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Welcome to Telling a great story and spinning a good yarn [Skip my introduction here and go straight to my latest contribution.] I have been writing stories on this website for a few weeks. When I started to write, I didn't have an exact idea or a real direction on what I wanted to do here. I thought a Weblog might be a good idea. On my seemingly never-ending journey across the web, I meet many people monetising their blogs by sharing space with sponsors. There are a number of companies who will populate your "free" space with commercials. If you write interesting stories, provide interesting material or have informative content, people will come to your site to read, be entertained, argue and learn. And if the sponsor provides relevant advertisements, you can make some money. Harnessing the power of Web 2 (to the use current 'in' terminology) allows content generated by others to be displayed on your sites. That's what Web 2 is. Rather than producing "static" websites in the classic style, you allow anyone out there in the Internet world to write for you. This is great for monetising, as obviously the more pages you fill, the bigger your site, the more advertising "area" you achieve and more money you bring in. QED -- quod erat demonstrandum. One morning I said to myself, well what the heck, I'll start a blog too, write a few stories, optimize them so the web searches point to me. I won't make it too interesting so people won't mind clicking out and away on the adverts, and I can make a few bucks in the deal. But things never work out as I plan. In the words of the old Yiddish saying, Men tracht und Gott lacht, roughly translating to "Men plan and God laughs". Google's business model certainly isn't what it was ten years ago -- businesses and people have to be flexible and go with the flow. But that's OK. I started to become more interested in the creative aspects of writing than the financial side. Maybe art is art and creativity is creativity, and I am using the same skills to write creatively that I use to produce fine-art photography. I think art can be defined as the ability to look at something in the world and use whichever skill or method is necessary to reproduce it in an artificial form. You can take a lump of stone and sculpture, a blob of mud and potter, a canvas and some paint or a camera. If you can see in your mind's eye what the end product will look like, and you can achieve this, then you have created a work of art. Writing falls into the same category. You create a word picture, and the reader smells the salt spray, feels the fog blowing on her face or hears the thunder of a mob of passing brumbies. So what I really have here, right from the beginning, is more a collection of short stories than a classic blog. (That's got to be an anachronism -- blogs haven't been around for long enough to be "classic" -- but that's the age in which we live -- everything gets compressed in time and place.) I haven't created a diary, nor a reporting system for any political philosophy. My stories cover much and varied ground. My past, my thoughts, my childhood, my hates, peeves, hatreds, loves . . . all presented in full technicolor on a wide screen. Answers.com defines a blog (weblog) as a website which displays in chronological order, the postings by one or more individuals, and usually has links to comments on specific postings. Now, some fifty stories later, I certainly do not have a blog. I believe what I have produced here is a collection of creative writings. A body of stories. What the Australians call "spinning a good yarn". I am the storyteller. I intend to entertain; I am not scared to say what I think, and I don't mind being insulting or mean if I feel the chronicle is enhanced by it, or that this is how I recall the events. Parenthetically, I should say here that whatever I write is my own take on events and sometimes (not always) I embellish the truth to improve the story line. I do not claim to be writing history (but sometimes it is exactly what I am doing). Many cultures have traditions concerning story telling. Civilisations pass their heritage to future generations via narratives; elders relating to a younger generation. Rav Nachman of Breslov said, "The world says 'Stories are meant to help you sleep'. But I say, 'Stories are meant to wake you up!'" Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach said, "The essence of a story is understanding life." Please enjoy my stories, my yarns. Let me know how they come across; I love to receive feedback and may publish some of it with my comments. If you enjoy my stories, feel free to pass them on to your friends, relatives and acquaintances. After all art, both my stories and my photographs have been created to be enjoyed. And remember, anything I write here is my humble opinion and only represents my thinking and not that of any organisation for which I may work, consult or do anything else. Thank you.
Please at your leisure. Note that commercials on this site are from third party feeds. While I have no control over them, they are supposed to be tailored to my page content. Feel free to view any of the sponsors' sites that interest to you. Below is a list of my stories written thus far. Please stay tuned for more. I don't like dating them, but in order to give some idea of timeline, I add a date every now and again. I feel that time is fluid and my stories are immemorial.
Want to tell me something -- or have a look at my photograph galleries (each gallery from a different part of the world and representing a different theme - worship in Thailand, Eating Out in Bangkok, Sydney Harbour and Beaches, Hong Kong, New York and non location themes: the World in Reflection and Actualities in Black & Orange). I've also produced two benchers, birchonim: Gush Katif and Hevron (Hebron). |