Christmas is my favorite holiday. It means home, family, love, sharing, laughing, . . .. I love the sentiment in this song. With my parents both deceased, I try to spend Christmas with one or more of my siblings. This year, I am off to Paris to visit my niece and her fiance, who are living in Paris at the moment. We are off to Zermatt, Switzerland, for the actual holiday. It should be a white Christmas!
For the final three week’s of Hugh’s challenge, he wants festive songs. Here is one of my favorite upbeat holiday songs, Snow Globe by Matt Wertz. It was released in 2011. The video is silly and good for a laugh.
Hugh’s challenge this week was to find a song that connects with blogging and followers. Well, don’t we all want followers. Of course we do. But as Hugh points out, we get a lot of ghost followers, bloggers who follow you in hopes you’ll follow them, then they disappear. I don’t mind them so much, if their blog has good content that I will revisit. What bugs me the most are fake follows by people/sites trying to sell you blogging or internet services. I would like to remove them as followers but I can’t figure out how to do it. Or even worse, blogs that follow you, but when you try to visit them to see what they are about, you get a message that the blog doesn’t exists. I find this especially mysterious when I click on the follow notification within a couple hours of the follow. I’m not sure what the point is. Though I do wonder if some of those strange follows are just a way to steal/borrow your blog address for merchandising/mass marketing purposes. For the post several months, I have received thousands, yes thousands, of comments from two or three IP addresses. Each comment is from someone trying to sell me “something you buy to protect your automobile if you have an accident” (I can’t write the word because I have put it on my automatic reject list) in almost every state and city in the US. Odd, since I live only in one. For a couple of months the comments were clogging my comment box instead of being redirected to the trash folder. WordPress was finally able to fix that problem, so now I get thousands of comments in my trash folder. Tonight, there are 17,179 comments in my trash. What I find most troubling is that the merchandising comments are supposedly responding to one of my posts (which is referenced in the comment) or on the post of either a blog I follow or the blog of someone who had written me a legitimate comment. This is why I think fake follows might be the problem. I don’t know how to make the merchandising comments stop. I would say that over the last few months, I have deleted or trashed over 40,000 fake comments. Unfortunately, because I can’t check them all, I’m sure I have deleted a few legitimate ones. Maybe Dorothy will lend me her ruby slippers so I can follow the yellow brick road. Perhaps the Wizard would have the answer.
Ah, a song for a broken heart. There are so many. Hugh went back to 1989 this week with his broken-hearted song. I’ve reached a bit farther back, to 1983. “How am I Supposed to Live Without You” by Laura Brannigan has to be one of the best songs about heartbreak. It speaks to the yearnings of a friend who wanted more—but love never happened. Brannigan’s approach to the lyrics says so much more than Michael Bolton’s later release of the song, which he co-wrote.
Join Hugh’s 51 Weeks:51 Hits from the Past – Week 42
Hugh’s guest blogger, Steve McSteveface, challenged us this week to showcase “sing-along-and-dance-along” songs—Songs that make you want to dance around your kitchen. Cher’s “Believe” is one of my favorites. It has the perfect beat for hopping around and singing loudly. When I lived in Seattle in the late 90’s, early 2000s, I was part of a writer’s critique group that met every Saturday morning. We all worked and on Saturday’s our energy could ebb. One day, someone suggested we needed to get our blood pumping and put on “Believe.” We all danced and jumped around the living room for a number of weeks at the beginning of our meetings. I always think of that wonderful group of people and how we became a Saturday morning family.
Hugh’s challenge this week was to showcase songs that made us think of that “first dance.” I decided to go for some songs about dancing instead. I have to admit the last one is my favorite
1964 – Martha & the Vandella’s, Dancing in the Streets
1972 – King Harvest, Dancing in the Moonlight
2014 – Walk The Moon, Shut Up and Dance With Me, Disney Version
The New 3 Rs: Retire, Recharge, Reconnect 