Dixon's Forum

I’ve been very busy this week setting up site security, firewalls, anti-spam . . .   Pretty in-depth stuff, lots of choices, with warnings like, ‘don’t do this blindly if you don’t understand things else you could lock yourself out of your own website’, and stuff.

The spam filter says it uses JavaScript and cookies, so if you leave a comment, you also give permission for the spam filter to leave you a cookie, and if you have cookies blocked or JavaScript disabled, it will mark your comments as Spam.   But fear not, I’ll still read them, and hopefully there’s a way to make them not-spam.   Also the “back” buttons use JavaScript so if they don’t work right you prob’ly have JavaScript disabled.

You could help, actually, if you’d like to turn off your cookies and post a comment like, “I’m not spam, I just turned off my cookies.” then I would have something marked as spam to test.

Somehow in all this, the link button images stopped displaying, and all you get are image placeholders and their ALT texts.   ALT text means alternative text, meant to display when the image can’t be viewed for some reason, like it got removed from the Image Library, or the visitor is using an accessibility application.

But these aren’t removed from the library, I’m not using accessibility, they’re truly not displaying, so you’ll have to pretend the images are really in the Header and Footer. They all look like one of these:  , , , , except the one for Naomi’s Corner, which looks like this:  .

While you’re pretending the link buttons are really imaged, you might as well pretend you’re in a live audience for this week’s activity.   “That’s my Way” is related to “Unentitled” in that “Unentitled” starts off as a kind of memoir of the times when “That’s my Way” took place.   Serendipitously, they both start out with the same verse.

“That’s my Way” is my most recent story, born of an epiphany, having totally flubbed an important opportunity, and realizing I had been so focused on compensating for my weaknesses, I had put no efforts into employing my strengths.   The cost was truly dear, and it caused me to look back and examine other lost opportunities.   Had I flubbed them, too, a similar way?

It seemed like a good idea to share that lesson, and I thought the best way was to go on the Moth Radio Hour and tell it, for their vast and erudite audience to ponder, so I read their guidelines and thought, yeah!   I could barely almost conform to that!   I’m gonna go on the Moth show!   Hence, “That’s my Way” is my first and only specifically aural story.   Moth didn’t like that offal pun either.

I wrote it, practiced it, revised it every time, until it was perfect, then changed it again a hundred times.   The Moth wants stories of life-changing events, and this one was profound.   Important.   If my pitch got past the screeners, the bigwigs might forgive the comedy mixed in, and the time length overlapping the limit a little.

It’s a story, no doubt, but written as a script with kind o’ shorthand stage directions and audience interaction cues.   I trip over my own feet, occasionally, at relevant points, which are marked by a in the text.    means “air quotes”.   Where I want the audience to cheer, a appears, and I gesture “thumbs up”.   For a boo,  , thumbs down.   Groan, , fist to the gut.   Asides, like when I comment on the audience’s reaction to one of the gestures, are coded like: <”thank you.”>.   Everything else is mostly normal.   There’s no gesture for “laugh” though; I leave that up to you.

I flubbed my pitch to the Moth, completely.   Didn’t even rate a rejection form.   I should have written a synopsis of the whole story rather than just presenting the first couple minutes.   I’ve always heard that it’s good to, first, engage the audience’s attention with a few jokes, so, “That’s my Way” starts out with a few laughs which, looking back, may have given the impression that it’s a stand-up comedy routine not a serious life-changing story.

Plus, the Moth guidelines say “no cliffhangers”.  I kind o’ knew the pitch presentation was a little cliffhangy but, not like their example cliffhanger but, denial is a powerful thing; I’d hoped they wouldn’t notice.   But, alas and boo-hoo, they did.

So it never got on the air, and you are pretending to hear it now for the first time ever.   Click here to see the script for the Moth pitch of my oral story, “That’s my Way” , a true cliffhanger if I ever saw one.   Or, click here   to go to last week’s home page, in case you missed Installment One of “Unentitled”.

Next week:   Installment Two of “Unentitled”.