Heck Of A Guy

Apolinary POlek,  the Heck Of A Guy blog’s best friend in Poland and the one who, among other contributions, hooked us up with the Leonard Cohen’s Presents Anjani concert that took place at the Agnieszka Osiecka Studio in Warsaw, Poland on 31 March 2007 and was broadcast live on Trójka Radio.

Apolinary POlek alerted readers to the availability of the broadcast and provided links to photos and a recording of the pre-concert interview with Anjani and Cohen on the Trójka Radio site; he  also graciously shared his recordings of the concert itself.

He has now extensively revised his blog site, which viewers can check out at  http://schronisko.art.pl/blog/.

He also writes
… but this is a blog which is proud to call Your blog “a kindred one” and that’s what is written next to the link to Your blog.

I feel I’m daft about tagging, clouding and comparing as well as you are and my migration to Wordpress is inspired mainly by 1heckofaguy.com :o)

Anyone “daft about tagging, clouding, and comparing” and that gracious is indeed one heck of a guy.

Footnotes

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What Did You Do On The Blog Today, DrHGuy?

Consequently, today’s post is also about housekeeping chores.

Now you’re excited, eh?

But wait, there’s more.

The housekeeping in the spotlight, you see, deals with cleaning up the mess caused by a conflict, embedded within the core coding of two web-based programs, between how those systems manage certain punctuation marks.

Quickens the pulse, doesn’t it?

Get Smart (Quotes) Or Get Found - Choose One

The developers of WordPress, the software that produces these posts, apparently decided that it would be way cool if the plain ol’ dumb, straight quotation marks and apostrophes keyboarded into the WordPress editor were magically transformed into fancy-schmancy, smart, curly quotation marks and apostrophes.

Readers who wish to compare and contrast these two styles may consider the following illustration.

My own subjective assessment is that the so-called smart quotes look a tad niftier, but not so much niftier that I would mourn their loss. And, others may prefer the less rococo, straight version, leading to the query, …

Google Don’t Need No Stinking Curly Quotes

Google likes straight quotes,¹ and, moreover, Google really doesn’t care for smart quotes. I know this because when I tried to find a Heck Of A Guy post I’d written about the Leonard Cohen song, Elvis's Rolls Royce, Google couldn’t - or wouldn’t - find it.

A bit of pondering and a quick search revealed the tripartite problem:

1. WordPress produces smart quotation marks and apostrophes
2. Google does not index smart quotation marks and apostrophes usefully
3. Elvis's Rolls Royce, one notes, includes an apostrophe

My immediate problem was how to indicate Elvis's Rolls Royce without the apostrophe. After a moment’s consideration, however - things got worse.

How many quotations and apostrophes, I wondered, were contained in the Heck Of A Guy’s 926 posts and 80 pages?

I’ll tell you how many - a lot, that’s how many.

And Google was disgusted with every one of them.

However Did You Solve This Conundrum, DrHGuy?

Once again, commodious one, you show great wisdom in your question.

There are a few workarounds, all of which are flawed. One can, for example, change the code in certain php files to turn off the straight-to-smart option. Of course, this would involve changing the DNA of the blog based on what worked for someone else.² This re-coding could well fix the problem - or mutate my two years of blog into a collection of unintelligible symbols. And, the fix would have to be repeated with every update of those php files.³

Or, on a punctuation mark by punctuation mark basis, one can insert the HTML code for the punctuation mark. The HTML code is invulnerable to WordPress transformations. All one has to do it find every apostrophe and replace it with four symbols placed consecutively: an ampersand followed by a pound sign followed by 39 followed by a semicolon.

Finding every apostrophe and quotation mark in every post not being my notion of a fun day (or, more accurately, a fun week), I opted to cleanse only the post titles of the problematic punctuation because Google weights titles as disproportionately important.

Heck, of the 926 post titles, no more than 150 (200 tops) contained the pertinent punctuation. In each of those I substituted code for the apostrophe or quote or, in perhaps a third of the cases, changed to wording to eliminate the need for quotes or apostrophes.

Yep, it’s just another day of the glamor that is blogging.

Footnotes

1. Several search engines other than Google will only index straight quotes reliably.↩
2. Different sources recommended different code changes.↩
3. There may be WordPress themes that handle this shift automatically, but I had already spent too much time on this issue to research that aspect.↩

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Hey-la-day-la My Blog Is Back¹

Heck Of A Guy Word Cloud (click on graphic to view larger image)

DrHGuy’s Suck It Up, Snap Out Of It, Get On With Life Campaign

Since the death of a loved one early in June, my waking hours have been characterized by despondency, aimlessness, and lassitude. As a result, I have published only a few posts on the Heck Of A Guy blog during this period and none in the last three weeks.

Now, however, as part of my general effort to resynchronize my life with what other sentient human beings consider real time, I plan to begin blogging again.

So, those of you concerned about the future of American belles-lettres can cease waiting to exhale and, in fact, breathe a sigh of relief.

