Crowl or Crawl

Courtesy Pixabay

Trawling through Evernote, I came across a piece I wrote in 2007. It was published on an internet site that faded away through not being able to pay its writers on time...Since it's a piece poking fun at blogs and their writers, I thought it could do with another airing:

Crowl or Crawl

In one of those idle moments when the brain is parked in a lay-by, I typed my surname into the search engine on Blogger.com. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a number of people had typed ‘crowl’ instead of ‘crawl’ and had never noticed (who apart from me proof-reads their blog scribblings?), but seeing my name leap out from some of the most random writing on the planet was disconcerting.

It even turns up in foreign language texts. Is it a slang word that crosses borders? Many blog writers don’t have too cosy a relationship with grammar and spelling. We can excuse those for whom English is a second language: “I want to know does search engines crowl websites without submission. Should website important to submit to Search engines. I have some website for promotion so I want to know that Search engine will not crowl without submission.”  

At least I hope this is a writer for whom English is a second language.   

The next writer, however, has style: “I'm detached. I don't want to do anything with this ugly politics anymore. If I'm lucky I'll find a hole in some quiet corner of the world and crowl there and continue my research on Machine Translation and live my own life and don't care a bit about anything that happens anywhere. If I see a needy, I'll help. But I'll forget dying African kids, and greedy thiefs of higher society... Let them do anything they want.”

Perhaps the next writer was too troubled by his angst to notice where his fingers were flying: “I woke up and I looked into the mirror and standing there was someone else...Not me. I have to say that I really didn't like what I saw. What happened with the VERY confident guy that used to stare back at me and say: "Today will be a great day!!"???  I really don't know...What I saw there, in the mirror, was a fraction of what I used to see...My walk has fallen into a crowl...I didn’t want to fall straight into a halt... If that happens I might as well just curl and die...I have never been so close to His will and then everything just piled up trying to tumble me to my knees and admit defeat... But I think I've got some news for ya...I won't give up and I will be at the centre of His will! God...I know things won't be easy... Help me...I think I might be losing my mind...”

Of course, losing your mind, let alone feeling you’ve fallen out with God, may well be the result of falling into a crowl.

And more on the religious life of the teenager: “Today—Monday, July 10, 2006—was a day of relaxation. We slept in and had pancakes for breakfast and then had morning worship and Pray the Bible. After lunch we had Salvationism class (which was really eye-opening to what we need to change in the world). The girls got into an in-depth discussion on today’s RevoDevos of Exodus 19 and 20 and the Ten Commandments and the Articles of War. After dinner we had a Salvationist Missionary/Teacher visit us and talk to us about her 10 month adventure in China. It was extremely inspiring to get out there and do missions. Last night the girls decided to go to Starbucks and then have a “discussion” and because of that the boys decided they wanted a “boy’s night out” as well. As soon as the boys left campus we girls went to Cozy’s for our second dinner. Side note: Thai food is good.”

I began to wonder if many people pronounce ‘crawl’ as ‘crowl’ and have a mistaken view of its spelling. “It seems like my blog has been forgotten again. But in the past 2.5 weeks I was glad if I had the energy to crowl into bed when I got home.”  

Or: “I don't dispute her assessment. It's pretty evident that the forces that brought Summers down were not monolithic and many people found themselves in a firm opposition to him due to a variety of reasons. But still, it doesn't dispel the gloom that comes from the realization that if even such a powerful man as Larry Summers had to crowl acquiescently, rather than stood by his remarks, and was still brought down, the perspectives of simple mortals are that bleak.” 

You have to wonder how a person who uses words like ‘monolithic’ and ‘acquiescently’ appears to have no idea about tense. 

Someone who may be teaching dressmaking writes the following: “At the top that blob like thing would be a pinned on flower of some sort. At the bottom, the sides would be runched up and have ties. The effect given is kind of like a crowl neck, only at the bottom.   More of that crowl neck effect, but just a little tighter, so it wouldn’t be overly exaggerated.   Split sleeves. A sheer see-through material overtop the bottom material, adding a bit of extra length.”  I’ve always had a ‘crowl neck’ of course, but it’s usually at the top, rather than the bottom.  

Here’s someone on the history of swimming: “The first literatures about swimming are dated since the 2000 B.C. However it wasn't since the 1800 the first competitions started taking place in Europe. Back then the most popular style was the breaststroke. The most popular and fast style, the front crowl, was first introduced in the so called civilized world, by John Arthur Trudgen, in 1878 who saw it from the natives Americans.”  

Oh, communication, wherefore art thou?

