funny | Funny about Money

Books, Books, and MORE Books

January 30, 2016 by funny

Went over to the church yesterday to help set up this year’s fundraising book sale for the choir. It’s a fairly big deal. You’ve never seen so many books inside a single room, this side of a library. When you look at piles and piles of books, you have to wonder: who writes all these titles, why, and more to the point for a micropublisher, how can anybody possibly compete, given the sheer mass of product out there?

So what did I learn, if anything, from this?

• Despite the prevailing wisdom about the profitability of flooding Amazon with electronic titles, one probably would be better off to publish fewer titles of high quality or broad pragmatic use. Instead of publishing a lot of titles, it may be better to invest one’s time and financial resources in marketing one or two titles.

• Very, very few titles stand out. Too often — especially where genre novels are concerned — cover design conveys the message that you’re looking at more of the same. Even literary novels rarely grab one’s attention, unless the author is someone you’ve read and liked. Or hated. Many cookbooks are similarly uninteresting; ditto travel books. Some children’s books stand out, partly because design is integral to the entire package, not just to the cover.

So here’s a question: Would it be possible to create a book for adults whose interior design is as important as the cover art? I mean, other than a coffee-table book. Could a novel or a history book or an inspirational book be designed in the same way as a child’s book, without bankrupting its maker? That really is a question, because as we know, children’s books are very expensive to produce.

• Some types of amateurishly produced bookoids become collector’s items. This is especially true of cookbooks. There are folks out there who collect cookbooks produced by clubs, charitable groups, schools, and the like. Some of the older examples we put out on tables look like they were run off on mimeograph machines; others appear to have been printed and coil-bound at Staples or OfficeMax. But most of those didn’t stay on the tables! Volunteers grabbed them up and paid for them as we worked.

Short form lessons for wanna-be book publishers:

• Every title must stand out. If you’re going to hire a designer, it will pay to hire the best. A run-of-the-mill designer will create a run-of-the-mill cover, and your product won’t be noticed whether it’s on Amazon or a bookstore shelf.

• Whether you’ve got a truly great book or just another piece of escapist genre fiction, marketing is key. In a vast tsunami of books, not even the best of books will be noticed unless it’s drawn forcefully to the public’s attention.

• Nonfiction books should be tightly focused on a specific aspect of their subject matter. So many cookbooks, so many travel books, so many inspirational books, so many craft books, so many this, that, and the other books are out there that a publisher needs to draw the buyer’s attention to something different or highly specific in order to stand apart from the crowd. That, my friends, is easier said than done.

No doubt many more messages lurk in the second-hand book sale.

In closely related precincts, while I was at Whole Foods last week, I asked the manager if he’d be interested in selling the very whole-foodsy 30 Pounds/4 Months diet/cookbook. He was interested but said at the moment the post of “forager” (yes!) for the department that sells books and magazines was empty — they were looking for someone to fill the job. He suggested I check back now and again.

If you want to work for Whole Foods, you have some retail experience, and you live in Phoenix, you might want to keep an eye on their “help wanted” postings. 😉

So far, I have yet to figure out how to fix the formatting for the .mobi version of 30 Pounds. Nothing I’ve tried works. Short of retyping it from beginning to end in a fresh template, I cannot see how to fix it. I suppose I’ll have to track down an ebook formatter who can break into the code and clean up whatever weirdnesses Wyrd has inserted in there. My guy right now is pretty swamped — people are lined up at his door to get him to work on their bookoids. He’s usually slow, but I’ll bet he’s really slow right now.

The advertising campaign I launched on Smart Bitches/Trashy Books seems to at least be putting eyeballs on our book covers. The most recent report shows, in this week alone for the four books we’re advertising:

• Bobbi and the Biker: 77,889 impressions, 48 clicks on the ad
• Bobbi’s Secret Life: 77,641 impressions; 82 clicks
• One Night at the Library: 77,658 impressions; 54 clicks
• Science Teacher: 77,595 impressions; 77 clicks

How many of the folks who clicked on the ads bought a book? None. We’ve sold two Racy Books this month…but neither of them were those Racy Books.

