I am not a very adventurous person. The most death-defying thing I’ve ever done was ride on a very large, very high, 360-degree roller coaster, and that was more than 40 years ago.
So I usually do not feel I’m in any position to criticize anyone who indulges in outrageous physical hobbies. If you want to bicycle for three weeks in the Tour de France, or drive along the Pacific Coast Highway, more power to you.
However, at least I’m self-aware enough to know that I’m in no shape to do such things. Apparently, that small bit of insight has not occurred to recent climbers of Mount Everest, which is only more than a mile-and-a-half above sea level.
As of the latest news report, 11 climbers have died on the mountain this season. A recent climber has stated that “There was a subgroup of climbers that was very rude and unruly and was basically pushing so that they could get better pictures of themselves.” So nice to know that the yahoo mentality we often encounter in grocery stores and movie theaters has now transferred itself to a life-threatening international monument.
But the biggest problem is that too many inexperienced climbers are trying to reach the top of Mt. Everest at one time. As a result of the high altitude, climbers’ oxygen and vital supplies get used up while they simply stand there and wait for their chance to reach the tippy-top. The aforementioned climber expressed his shock at seeing dead bodies attached to a safety line.
This is what our selfie society has come to. People are shoving others out of the way and using up precious air just to take a souvenir photo of themselves. You couldn’t settle for a ride at Disney World?
As I said, I usually don’t chide people who are far more audacious than I am. But if your self-esteem hangs on literally killing yourself to get a good selfie, skip the 8,800-foot straight-up trip, and head for the nearest analyst instead.
So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am?
One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account.
When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account.
And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”)
So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog.
Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog.
If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog.
Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.
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