And finally a person who hasn’t yet discovered the shift key: “what an amazing moment.  i tripped and fell today. i ripped my jeans, skinned my knees and killed my toe...it hurts real bad.  everyone looked at me, good thing kate was with me, its always more sad when someone is alone and they fall. but i owned it and it was pretty much amazing. it almost made me late to crowl the warrior king's final. that wouldnt have been good. he was wearing jeans today and it was pretty awkward. but you dont know him so you probably dont really care. well sara knows him. im sure she will agree that its awkward.”

I’m sure she will….and not just the falling over.

Footnote: 

All these are unedited extracts from blogs. My thanks to the people who unwittingly offered their writings...

Commonplace post

One of the fun things about Google desktop, and also about Evernote, the programme that allows you to store virtually everything you like via Cloud, is that if you put a particular word in you can come up with all sorts of things: things you've forgotten, or things you didn't know you had.

For instance in relation to the word, 'insurance' which I checked out because I wanted to put in a link for rv insurance quotes, I came across three items, all unrelated, and all of interest. Firstly there was this footnote to one of Jason Goroncy's recent blog posts - in this case on the subject of holiness. The original quote comes from William Stringfellow.

‘Can a Homosexual be a Christian. One might as well ask, can an insurance man be a Christian? Can a lawyer be a Christian? Can an ecclesiastical bureaucrat be a Christian? Can a rich man be a Christian? Can an infant be a Christian? Or one who is sick, or insane, or indolent or one possessed of power or status or respectability? Can anybody be a Christian? Can a human being be a Christian? All such questions are theologically absurd. To be a Christian does not have anything essentially to do with conduct or station or repute. To be a Christian does not have anything to do with the common pietisms of ritual, dogma or morals in and of themselves. To be a Christian has, rather, to do with that peculiar state of being bestowed upon men by God … Can a homosexual be a Christian? Yes: if his sexuality is not an idol’.

And with that succinct piece of theology we move to quote number two, this time from Seth Godin. It comes from a post he wrote in Feb 2010 called Phoning it in and he began with some concern about a minister of religion who told him that some days she just works...

I know doctors, lawyers, waiters and insurance brokers who are honestly and truly passionate about what they do. They view it as an art form, a calling, and an important (no, an essential) thing worth doing.
In fact, I don't think there's a relationship between what you do and how important you think the work is. I think there's a relationship between who you are and how important you think the work is.

The third reference to 'insurance' (I'm sure there are plenty more, as Google desktop came up with several pages worth) comes from a draft of a blog post I'd written which doesn't appear to have been published....

I stood outside my house with two of my neighbours the other day discussing the tragedy of teens committing suicide. Apparently there was an Internet ‘pact’ made by about twenty local teenagers to commit suicide on Christmas Day. Horrific. Thank God it didn’t go ahead, for whatever reason, but one of my neighbours was going to a tangi for one teenager who did commit suicide at Christmas. And talked about another who’d killed herself because of text message bullying. The girl who’d done the most bullying had turned up at the tangi for that girl, which my neighbour thought was actually brave…but then had killed herself a few days later.

It’s unbelievable. The other neighbour and I felt it was that these kids don’t have a sense of the reality of death, that once you’re gone, you’re gone. I remember years ago a boy hanged himself because he’d had an argument with his father. Hanged himself! Why would you go and do that to spite someone? There’s some strange evil process at work in all this. I feel that it’s more than just kids deciding this is the thing to do. Behind it, I sense, there’s a supernatural factor that’s inciting this kind of unreasonable behaviour.

And then there are kids who kill themselves on the road. You can kind of understand this better: kids have far less judgement in cars than more experienced drivers. They have a sense of being bullet-proof, and time and again they’ve proved they're not. I noted that there was a site in the States where they have a number of tips for teenage drivers. Getting the teenagers to pay attention is, of course, the issue. The site was brought to my attention by a car insurance company who offer a cheap car insurance quote.

To go back to the original phrase that inspired this digging around in my computer: rv {recreational vehicles} insurance quotes. You hear a lot about rvs on the Internet, but they're not something that New Zealanders tend to have much to do with [though the photo on the right was taken in Rotorua, NZ]: we lean towards converting old buses into the equivalent of an rv, sometimes in a superb way.

Most of my experience with rvs comes from the movies - Sandra Bullock, desperate to go to the loo, boarding an rv owned by total strangers; or Jack Nicholson watching the stars while sitting on the roof of an enormous rv he and his wife had bought just before she unexpectedly dropped dead doing what she was passionate about: cleaning...and many more. The way rvs get treated in the movies, they'd need massive insurance, I'd think!

