Gone in a Flash

I don't remember the exact quote, but somewhere in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy says something like "My goodness..people certainly come and go so quickly here." I may be way off, but that's the jist of it.

I was thinking about that when I accidentally pressed the wrong button on my bookmarks toolbar on Firefox and connected to the Morning Stories page. What an amazing experience that was, and what an incredible flash in the pan it was!

A group of us came together, through e-mail, under the leadership of a woman named Liz Cooksey, and in a matter of a month or so, we had transcribed something like 150 Morning Stories broadcasts. But that wasn't the amazing thing. The amazing thing was how quickly we became a community. Well, some of us. Four or five of us were prolific e-mailers, one set up a blog for us to use, there were talks of getting together, we joked about visiting the one who lived in Italy. People sent photos of their families, their vacations. There was lots of chit chat, the beginnings of some soul-searching, we all agreed to set up Skype on our computers so we could have face to face chats and I actually did talk with a couple of people.

Tony Kahn, the producer and director of Morning Stories popped in from time to time to leave messages and I was excited to meet him when I went to Los Angeles for a taping of Says You.

And then. It just all dissolved! Seemingly overnight. The Morning Stories transcriber group hasn't had a message in months. I tried to start a discussion, pointing out that I hadn't heard from anyone and asking what everyone was doing and there was a resounding echoing silence in response. My note to Tony following our meeting, following up on something we discussed, was never answered.

I had a note from Liz when it was my turn to transcribe the next new Morning Stories podcast. And one of the women, who is on Twitter, occasionally leaves me a "tweet" (that's what Twitter messages are called...I'm so hip!)

But my god ... that was the fastest coming together and splitting up since Brittney Spears' last marriage.

That is the problem with on-line relationships. You can be the best of friends one day and the next day you don't hear a word from someone -- and you have no way of knowing if they are alive and just sick and tired of you, or dead and nobody knew to contact you.

We had a group that grew out of one discussion group on CompuServe. When CIS started getting wonky, one of the people set up a discussion group that went hot and heavy for quite a long time. But then it just all kind of faded away. Some of the group had physical problems and we have no way of knowing how they are, all the banter has stopped completely. We only hear from each other when someone is traveling or when someone has a birthday. Being a part of each other's lives is completely gone.

Fortunately there is my other CIS discussion group, now also a Yahoo group. We've been together for over 10 years and are still as friendly as we always were. We also have ways of finding a lost soul who stops posting messages for a while. We all have each other's address. Most of us have each other's cell phone number, if worse comes to worse. I don't see this group splitting up in the foreseeable future, at least not until we start dying off.

I'm also glad to know that Walt has contact information for Peggy, in case something should happen to me, and Peggy has friends who would contact me if something happened to her. That's not a friendship that is likely to fade away into nothing.

But there are other people I've lost, people whose blogs I followed religiously, who never post any more. Someone wrote to me recently because he'd come across my name on The Bitter Hag's web site. He used to follow her all the time and wondered what she was doing. I had to tell him that, like him, I had no idea. I only knew what was going on in her life from her blog and she hasn't written a blog entry in over a year.

Likewise SecraTerri hasn't written a blog entry in more than two years. She and "Haggie" were people I knew in real life, people with whom I had gone on bike rides, and now there is no way to contact either of them. I wonder about them because I care about them and considered them friends.

Fortunately Marn is posting again, but went for several months with no posting at all, and when someone passes "a certain age," you just kinda wonder when they disappear, you know?

Maybe this flash in the pan situation I've encountered with the Morning Stories group isn't all that unusual. Maybe it's just the instant gratification of the internet that accentuates the loss of people who once were very important to us.

People do fade out of our lives in real life, but it doesn't seem quite as noticeable until you suddenly realize that "Hey--I haven't heard from so-and-so in a long time." There is a long list of people who fall into that category, and I'm sure that I'm on a similar list for a lot of people. Not people that I don't care about any more, but I guess people that I've grown away from.

But when you're someone's real life friend, someone else generally knows it and lets you know if something happens to your friend.

I just had to check on Denver Doug, who was one of those people that I kind of let slip...then discovered he had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. I checked him out today and he posted an entry on June 5 (the previous one was in April), so he's still around and I was able to put a note in his guestbook telling him I was thinking about him.

But I don't think there is going to be any follow up with the Morning Stories group. We hadn't actually formed a close bond yet, just getting to know you stuff. Still, I felt there was the potential for a close-knit group among some of us, and it's sorry to see that it all seems to have dissolved, perhaps on the heels of the sad news that Morning Stories is not going to continue after the current season ends.

