Turning 65: social media & James Brown!

I may have become 65 years old yesterday, but no barnacles are growing under this blogger’s keyboard!  It’s still a work in progress, but have you seen the new line of useful function and social media icons that recently appeared at the end of each Panbo entry (also seen above)? The “Print” button will get you a nicely formatted version of the entry with reader comments included, but without extraneous web page stuff. And the “Email” button makes it pie simple to send someone a link plus a bit of the entry with an image and an optional comment from you. The Email button also leads to all sorts of other share possibilities, though you may have to join ShareThis to use some of them.  I’m not clear on that and a few other things…

The purpose of the Facebook “Like” button, for instance, is so that you can add a link and bit of a particular entry to your FB wall or business page with a single click, but at the moment it seems to “Like” my disorganized FB page instead. But, hey, I have an excuse; I’m old!  I’m also rather dim on what the heck Google Plus is, and I rarely visit the Twitterverse, but I do know that these sort of social media links are a great way for some readers to share things they like with their friends and associates. Even if the term “social media” makes my stomach turn a dite, possibly because I’m old.
    Not that there’s anything wrong with being old. In fact I feel extraordinarily lucky in terms of how all those years are turning out — like where I live, and who I live with (near and far), and what I do. I love this boat I’m sitting on now too, and that may be the root idea behind this little wallet collage I came up with this morning. Once you have the boat squared away, isn’t this a good set of cards to cruise away with?…

And whereas I’m more or less taking the day off to celebrate all of the above, I’ll close with a more or less irrelevant image I’ve been chuckling over since I took it in Memphis, Tennessee, a few weeks ago. I was there for a family event before I went to IBEX (yes, riding a Greyhound bus from Memphis to Louisville via Nashville is now checked off my bucket list), and during one afternoon walk around the city, we came across this strange homemade memorial to musicians passed…

It’s a wonderful bit of urban folk art, I think, but the particle board “grave stone” that really got my attention belongs to the great James Brown. And I’m borrowing that faded line that some passerby may have added.  I’m 65 and I still feel good.