Solonor's Inkwell

There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.

With 22 years of crap siting on a server, there was bound to be a rotten egg in the barrel. It looks like one of them bit me on the ass last week. Everything was deleted and the landing page for solonor.com was replaced by an Indonesian gambling site.

Fortunately, I have been with Hosting Matters since 2002, and they put up with these shenanigans for the entire time. They restored the site…the bad guys wiped it…they restored again…hacked again. They moved me to another server….hacked again. Finally, we’re on a third server and have only restored the WordPress database. If we be vewwy vewwy quiet, the bad guys won’t notice (or the bad file that was in the backup of those 22 years of junk won’t find us).

I don’t really have everything back in place, yet, because my baseball league isn’t back online here. The proposed site for my future business (The Gaming Trove board game cafe) is gone. And the little used lesternorton.com, where I had my music “career” posted, is also kaput. But all of it is recoverable, and this is post #8 of my 100DaysToOffload challenge.

I am only 8 posts off the pace…

Sorry, but I’m just now catching up to the rest of the planet and submersing myself into the world of Ted Lasso. So, that’s the first thing that came to mind for a title. Apologies to Dani Rojas.

The other day I had a random memory about sitting at the kitchen table and helping my Dad work on the schedule for the church softball league. He was an umpire for the league, and somehow–though he never went to church–was in charge of a lot of the organization. Maybe because he wasn’t affiliated with any one of the churches? I know he was obsessed with being an umpire.

I wondered if the league still exists, because I always see softball, golf, and other trophies in the lobbies of churches, but they are from the 70s and 80s. I don’t know if this is the same thing, but I found that there is a Church League on the Bangor Parks & Rec site.

The other thing that I pondered on was putting together the schedule. I don’t remember how many teams were in the league, but I feel like there were a lot. Dad got me to create a balanced schedule and playoff bracket, and I remember it being a bit of work. (This is the part where I blather on about technology killing our brains, because you can just pop the info into a website and get a computer to do it for you in seconds.)

I don’t really know where I was going with this, but it gave me a chance to look through old pictures. So, that’s nice.

Have a great week.

Overture! Curtain! Lights!
This is it, the night of nights!

Everyone knows the theme song to The Bugs Bunny Show, right?

Well, not so fast there buckaroo. Saturday morning cartoons haven’t really been a thing since the 1980’s, and the Bugs Bunny show left the airwaves in 2000 . . . 24 years ago for those scoring at home. So, anyone under 35 might have no clue what I’m talking about. (I know this for a fact, because I’ve met at least two of them this week.)

But I’m not here to talk about a collection of the greatest cartoons ever produced and how it started as a prime time show in 1960 before becoming a Saturday morning staple, running on network TV for 40 years. Nor am I going to bemoan the fact that “kids these days” don’t know what they’re missing.

What I really want to talk about is my brain.

For some reason, I absolutely, positively remembered that the theme song for the show was from a “real” musical. I swear that I saw it performed…maybe in a movie with Judy Garland…maybe by Ethel Merman… It was such a vivid memory that I spent a good chunk of Sunday afternoon trying to find it.

In the end, the closest I got was a reference to a 1939 musical called Stars in Your Eyes, which did have a song called This is It performed by Ethel Merman, but I cannot find a recording of it anywhere…and every other source says, “No, you idiot, the song was written by Mack David and Jerry Livingston specifically for the show.”

Now, this is not really an example of the Mandela Effect. For that to be true, there would have to be a lot of people misremembering the same thing. And I don’t think there are more than a couple dozen of you that could possibly share this specific delusion with me…right?

Something in the back of my pea brain kept yelling and jumping up and down for attention. It took me a whle to give it heed, but it turned out to be that part of my mind that keeps track of commitments.

“Hey! Dummy!” it said. “Didn’t you commit to 100 blog posts this year? Ya know…two per week?”

I don’t like it when it calls me names.

Regardless, I looked up and saw that the last post was January 13, and today is…counts fingers..several days later. So, in order to keep this train rolling, I need to post about something. Fortunately for me, I know a lot of puns, and the title of this post is one of them.

I originally thought it was from Groucho Marx, but the Wikipedia entry for the phrase (yes, it has its own Wikipedia page) says there’s no evidence he ever said it. Of course, it also goes into way too much detail on it and includes words like amphibology, antanaclasis, paraprosdokian, perverb, and syntactic ambiguity. So, there’s that.

The cool bit about it, though, is that it reminded me of an incident this Fall in my home office.

At a certain point, I started seeing a teeny, tiny fly zipping its way across my field of vision. My efforts to smack the little bugger between my hands were fruitless…but the fly was of the fruit variety.

I soon found out that he had siblings. Many. Many. Siblings.

Apparently, they had started a colony in the banana peels that I had thoughtfully placed in the waste basket. I was their life-giving God, dispensing manna from on high for their sustenance. They were determined to fly up and tell me how wonderful I was.

Sadly, I don’t speak fruit fly. So, in a fit of Old Testament vengeance, I tried to smite them all. Yet, they survived. My lightning quick reflexes had been dulled by time (see it all comes together).

Fortunately, my brain matter still knows how tell my fingers how to look stuff up on the internets, and I found my solution.

If you are ever in the same boat, where you have tired of the insignificant masses whose very existence depends upon you and your magnificence, and those masses happen to be fruit flies, then just fill a small bowl with apple cider vinegar and place a couple of drops of dish soap on the surface. Your faithful flock will fly to the food and be forever freedomless as their feet are fastened like fools, and you flush their flightless frames.

I did not mourn their destruction–for I am so much mightier than they. Yet, there is another part of my pea brain trying to get my attention now…some rubbish about Psalm 8?