We’ve also sold one, count it (1) copy of the first collection of Fire-Rider books. That is not anywhere near as well as we did last month, which wasn’t what one would call “very” well.

However, Fire-Rider is garnering some very nice reviews. Book I, for example, nailed FOUR five-star reviews! If ego boosts bought groceries, this one would stock the pantry for a year:

Reminds me of Robert Adams’ _Horseclans_ series in the way you can dimly see the strands of our present world shimmering in the fabric of a far-future United States.

I had a bit of trouble at first keeping track of the characters, but that resolved as the story went on, and I found the developing interrelationship between the two characters, Kay and Tavio, intriguing. One thing I appreciated was that while there was a lot of information about this world descended from ours, it seeped in through the story and wasn’t dumped on me all at once.

My chief complaint was that the story ended just as the story was getting interesting – I know, the nature of episodic fiction! I’ve added the first boxed set to my wishlist.

No idea who’s writing these things, but whoever you are, ♥♥♥♥♥♥

Let’s Test an Amazon Feature!

January 25, 2016January 25, 2016 by funny

This morning comes in the email breathless news from Amazon about a feature that allows a blogger to post a free preview of a book, any book, into his or her site.

So, by golly, let’s try this. Plain & Simple Press just emitted the third and final collection of the Fire-Rider series, ever-so-aptly titled Homeward Bound. What happens when you embed the proposed code for the thing? Observe…

Et voila!

Well now. Isn’t that interesting?

Wonder if you can resize the thing so it will fit in a widget? And WTF do you suppose happened to the Roman numerals in the title data? I’m pretty sure I don’t habitually type XIII as XiiI. Dammit.

Oh well. This thing gives away an entire chapter for free, plus most of the front matter.

I’ll leave this for you to enjoy while I try to build a widget with the embed code. Meanwhile, notice that once you open this, there’s a link in the lower right that lets you toggle to full page. Nice!

Postscript

Oookay… The code doesn’t seem to lend itself to widgetizing for those who are code-unsavvy.

I’ll post previews of all three collections — gathering 18 books (each of which has anything from three to eight or ten chapters) in three electronic volumes — at Plain & Simple Press (probably on the “Books” page) and at the Fire-Rider site. Watch those spaces… This will take a few minutes, because like all things techish, it’s a pain in the butt.

It can be done, though…

😀

Post-Postscript

Enraged publisher to Amazon CSR (believe it or not, you actually can find a “contact” link, buried on the bottom of the Author’s Bookshelf page in the finest of fine print, that lets you send a message to a someone in the vastness that is the Amazon behemoth):

I received an email plumping your new Amazon “preview” tool. Naturally, I posted links to a bunch of my Plain & Simple Press books at my websites, hoping to send readers your way. I posted a link to my Preview page (http://www.plainandsimplepress.com/previews/) on Twitter.

Double-checking a link, I clicked on the “Preview” link to my latest magnum opus, 30 Pounds / 4 Months. When I published this thing, I checked it carefully in the Kindle Previewer downloaded from your site. It looked perfect. This afternoon, using the same downloaded and installed Kindle Previewer, I just opened the .mobi file I posted and also downloaded to my hard drive at the time I published it it. In the Kindle Previewer tool that appears at your Bookshelf site, the layout looks PERFECT.

But when the Preview is viewed by clicking on the linked image generated by your “Preview” code, what you see is a FREAKING MESS!!!!!!!!! The subhead fonts are all screwed up: subheads are larger than level-A heads. Flush-left first grafs are indented further than regular indented paragraphs.

No wonder I’m selling a ton of them in hard copy but can’t get move the thing at all electronically! Your customers must think I’m a lunatic.

I had to take the first version of this book down and completely revamp it when a reader slammed the bejayzus out of it and me because it went online in a font jumble. It was, admittedly, my first effort at publishing through Amazon, and I mistakenly thought that what one saw in your simple online previewer was what one got. My error!