I’m headed back to the keyboard in part because the sporadic laudatory email or comment consequent to a well-received post has reliably produced in me an altogether pleasing, narcissism-enhancing effect. Heck, I’m even gratified when one of my buddies, someone who would, for example, unhesitatingly assist me in disposing of smoking guns, corpses in rigor mortis, and other incriminating evidence, professes to be amused or impressed by my scribblings. Yes, indeed, I’m willing to accept - unquestioningly - a mercy compliment.

But, the more fundamental motivation for sharpening my quills or, for the literal minded, booting up my antiquated Dell Inspiron and unleashing the WordPress software the software, is that singers sing, actors act, and writers write - or, at least, bloggers blog.

And it certainly appears that I am, God forgive me, a blogger.

The Same But Different

Two factors are essential to the authorship of literature, whatever the genre, era, or format: time and money.

In this case, I lack sufficient quantities of both elements. It is discouragingly rare, for example, to receive an envelope stuffed with handfuls of cash as compensation for a well written post about George Washington Carver, Anjani, Allan Truax, broomcorn, Leonard Cohen, ketchup decantation, or my mother’s walls and walls of collectibles. Consequently, unless I can finagle a scam to rake in some bucks from my idiosyncratic displays of literary prowess, photo-faking, and footnoted snarkiness, I face the soul-draining prospect of earning an honest dollar.

And, as it turns out, I have a lot going on these days.

More about that later.

For now, I just want to alert readers that the number and size of Heck Of A Guy posts are almost certain to diminish with the final look evolving over time. Regardless, I suspect today’s readers will still recognize my posts.

Credit Due Department: The nifty Heck Of A Guy word cloud atop this post was generated by The Wordle Web Site

Footnotes

1. With apologies to The Angels, The Raveonettes, Nikka Costa, The Jersey Boys, Stacie Orrico, and the many, many others who have made “My Boyfriend’s Back” an enduring pop music hit.↩

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An Email From Jim Sand About Allan Truax

I recently received an unsolicited email from Jim Sand (who was previously unknown to me) about Allan Truax.¹ The pertinent portion of that message follows:

Why An Email² From Jim Sand To Heck of a Guy About Allan Truax Is Important

I’ve featured the email from Mr. Sand in this post for two reasons:

1. The content confirms and clarifies an important detail about Allan Truax. In Evelyn and Allan Truax Journey Through Life Together, I wrote “Allan Truax’s interest in horticulture, for example, resulted in his planting trees and shrubs around the Truax home in Crosby, North Dakota, at a time when those “were about the only trees in town.”³ The email, describing the Truax lawn from an 8 year old boy’s perspective, is significantly more effective.

2. This email is an example of one of the genuine advantages blogs confer on humanity: mutually beneficial interactions. Obviously, interactions are hardly blog-dependent, but the accessibility of blogs and effective search engines have dramatically increased the number and quality of such connections compared to pre-internet technologies.

Even if I had, for example, written the definitive Allan Truax biography and even if Mr. Sand had read it, what are the chances he would have written me about his childhood memory? And, even if he had written, how could I have circulated that information short of publishing another edition of the biography?

Further, this is no fluke. Some readers may recall the The Great Ozark Folk Festival Flood of 1973 adventure. I have heard from at least two readers who were at that same bluegrass festival deep in the Ozarks that same weekend in 1973, one of whom has promised to write up her own story from that weekend - a story which equals if not surpasses the weirdness of the sojourn I described.

That’s why - ya gotta love the blogs.

______________________________________

Identification: Allan Truax, Allen Truax, and A.L. Truax
“Allan Truax” and “Allen Truax” appear with approximately equal frequency in the written material I’ve reviewed, with “A.L. Truax” occurring somewhat less often. The name Mr. Truax inscribed in his books was “Allan” so I use it preferentially

Other Heck Of A Guy Posts About Allan Truax

• The first Allan Truax Post was Allan Truax, A.E. Housman, The Ex, and Me
• The most recent Allan Truax Post before this entry was Crosby, North Dakota In The Time Of Allan Truax: Railroad Depot and Hospital
• All Allan Truax posts can be found by clicking on the Allan Truax category

Footnotes

1. An explanation of who Allan Truax is and why he is a feature of the Heck Of A Guy Blog can be found at Who’s Allan Truax?↩
2. Mr Sand also sent a second complementary email:
   I only lived across from Mr. Truax for about 2 years. We then moved to “south hill” as the south side of town was called. Coincidentally, after we moved, I lived two houses up from Mrs. Truax. Mrs. Truax was my music teacher throughout elementary school. I assumed she was Mr and Mrs. A.L Truax’s daughter-in-law. Unfortunately, I have no additional information about Mr. Truax. (I do recall seeing a sign that read A.L.Truax. I can not remember if it was on the gate to the fence around his house, or if it was by the door to his house.)

   ↩

3. Mr & Mrs A.L. Truax, Richard Truax, A History Of Divide County, 1964. p 224↩

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