibes, will ya?

Outside Looking In re-launch.

I mentioned one post back that it was coincidental that my review of the cartoons on The Dubya Chronicles website (which has been updated) turned up the cartoons by Rob Davis and me for February 2008 which were quite good. The coincidence came from the fact that three of them centered on Sen. John McCain and the initial cartoon in the relaunch of our Outside Looking In cartoon series this very day also features the ancient legislator.

Yeah, we went for the low-hanging fruit. Sue us.

So that's two of my websites come back to life again. Meanwhile, the relaunch of Jack Curtin's Liquid Diet, the major move of the three, is still underway and will not be completed today as I had hoped. Soon, soon...

A sneaky post, followed by an immediate confession.

While I will be spending most of this weekend (I hope) polishing up and off the re-launching of Jack Curtin's Liquid Diet with a more attractive, functional and clean look, I plan to set aside two and a half hours in late afternoon and early evening to watch the film adaption of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo via Netflix on my computer screen. It's not the ideal way to see it--although movies on the 'puter screen are pretty crisp and clean (even for the subtitles, I hope), the seating arrangements are not optimum--but I missed it when it played ever-so-briefly in the area and it's either this or renting it, an option I'll choose if the first half hour or so isnt' satisfactory.

Now, a bit of a confession. I posted the above mostly to check out a new linkage from here to Amazon which will earn Mermaids a bit of the profits every time anyone clicks from here to the book and buys it. Let me say up front that, if you are an inveterate reader and have an independent bookstore from which you usually purchase, please continue to do just that. I owned a bookstore for five years and I know both what an invaluable service they are to the community and how hard it is to make a living offering that service. If you do not have a local store and at some point you are moved to want to look more seriously at and possibly purchase a book mentioned and linked here, it would be a nice thing to do to reward the management for its efforts.

I promise I will put any earnings to humanitarian purposes such as buying donuts for the boys in the mail room one morning or dogitarian purposes by buying a treat for Buddy.

And, what the heck, as long as I'm pimping here, let me further suggest two of my favorite books of the year so far, The Pint Man and Hardball. The first is a tale of two or three days in a drinking man's life and filled with all sorts of clever wordplay and commentary; the second is the newest novel in a long running and very good private detective series.

And now we return you to our regularly schedule blather, already in progress...

Try, Try Again. UPDATED 6-Aug-10

Update:This issue has been resolved; there was a "verify" button I needed to click. I now own this little, tiny corner of the internets in Facebook's eyes, for whatever that's worth.

I have once again added the NetworkedBlogs sign-up area in the column at right, about midway down.

While it currently specifies 11 followers, which is one more than needed to allow me to claim ownership of Mermaids over on Facebook, they for some reason only credit three followers.

I urge anyone who has any interest at all in seeing this blog continue to sign on as a follower and do whatever comes next to verify my ownership.

Thanks.

With friends like these...

While Carl P was taking advantage of my hospitality last June, he was also using the time to betray me. You know it happens. The photo below, obviously more candid than I might wish, catches me "at work" early one morning. Its only redeeming feature is Buddy in the lower right corner, doing his Buddy thing (sleeping).

Excuse the big ugly box at the top of the page.[Updated]

It will stay there until at least ten of you click on "follow" and verify that I am the author of "Mermaids." Please do so. Thanks.

Big Blue Box is gone. Thanks for your help.

Why.

I have not gone away, I just have nothing to say.

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright and giving off no light.

My apologies for having gone silent for almost two days. Two reasons for that:

One: I've been busy. That's a good thing.

Two: This site is, sadly, looking more and more like an ego-booster. The move from Wordpress to Blogger, aside from my desire to be familiar with both, was made in the hopes that we might attract more of an audience over here. No such luck. The readership is small, jumping up only when I either pimp the posts elsewhere or write about His Majesty Buddy, who does have his following. Not wishing to become the Westminster Dog Show, I reject a total focus on the latter as a solution. Additionally, input from the readers is minimal at best; granted, that is largely my fault, not providing commentary that inspires response or participation, but it does lead to a lessened enthusiasm for posting.

Still, a lot of intriguing things are happening of late, from the possible new life for the Public Option in the never-ending Health Care Reform debate to the emergence of many of the creatures behind the curtains at the CPAC gathering in Washington, and, hey, ego-boosting has its place too, so I'm not going anywhere.

However, we will not be discussing Tiger Woods.

Because I. Do. Not. Care. 

Just sayin'....

Here I Go Again: Site Changes.

In conjunction with a Very Big Day coming up Monday and my conclusion that three websites for me to tend to, plus two others which pay me to handle their content, is a website too far, I will be moving several posts which first appeared at Curtin's Corner over to this blog during the weekend.

They will appear as new posts here; I'll likely get confused but will try to make they show up here in some sort of logical order. This is part of expanding Mermaids beyond the merely political to a place where I can confront all aspects of my life in this World I Never Made. Basically, our perspective is going to get broader and our content, I hope, more fun and varied.

This will include the new cartoon feature I have mentioned in the past if I am able to pry Rob Davis, that selfish soul, away from his paying work often enough.

Hey, it's been over a month since I last declared my new and final website presence, count on it, no more vacillating, you can book it, all that stuff. That's almost a record.  

I tinker, therefore I am. 

My Robert B. Parker Post.

Welcome to anyone arrived here because of this Rap Sheet posting which lists several online tributes and reminiscences; please look around and, if inclined, make yourself comfortable. The actual Parker post quoted on that list appears over here, on another of my sites. Apologies for the confusion, which I assume is my fault.

Why Does This Happen?

I find it very frustrating that whenever I try to share a post from here on Facebook, the section quoted is not from the post itself but from the "About Me" section. Can any of you experienced Blogger users explain to me what's going on?

Thanks.

Nine Years Ago Today....

...cartoonist Rob Davis and I launched an online cartoon series, The Dubya Chronicles, which ran until one year ago today and recorded in graphic format (later posts were also animated) the absolute disaster which was The. Worst. Presidency. Ever.

If you click on that link, you'll find your in the middle of a retrospective of the entire series which ran aground after a few months; it now serves as the home page until I find the energy and time to do something constructive with the site. The entire archives are available at a link below the artwork and comment if you want to pursue our efforts through the years.

On that first day, Inauguration Day 2001, we ran the two cartoons below as a double entry. The second cartoon has been rearranged and the first panel truncated in order to make it work in this venue.

I thought they would serve as an excellent reminder that, no matter how bad things look this morning, something even worse is---and was---possible. And I think you will see that we had those guys' number right from the gitgo.

Ready, Set...

I have been terribly slow getting into the rhythm of posting around here, for which I apologize. I'm hoping whatever happens in Massachusetts tomorrow will kick-start me. Also, I have few fun items to mark a special anniversary for Wednesday so, one way or another, the pace will pick up soon.