After spending many hours completely reformatting the thing from beginning to end using the appropriate styles, I re-uploaded it and checked it obsessively in your Kindle previewer. Not the one in the cloud, but the one you download and install on your computer, which supposedly comes closer to displaying the reader experience.

WTF? Can you explain this latest fiasco? I have put a lot of work into this book, and I am NOT HAPPY to see it screwed up again!!!!! Especially after the viewer you folks promulgate in your “Bookshelf” function showed it to be as close to perfect as a human editor can make it.

Is the book as the reader purchases it a freaking mess? If it is, WHY is it a freaking mess?

If the formatting looks to the reader as it does in your downloadable Kindle previewer, why is it a freaking mess in your “Preview” come-on tool?

To coin a phrase: God damn it! I had no idea the format on the 30 Pounds / 4 Months book was all f*cked up. Again. It looked absolutely primo in the (huge!) Kindle Previewer that you download and install in your computer — the one that takes half your lifetime to load. It still looks primo.

But when you look at it through the new Kindle previewer sales tool, what you see is sh!t.

Now I suppose I’m going to have to take this version down, too. I actually have sold more of them in hard copy than in Kindle (the final print version should be here this week or early next week, for those of you who have ordered them).

Grrrr! You can be damn sure if that thing is a mess again…still…whatEVER…it’s not going back up on Amazon. We’ll convert the thing to ePub and post it at Nook and iBooks.

I. want. to. bite. someone. Jeff, my man? Are you there?

Medicare: Watch Your Back

January 24, 2016 by funny

Of interest: When you hit Medicare age, you will be shuttled into what looks like a single-payer system. But bear in mind: it’s NOT a single-payer system. It’s really a two- or three-payer system.

SDXB’s lifelong friend is dying of prostate cancer, a condition he’s been struggling with for several years. Recently he told SDXB that the costs he’s racked up will pauperize his widow. At one point, a hospital demanded they disgorge $9,000 up front, before he could be admitted for treatment.

That may be because he doesn’t have so-called “Medigap” insurance: a supplemental policy that picks up the costs Medicare won’t cover. Possibly, too, his prescription drugs have dropped him into the so-called “doughnut hole,” in which the victim of a serious illness has to cover Rx costs out of pocket after they hit $3,300 and until they reach an astronomically high ceiling.

Traditional Medicare, the safest option because it allows you to choose the doctors you will go to rather than limiting you to an HMO’s network, covers only 80% of most bills. A stay in a hospital can rack up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills.

In the US, costs for treating major ailments vary by region. Rescuing you from a heart attack, for example, can cost as much as $92,000. Folks…20 percent of $92,000 is $18,400! Not many of us happen to have that laying around the house. And acute costs may be just the beginning. Treatment for most conditions of old age goes on and on and interminably on.

If you select traditional Medicare (Part A comes with the 65+ territory; the optional Part B covers doctor’s visits and outpatient experiences), you will also need to buy a couple of other policies if you want to be fully covered. These include a Medicare supplement policy (often called “Medigap”), which picks up the 20% that Medicare doesn’t cover, and a Part D policy to (partially) cover prescription drugs. These are supplied by private insurance companies, not by the government program called Medicare.

So now we have not one payer, not two payers, but three payers.

Yes. You can opt out of buying Part B, a Medigap policy, and/or Part D. But you do so at your extreme peril.

So, those who elect “traditional” Medicare so as to preserve their right to see a doctor of their own choice and who wish to be fully covered will end up with three-provider coverage: the U.S. government, a large corporation selling Medicare supplements, and another large corporation selling prescription drug coverage.

An alternative is to buy a Medicare Advantage plan, which is your basic HMO or PPO designed to collect your Medicare benefits in exchange for rationing your care. Medicare Advantage insurers usually sweeten the deal with dental and optometry benefits, which make those plans look more attractive to the unwary. Some, but not all, Advantage plans also include coverage for prescription drugs.

