Enotes

Bob Denver is still dead. The other day on Facebook, I came across a link "announcing" the death of Denver, who most famously played Gilligan on TV's "Gilligan's Island." I'm usually pretty up on who's alive and who's dead, celebrity-wise, but in this instance I dropped the ball. So I shared the link. The story, which appeared to sprout from "The Today Show" web site, announced Denver's age at death as being 70. That should have been my first red flag. A quick calculation told me that Denver must have been born in  1943, or in December of 1942, for him to have died at age 70. After I shared the link, a Facebook friend commented that he was surprised Denver was that young. "Yeah, me too," I commented back. "That meant he was in his early-20s when 'Gilligan's Island' first started on the air." That by itself is semi-plausible, but I had neglected to take into account Denver's years p...

Can you imagine the world we would live in if we were all judged based on things we said or did when we were young and foolish? Actually, if you are a celebrity, you do live in that world. If we could whip out an instrument, not unlike a defibrillator, and measure what's in Paula Deen's heart at this very moment, then maybe she wouldn't be persona non grata right now. Maybe she wouldn't be hemorrhaging support from her network and from her endorsement clients and she wouldn't be kept away with a ten-foot pole by her on-air colleagues. If we could go into that ticker of Deen's and find out whether she is, today, an abhorrent racist Southern belle, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it save a lot of angst and hurt feelings if Deen's true views of those of color were as easily determined, were as black and white (no pun intended), as the fact that she, once upon a time, used racial slurs? Deen, fired by Food Network and dropped by Smithfield a...

It might have started with LOL. Not sure. My Internet experience dates to 1998, but my chatting with other folks came several years later. LOL. BTW. FWIW. IMHO. ROFLMAO. We need a new dictionary. Not for new words---for new abbreviations and acronyms. I remember, as a youngster, happening upon my mom's old shorthand tablet, from the days when she was a secretary. I can still see the hieroglyphics on the spiral bound pages. How in the world, I thought, could anyone make heads or tales out of this gobbledygook? My wife was also in clerical work, and she used to write in shorthand as well. She kept some of her old tablets, too. It's getting to where the "shorthand" that people use on the Internet, thanks to Social Media, is almost as undecipherable to me as the Gregg shorthand stuff from back in the day. I know the basics (see above examples), lest you think me a total Luddite. But the use of abbreviations and acronyms is getting out of hand. I can't ke...

How long before video stores go the way of travel agencies? Remember the local travel agent? They'd advertise on local TV and they had tiny offices with globes on the signs and maps on the walls. You'd ring them up if you wanted a surrogate to get you the best deal on a hotel in Chicago or a rental car in Boston. Then the Internet struck, with its multitude of websites, and the American traveler became his or her own travel agent. The middle man, as so often has happened after the Internet, was cut out, like a tumor. Why pay someone to do something that we could do for free, and still get discounts to boot? So I wonder about the fate of the corner video store. Actually, you may have to drive past quite a few corners before you find a video store these days. NetFlix, the Red Box kiosks, the Internet (of course) and more people owning BluRay discs than DVDs, are all contributing to the slow death of the local video store, I'm afraid. But some of it is the vid...

Those advertisers sure know a captive audience when it sees one. I'm talking about the newest way they're getting you to watch their ads---by boldly placing them in front of various videos you click to watch on the Internet. And they're getting worse. It used to be that the advertiser spots you'd be forced to view would last 10 seconds. No biggie; 10 seconds isn't too long to settle in and watch what you hope will be a compelling, funny, interesting, cute video. Then the spots grew to 15 seconds in length. OK, what's 15 seconds, right? That doesn't seem too long. Now they're a full 30 seconds in length, and they're showing up in more and more videos, annoyingly so. Now we have a problem. First, 30 seconds is a long time. It may not seem like it, but grab a watch with a second hand, close your eyes, and count out what YOU believe are 30 seconds. Almost guaranteed, the watch will tell you that you're shy. Besides that, having to sit through a 30-se...

Warning!! Today's post is graphic. Just my words, today, will make you squirm and feel nauseous. You won't need actual images, though one of them will find its way here, a bit later on. But that's an Etch-a-Sketch compared to what I will write about. This is the story of a young girl who took her dad's Porsche out for a joyride, possibly amped up on cocaine, and crashed it, killing herself in the process. That sentence, alone, conjours up some not-so-pleasant images in the mind's eye. But I can assure you that anything you're cooking up in your brain, even with the most vivid imagination, is child's play compared to the actual images captured from this horrific event. Nikki Catsouras was an 18-year-old Orange County, CA girl who, in a fit of anger and defiance, took her father's Porsche and tooled it down the freeway at speeds upwards of 100 MPH. It was Halloween afternoon, 2006. She clipped another car, lost control, and slammed the Porsche into a very ...