It's just a shell

There's this 'just a shell' theory of how we ought to relate to dead bodies. You hear a lot of it from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws - folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others. You hear it when you bring a mother and a father in for the first sight of their dead daughter, killed in a car wreck or left out to rot by some mannish violence. It is proffered as comfort in the teeth of what is a comfortless situation, consolation to the inconsolable. Right between the inhale and exhale of the bonecracking sob such hurts produce, some frightened and well-meaning ignoramus is bound to give out with, 'It's OK, that's not her, it's just a shell."

I once saw an Episcopalian deacon nearly decked by the swift slap of the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, to whom he'd tendered this counsel. 'I'll tell you when it's "just a shell",' the woman said, 'for now and until I tell you otherwise, she's my daughter.'

She was asserting the longstanding right of the living to declare the dead dead. Just as we declare the living alive through baptisms, lovers in love by nuptials, funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It's how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories.

Page 23, The Undertaking - life studies in the dismal trade, by Thomas Lynch.

Twittering teens - not!

A 15-year-old intern? Apparently the global financial services firm Morgan Stanley has one. Who says that teenagers aren't much interested in Twitter. They'll try it, like they try everything else, but then they give it away. Texting to it costs, and they're rather text their friends instead.

This young feller, Matthew Robson, has made headlines by commenting on what's in and what's out in the social network/media world. TV is definitely over. Radio with ads is out. Streaming radio without ads is in. Downloading movies to the computer is pretty ho-hum because of the lack of quality (and if it's anything like my experience, the annoyance of having it stop and start a good deal) and the possibility of viruses.

In fact, anything with ads - especially intrusive ads -is out. Well and truly. So much for the advertising world.

Of course there are plenty of other people in the world besides teenagers, and Twitter is obviously making a big impact via people who aren't teenagers. When we think that only teenagers' opinions count (as obviously the financial world did after Matthew's pronouncements) then we're living in la-la land.

Yes, of course, teenagers are the next generation, and what they think will eventually count for something. Maybe just not yet.

Alexander McCall Smith I

What if we really did kill God, what then? Would we all be rationally committed to the greater good, or would savagery be the norm? To kill God: the idea was absurd. If God existed, then he should be above being killed, by definition. But if he was just something in which we believed, or hoped, perhaps, killing him may be an act of cruelty that would rebound upon us; like telling small children that fairies were impossible, that Jack never had a beanstalk; or telling a teenager love was an illusion, a chemical response to a chemical situation. There were things, she thought, which were probably true, but which we simply should not always acknowledge as true: novels, for example - always false, elaborately constructed deceptions, but we believed them to be true while we were reading them; we had to, as otherwise there was no point. One would read, and all the time as one read, one would say, mentally, He didn't really.

Isabel Dalhousie muses, in her charming philosophical way, in Alexander McCall Smith's latest book in the Dalhousie series: The Comfort of Saturdays.

Teens, suicide, and safe driving

I stood outside my house with two of my neighbours the other day discussing the tragedy of teens committing suicide. Apparently there was an Internet ‘pact’ made by about twenty local teenagers to commit suicide on Christmas Day. Horrific. Thank God it didn’t go ahead, for whatever reason, but one of my neighbours was going to a tangi for one teenager who did commit suicide at Christmas. And talked about another who’d killed herself because of text message bullying. The girl who’d done the most bullying had turned up at the tangi for that girl, which my neighbour thought was actually brave…but then had killed herself a few days later.

It’s unbelievable. The other neighbour and I felt it was that these kids don’t have a sense of the reality of death, that once you’re gone, you’re gone. I remember years ago a boy hanged himself because he’d had an argument with his father. Hanged himself! Why would you go and do that to spite someone? There’s some strange evil process at work in all this. I feel that it’s more than just kids deciding this is the thing to do. Behind it, I sense, there’s a supernatural factor that’s inciting this kind of unreasonable behaviour.

And then there are kids who kill themselves on the road. You can kind of understand this better: kids have far less judgement in cars than more experienced drivers. They have a sense of being bullet-proof, and time and again they’ve proved their not. I noted that there was a site in the States where they have a number of tips for teenage drivers. Getting the teenagers to pay attention is, of course, the issue.

The site was brought to my attention by a car insurance company who offer a cheap car insurance quote. They offer the ability to shop for car insurance – a kind of brokerage service online. They also have a list of interesting question and answer topics: Can auto insurance save the environment, for instance, which is ‘reprinted’ from an article in the Charleston Gazette dated 28th December, 2006. Worth a look.