Does a Medicare Advantage plan keep costs down? Maybe; maybe not. Depends on the plan and the circumstances. In 2015, for example, almost half of these plans imposed limits on prescription drug coverage above $5,000. For a victim of prostate cancer — just as an example — an androgen receptor inhibitor can cost $8,862.

AARP tells us that by law, “all [Medicare Advantage] plans…have annual limits on out-of-pocket costs.” What is this limit? Unclear. Says the redoubtable lobbying group and insurance provider for the aged:

Additional out-of-pocket expenses associated with Medicare Advantage plans depend on a variety of factors, including

• If the plan covers part of or all of your Part B monthly premium
• How much you pay for each service or health visit (copayment and/or coinsurance)
• Whether the plan has a yearly deductible that you must meet before it provides coverage
• What types of services you require and how often you require them
• Whether you join a plan with additional benefits such as vision, dental, or prescription drug coverage
• How much the plan’s maximum out-of-pocket limit is for medical services
• Whether you receive care from in-network health care providers

Some plans charge yearly deductibles. Some do not. Some plans charge copays for some benefits and services, and all Medicare Advantage plans are allowed to set their own coinsurance percentages and terms. In other words: good luck with that!

Only about 82 percent of Advantage plans cover Rx drugs. For some plans, your monthly premium may exceed the amount you’d pay for part D. Original Medicare has no out-of-pocket maximum. Unless you have Medigap coverage, you’ll keep paying for some part of as you use them. Medicare Advantage plans, by law, have an out-of-pocket maximum of no more than $6,700 per year. Once you hit that limit, the plan pays for all covered expenses.

And by the way, if you’re in a Medicare Advantage Plan that includes drug coverage, you must accept its terms for prescription drug coverage. Dare to join a Medicare prescription drug plan, and you’ll be expelled from your Medicare Advantage Plan and returned to traditional Medicare.

So how is SDXB’s buddy going broke despite a federal plan designed to protect the elderly from exactly that? Evidently he has traditional Medicare without a Medigap policy, or else he has a Medicare Advantage plan that doesn’t cover drugs and he failed to get a Medicare Part D (prescription drugs) plan.

The whole program is tricky, complicated, and loaded with land mines. You have to study it carefully and understand exactly what you’re doing — no small order! — to protect yourself from impoverishment should you face a medical problem that doesn’t carry you away quickly.

The Mailbox Annals: Four Hundred Dollars Later…

July 21, 2021January 22, 2016 by funny

So yesterday Larry the Preferred Handyman surfaced to install the new locking mailbox I felt called upon to acquire in response to the repeated thefts. This thing, the Fort Knox of mailboxes, weighs about 40 pounds and is, as he remarked, big enough to hold a month’s worth of mail.

Which is good, because having to trot out to the street with a key in hand to pick up a wad of advertising circulars that will go straight into the garbage is infuriating enough that one will not feel inclined to do it often.

Larry charged $200 to traipse to Home Depot and buy a heavier metal post to hold it (the one that held the rural-style mailbox was too lightweight for the job), bang out the wad of concrete the old post was sunk in, sink the new post, and then figure out the obscure instructions to put the massive new mailbox in place. Fortunately, some of the 220 customer reviews at Amazon described the trick to installing the thing. At $200 (including the post), the guy was giving away his services.

So, to the $100 for the mailbox and the $200 installation, add the $75 I had to pay to rent a mailbox for six months to intercept incoming bills, checks, and packages, the $20 worth (wholesale!) of books ordered from the PoD vendor that got stolen, who knows how much for the expensive specialized stage makeup the roommate ordered that got stolen, and who knows how much, if any, in Medicare and Medigap checks that may or may not have been stolen.