A Brief Post-Mortem

I just want to add just a few more words about Says You before going on with the rest of my life. I've had messages from people who say they checked it out and it doesn't seem to be playing in their area.

Best thing to do is to go to the Says You web site where you can find a list of all the stations in the country which carry the show, and when it is on. If none of those stations is within your radio-listening area, many of those stations stream the show, so you can listen on the internet, if you have a way to do that. The wonderful thing about the Internet is that you don't need to be near a radio station's signal to listen to a radio show. You can be in Maine and pick up the streaming audio from San Francisco (in fact, before we started getting the show from Audible.com, our radio signal was often very weak and we would listen to the San Francisco station on my computer instead).

If you love word play, bad puns, and just general intelligent (and sometimes downright stupid) humor, I encourage you to check the show out. The thing that we have enjoyed, these past three years of flying to LA to catch tapings, is finding out how many other people are as nutty as we are, as addicted to this show about "words and wimsey; bluff and bluster." I know so many people who love "Wait, Wait, Don't tell Me" (and I do too), but that show is more topical. Unless it's an "evergreen" episode, it kind of loses its impact three years later, whereas the Says You 11 year old recordings are as fresh as they were at the time they were recorded.

The interesting thing I discovered in an extremely short poll, based on the fact that I seem to "know" Tony Kahn in so many different venues, is that there are Says You people and there are Morning Stories people and the two don't seem to have met. It was a surprise that none of the Morning Stories transcribers had heard of Says You and it was another surprise to discover that none of the people we spoke with in line at Says You ever listened to Morning Stories. It just seemed, to me, at least, that a crossover was inevitable.

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One nice thing about the trip, about any trip, actually, was the time spent in the airplane, which allowed me to finish reading the book I had been readiong ("The Surgeon," by Tess Gerritsen) and start reading a new one ("Dead and Doggone" by Susan Conant).

(yes, Jeri, I can turn off the TV any time and read, but somehow I just don't.)

I bought the Conant book after I finished her first one, "A New Leash on Death." I really, really like reading books which are part of a series in order, so I couldn't read any other Conant books until I'd read book 2 of the series.

I didn't like book 2 as well as I did book 1. It might have been partly because I was distracted by airports, and airplanes and just all the stuff we were doing. But one thing that Conant does--and I've seen this in two books now--is to slip in an awful lot of instruction about dogs within the format of a plot line.

I've learned a lot about obedience training, for example, as well as characteristics of various breeds. I think it was the last book that gave a recipe for making your own liver treats to use in training.

But this book did something else. It shed light on animal testing and what you might find in a laboratory that is testing products on animals, specifically dogs. She describes dogs stolen from their families, sold to laboratories who ask no questions, the living conditions in cramped cages, debarking to prevent them from making noise when they are hurt, and a host of other things that happen to research animals.

I'm sure that any animal lover (a) would also be appalled at what I read in Conant's book, and (b) probably also turns a blind eye because we don't really want to know. It's easy to get indignant on a case by case basis. The recent expose on puppy mills got me, for one, to write a diatribe against pet shops and puppy mills, and YouTube had lots of videos about the living conditions of the "breeder bitches" in puppy mills.

I've recently been watching Escape to Chimp Eden, which documents a man's fight to save chimpanzees who have been through horrible traumas -- held captive for decades without access to trees or anything but concrete under their feet, or infants torn from their mothers to become someone's housepet, until that person finds out that a chimpanzee is not as "cute" a pet as they once thought. The stories go on and on.

And then there is the David Sheldrake Wildlife Trust, about which I've written before, which rescues orphaned baby elephants who have watched their mothers often slaughtered before their eyes and who have lost the love of the herd to which they belonged. (I am still haunted by the photo of Daphne Sheldrake comforting an infant who watched the slaughter of its mother and cried out in its sleep.)

The other day I watched an expose of dolphin farming, first learning about the nature of dolphin societies, the closeness among family members, and then watching as hundreds of dolphins were killed on Japanese beaches, watching them in the death throes, hearing their cries. It was heartbreaking.

But we human beings are terribly cruel to animals. We spend fortunes on cute little outfits for chihuahuas or bull dogs, but we buy products that torture animals in the process of making a face cream safe for a middle-aged woman's wrinkles.

