Disclaimers

There are three or four preliminary points I need to try and make to anyone reading a blog that I write. Unfortunately, since one of my most basic beliefs is that verbal communication is inherently unclear, I tend to use a LOT of words in an effort to make it less likely that I will be misunderstood. Sometimes I will state and overstate things that might seem obvious, because I do not want to assume they are obvious in case they are not, and also because I believe that even though they may seem obvious, they are often ignored or overlooked. If this style seems "wordy", tedious, preachy, or is otherwise unappealing to YOU, I am sorry. At least for these foundation points, that is how I probably will write. Please be assured that this is due to my awareness of my own struggle to be clear, rather than anticipation of some inadequacy on your part. Still, I am also painfully aware of instances in which a person spent fifteen minutes trying to make a point, only to have someone seize upon one phrase and decide they had fully understood the speaker's intent from that one phrase, despite protestations to the contrary from the speaker, and I find this to be among the most incredibly frustrating phenomenons in human interaction. If it takes someone fifteen minutes to make a point, perhaps their point is a bit more complicated than a single phrase -- or perhaps not. You can never know without listening for those entire fifteen minutes, and life is short, and perhaps it is not worth your time.

Anyway, for those who are short on time, perhaps you are at the wrong blog. Briefly, here are the key starting points I am about to try to make (but I will not be held responsible if you decide not to bother to read the expanded versions to follow):

1) Words are not clear, and can never be clear
2) I do not worry about plagiarizing myself, so anything written by me in this blog may have already appeared elsewhere, or may appear elsewhere in the future
3) I DO worry about my own privacy and the privacy of those with whom I associate, and I shall endeavor to protect both
4) I believe the grammar rules about always placing periods and commas inside of quotation marks are stupid and obsolete, and I shall feel free to disregard them.

I would also like to point out that I favor clarity and honesty over grammatical and other "correctness". When speaking, if I believe there is a chance the word "knight" will be confused with the word "night", I often pronounce the "k". This may sound ridiculous, but people understand that I am not talking about "nights". (In a future blog entry, I hope to include a similar story involving someone speaking about the large intestine.) In typing, or e-mailing, or blogging, if I want to stress a particular word or phrase, as I would in speaking, I tend to use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS rather than underlining or bold face or italics. This is due primarily to the fact that I have been involved in writing computer programs since the late 1970s (when I tended to use all caps, all the time) and as things have developed over time, using all capital letters has remained the easiest method for technology to handle, offering the highest likelihood of accurate reproduction across different systems and media (though this is becoming less of a problem, and my views may already be obsolete -- just like worrying about periods outside of quotation marks).

Finally, I do not claim that any of the thoughts and ideas recorded here are original, eloquent, profound, or relevant. They are "original" in that they ARE my thoughts, but others may have had the same thoughts before, and may have stated them more eloquently. "Profound" and "relevant" are in the eye of the beholder and the situation. I hope that this blog is a worthwhile experience, but life offers no guarantees.