Apparently mail theft is so commonplace the USPS doesn’t give a damn about your losses anymore. They make it impossible to report it. Infuriatingly, after I jumped through 87 berjillion hoops to post a theft report presented at their website, I got a message saying that was the wrong form and I needed to call their 800 number. Of course, when you call that number you get a robot. It asks you to leave a message and promises someone will call you back. No one does. After a week passes, you get an email asking you to fill in a survey reporting on how you liked their customer service!

God, how I hate the facelessness of our Brave New World.

The frequency of the theft issue is also indicated by the fact that over 200 people have purchased a behemoth like this thing from Amazon alone. Reviewer after reviewer says it was the only one they could find in the $100 range that is a) not easily jimmied open with an ordinary screwdriver and b) not equipped with a slot big enough for a person to reach in and grab the mail.

The slot is not large enough to accommodate a package, either.

Yesterday while Larry was doing battle with the installation job, I talked with one of the mailmen. He approved of the box (Larry was not thrilled, but Maildude was) and said these days they carry packages up to your doorstep anyway. My house has a walled courtyard, so packages aren’t easily visible from the street. So, despite one of the neighbors catching the thieving bitches on video as they drove up to her house, hopped out of the car, ambled up to the her front door, picked up a UPS package, strolled back to the car, and drove slowly on down the street searching for more loot, the ladies haven’t taken any packages that were delivered to my door instead of stuck in the mailbox.

The damn thing is SO ugly. It just pisses me off to have to spend $400+ and end up with an unsightly monster in the front yard. And it really pisses me to have to do it for the privilege of receiving mountains of junk mail from tree-murdering, ink-wasting, gasoline-burning parasites trying to sell me pizza and real estate.

I’m thinking what I’ll do is plant a vine that can trail up and over it. Don’t know whether I can get one to live there — the concrete under the ground won’t make for a very good growing medium, and the box and the post are black. During the summer, the thing the plant is supposed to climb on will get about as hot as a barbecue. I suppose I could paint the damn thing white, adding to the nuisance factor. But I don’t want to. Enough is enough.

Life in the big city. Please, God: send a grocery store, a gas station, and a competent doctor to Yarnell so I can move to the sticks!

Yarnell shopping district... — Yarnell shopping district…

Loafing at the Publishing House…

January 19, 2016 by funny

So I’ve gotten three, count’em (3) publishing enterprise-related activities done today. And that’s about it. Can’t quite say I’ve been totally loafing. But it’s close.

This morning I typed up and emitted our newsletter to those hardy souls who kindly subscribe. (You know who you are! ♥ ) Sounds simple, looks simple enough. Doesn’t it?

No.

It consumed the entire morning, from about 8:30 to almost 1:00 p.m. Let the dogs out after they rousted me at 7:00; turned on the heat, fed the dogs, and then climbed back into the sack with the laptop to wait until the chill was off the refrigerated air.

Read the news on the Internet. Played a computer game. Filled in a crossword puzzle. Then figured I’d just flow the copy I’d drafted into MailChimp, tidy it up, add a picture or two, and ship it off.

No.

Should’ve known better. Once sucked in, I was like a fly in a vacuum cleaner: there was no escape.

Item: Do not, ever, paste copy from Wyrd directly into MailChimp. At the very least save your file as an HTML file. But don’t. Best choice: Paste it into a WordPress post, edit it there, and then copy and paste from WordPress into MailChimp. This will cause relatively little conversion wackiness.

Failing that, paste it into a plain text editor. Do the best you can to edit in that, then paste into your MailChimp page and edit copy and add your images there.

After merging content from two draft sources, pasting the resultant Wyrd copy into MailChimp, and fiddling around ad nauseam to make the result vaguely coherent, I tried to format heads, subheads and body copy and add an image or two. Holeee crap! What a nightmare.

Hours of fighting with MailChimp later, I finally gave up and sent it out. And what did I see in the version MC kindly sent to me?

Let me assure you, it looked nothing like what MC was showing me at its site. Crazy type fonts in the subheads — some look sort of like Copperplate Bold (huh?????), some like Tahoma. The bulleted lists? The bullet points appear in the middle of the second character in the first line of each list item! Like that character overwrote the bullet point. Wha-a-a-a-a?