I don't have a place where I am taking this entry. I am appalled at what we do to animals and I don't know what to do with my anger, because I still eat meat and I probably use products which were developed by testing on animals. I understand that some testing maybe necessary and that we probably do far too much of it. I also understand that animal societies are far more complex than we ever realized and that it diminishes us as human beings to devalue the life of other animals.

I have this burning need within me to DO SOMETHING, but the problem is so huge I don't yet know what that "something" is. I guess the first step is just awareness and then education...and reading labels more carefully to familiarize myself with the products and brands which test on animals, trying to find similar products which do not.

I haven't reached the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" stage, but I sure have reached the "I'm seriously concerned that I have unwittingly contributed to the torture of some poor animal" stage. It seems to me that once we know the facts and see for ourselves the horror that some animals go through, we really are duty bound to make some change in our lives, whether that be becoming active in animal rights causes, or simply changing the way we choose the products that we use.

It seems like a small thing, but every good change begins with a small step, doesn't it?

Check this website if you really care...

The Transcribers Club

Little did Tony Kahn know what he had unleashed when he made an innocent comment on his Morning Stories podcast that he and co-producer Gary Mott thought maybe one of the listeners might be interested in helping transcribe the archive of Morning Stories podcasts so that those who either couldn't hear them, or who wanted to use them as an aid to help learn English, could read them.

(That's Gary on the left, Tony on the right)

I didn't hear the request until several days after he made it, but I immediately dropped a note to Kahn and Mott and volunteered my service. Unbeknownst to me, an amazing woman named Liz Cooksey...

...had already volunteered to spearhead the project and a couple of other volunteers had been working on the archives. I immediately set to work on doing transcription along with the others, who ultimately numbered 13 -- men and women, in this country, in England and in Italy -- working to complete the backlog of episodes.

It is three months since we started this project and there are only a handful of shows in the archive left to finish (I am embarrassed to admit that two of those are mine. With the complication of computer problems, houseguests, and trips to Santa Barbara, among a few other things, I just haven't been able to complete them--but I should have them finished this week.)

But the amazing thing is not that we completed the archives in three months (and plan to rotate through the group of us to keep things up to date when a new podcast comes out), the amazing thing is the community which has formed around this little group of dedicated, semi-faceless people.

It started, as these things do, simply with e-mails flying back and forth all concerning the business of getting the transcription done: getting consistency in format, assigning new shows to various ones of us, and reporting back on how many had been finished and where we were in the list.

But somehow in the course of all that "business" we started popping in personal messages. There were cheers for "Wonder Woman," for example, who seemed to be working at this 24 hours a day and flew through the transcripts, putting us all to shame.

And then there were little jokes that crept in, especially with the woman in Italy, who once mentioned something about a "piazza" which I mis-read as "pizza" and the fun that ensued because of that mistake.

Gradually we began to learn about each other's lives, the woman with the special needs child, the woman who is in a race with our daughter-in-law Laurel for who is going to give birth first, the young man who is having settling-in difficulties at his college. The woman who just broke both her wrists (and Walt thought he had it rough!)

We began to talk about our lives.

And then there was crazy Geo, who really sort of became the heart of the expansion into a real community. Geo, with her offbeat sense of humor and her internet expertise. She set up a blog for Morning Stories readers, where they can download the transcripts and chat with others about them. She also set up a private blog for the 13 of us to discuss things more in depth than in individual e-mails.

She also spearheaded getting all of our information, such as addresses and birthdates (you don't suppose she's a stalker, do you? :) ). And it was Geo who suggested that we all get on Skype so we can chat with each other, so slowly we are all getting Skype accounts and though the first call has not yet taken place, I know that it will.

I love it each morning when I check my e-mail and find a whole slew of e-mail from the Transcribers Club.

Now Tony Kahn has decided to make us a morning story. A couple of weeks ago, he interviewed half of the group and planned to interview the other half a few days later, but got sick. Organizing six people for interviews on days and blocks of time that are convenient for all isn't easy, so it wasn't until today that we had our interviews.

Tony has kind of been haunting me for...well...years. He's on the panel of Says You, and I've seen him interviewed by several of the vloggers that I know. There was a period of time that no matter what I clicked on, there was Tony! So our chat was like chatting with old friends.

Now he has the task of blending all of our babbling into a coherent Morning Story. Having listened to lots and lots of them now, I have every expectation that it is going to be fun to listen to when it's all finished.

In the meantime, I have a Skype chat set up with the woman in Italy. We'll either be on the piazza or having pizza. I'm not sure which yet.

Talking with Tony Kahn