I had set the whole damn thing, blanket-style, in Times New Roman 12 points! Each subhead was formatted using Mailchimp’s “Styles” function. The bulleted lists were set using “Styles,” too.

If I tried to pull up extra space between a level 2 head and the following paragraph, sometimes the paragraph would morph into 18 point boldface. Sometimes it would not. Sometimes the graf would appear flush left, no first-line indent; sometimes it would appear indented. No rhyme nor reason for these quirks was evident. It was all catch as catch can, trial and error.

So I spent the larger part of the morning dorking with that, to not very good avail. Would’ve been a lot better off to have printed out my draft from Wyrd, dropped the print-out next to the computer, and transcribed the entire thing character by character into MailChimp. Would have saved a lot of time by doing that.

Oh well.

Then it was off to the church to drop off a couple of small donations.

From there: a straight shot into the scariest part of South Phoenix, where the printer has his plant.

Somewhere near there, according to a couple of hand-lettered signs, are a couple of living spaces. One is described as barato; the other as barrado. Spelling variation?

Hm. Barato means “cheap.” Or it can mean “trashy.” What is this person trying to say to us?

Barrado means “barred.” Now that would be a selling point. But corduroy can be described as barrado; so can striped fabric. Maybe the joint has a fancy paint job.

And if you happen to be in Chile, barata, which around here means “sale” (as in “at the sale”: en la barata), can also mean cockroach. Personally, I rather prefer la cucaracha. Much jazzier. I’ll bet the person trying to unload the real estate has the same thought. 😉

Picked up the page proofs, which show that on the new equipment the cookbook’s cover will have to be tweaked. That’s frustrating: I’d expected to walk in, say “uh huh, fine,” and order ten copies.

So….if you’re waiting for your copy of the cookbook, it’ll be a few more days. {grump!}

Back at the Funny Farm, I could not face another session of fiddling with the computer. So decided to do some yard chores that have been neglected since before the start of the first Adventure in Medical Science — damn near two years ago. Though the yard is fundamentally minimalist, the plants have been suffering.

Occasionally I look at old iPhoto images and see the spectacular flowers I used to grow. No more of those around here! Usually at this time year and also as the weather cools in the fall, one has an attack of spring fever and wishes to do nothing other than garden. Haven’t gotten into that in…well, way too long.

Pruned three roses, two of them climbers.

The recent long, soaking rains have revived many of the plants, among them the roses. I’d thought the beloved climbing roses were dying of old age. But apparently that’s not the issue. Apparently the issue is, between the gawdawful heat and the drought they haven’t been getting enough water.

Lo these many years ago, when my parents dragged me here to Arizona, the climate was altogether different. Every winter, we had what the Indians used to call “female rains”: days of slow, soft, soaking rain that did not run off, but rather soaked into the ground, deep-watered everything, and eventually made its way to the water table. Each summer we had what silly Europeans call “monsoon” rains: crazy hard showers pouring out of thunderheads, much of whose water rolled off the hard desert floor, made its way to the nearest riverbed, and eventually ended up in the Sea of Cortez.

The summer rains would roll through late in the afternoon, around 4 or 5 p.m., and they could easily drop the ambient temperature by 20 degrees. So a hundred-degree afternoon would soften to an 80-degree evening. A high of 110 was unusual, 112 was strange, and no one ever heard of a 118-degree day.

Good times.

Now the weather here is not conducive to plant life. Nor, we might add, to human life. The water table has dropped to Hades’ front door, and we almost never see a hard rain in the Valley unless it comes out of something that looks alarmingly like a tornado cloud.

But of course, there’s no such thing as climate change. Our legislators assure us that’s true. 😉

After two or three years of neglect, the “perfume delight” rose that used to be so beautiful was now scrawny, rangy, and as big as even a Mr. Lincoln can get. And a Mr. Lincoln is a big hybrid tea rose.

Only two more roses to prune, and one of them is in a pot located in a hot place with a lot of reflected glare, so shouldn’t be trimmed back very much. Then I need to cut the dead stuff off the blue plumbago and prune back the orange thing that wants to take over the galaxy.

And I really should soak the flowerbed by the pool, dig out every piece of plant life in there, and replace it with something beautiful. But I’m not going to. Right now there’s a mat of Mexican primrose in there, interlaced with bermuda-grass tentacles. The heck with that. With any luck, the Mexican stuff will suffocate the crabgrass (good luck with that). If it doesn’t…well…no one sees it, anyway.

So it goes.

Obnoxious Facebook…

January 17, 2016 by funny

In my old age, the glories of a lot of things the Moderns love do escape me. Facebook? Biggest corporate escape artist in town. Between its habitual invasion of privacy and its faceless corporate obstinacy, I find Facebook utterly obnoxious. I’ve never been able to figure out its appeal, but the more I’m forced to know about it, the less I grasp people’s fascination with it.

Facebook appears to have stopped reposting from Funny about Money. At least, it has if you believe JetPack, whose corporate credibility strikes one as a lot more reliable than Facebook’s.

Because I have no patience with Facebook and do not wish to consume the few hours remaining to me on this earth with learning how to operate a system whose point goes over my head, I hired an ad manager to run a Facebooks Ads campaign to publicize Fire-Rider and the diet/cookbook. She asked for my log-in details so she could set up an ad account for me.

Turns out Facebook, like Big Brother, is always watching you. Its machinery noted that someone was logging in from a different ISP than my Macbook and so they canceled the ad account, took down the ad campaign to which she had devoted a number of hours, and forced me to dream up a new password. When I asked for my money back (turns out the business of spying on your ISP is a known issue with FB — apparently no normal person can be expected to log in to FB from more than one computer), she came up with a workaround. It remains to be seen how long Big Brother is going to let that stay in place.

Understand: the feed from Funny was set up years ago by a long-since retired WordPress guru. She’s not even in the blogging business anymore. I wouldn’t have known how to set up a blog feed into Facebook, nor would I have been inclined to do so without said guru’s prompting — FB doesn’t interest me and I wouldn’t have signed up at all except for the choir’s insistence that everyone must go online.

JetPack makes it easy to feed blog posts to WordPress — thereby increasing everyone’s potential for pointless clutter by vast orders of magnitude. So with the latest update, it asked me to “refresh” FaM’s connection to FB. Obediently, the little sheeple did so.

It — JetPack — seems to have had no problem connecting Writers Plain & Simple to my Facebook feed, but it no longer can get Funny online, apparently because FaM is posted with the old password. I have no idea how to fix this, and I’m pissed.

Not that the world rotates around FaM. But since I’ve drifted away from PF blogging per se, FaM has become my personal blog. The old connection with FB, then, made it easy to update friends about whatever is, famously, “on my mind” (grrrrr! patronizing bastards) without having to log in and upload links or post bleats.

Among the many things I dislike about Facebook is the lack of control you have over what goes up on the thing. Facebook is like the Borg: We will assimilate you. It’s spying on you everywhere you go, and it seems to pick up messages for group B that you really would not like to share with group A among your friends, family and associates.

Why do Facebook’s arrogant developers fail to grasp the possibility that you might not want your church group to know about your spicy publishing venture? I do not publish porn because I so love it. I publish porn because I can’t make a living at teaching, a trade that now pays less than minimum wage. It’s not something I want anyone but porn readers to know about.

Facebook makes it difficult — IMHO probably impossible — to separate out groups of acquaintances and friends. It mandates against setting up more than one “account,” and the thing is set up to confound efforts to send out messages to targeted groups and still actually reach those groups. In theory it’s possible to do so, but who trusts Facebook? The risk that a message for Audience A will end up being shoved in the faces of Audience B is definitely there. And IMHO, any such risk is too much risk.

Brave new world, isn’t it… So we think.