Yes!

I’m Pleased To Announce That Miss Nettie Briggs Has Entered The Chat

/ Ally Bean / 217 Comments

Give attitude, get attention, right?

I like that saying, it explains many things.

I prefer, and I think you’d agree, that the attitude be positive spunk [aka signal] rather than negative junk [aka noise], BUT the result is the same: the attention is on you.

Not that giving attitude is anything new.

In fact back when the world was a more genteel place free from 24/7 news and social media, I’m sure people gave attitude— just in more subtle ways. They may have been irritated by events and other people, but seemingly they tolerated that irritation with more grace than today*.

Case in point is Miss Nettie Briggs. She is featured in the professional portrait seen at the top of this post. She is looking placid, mildly amused by what she is doing.

Or so it seems to me.

I found this photo mixed in among the boxes of family photos that I sorted last summer and wrote about in Confessions Of A Reluctant Family Historian: My Kingdom For A Shredder, my most popular post of 2024. [Go figure?]

I don’t know for sure who Miss Nettie Briggs was: my mother had written her name on the back of the photo so she knew who she was. But there’s no one left from any generation that’d be able to tell me Miss Nettie Briggs’s story.

However I have an inkling of who she might have been.

I remember my mother talking about a nurse who came to live with her family for a year, tasked with looking after my mother’s older sister who’d had abdominal surgery. Something that at the time was a dangerous procedure that required months of bedrest in order to heal.

Nettie lived with them and when not looking after her charge, who slept a lot, she read books to and played games with my mother and her younger sister.

Mom liked Miss Nettie Briggs, as I recall. Enough, I would guess, to keep a photo of Miss Nettie Briggs around in a ratty cardboard box full of dusty old family photos for me to find one day.

I adore Miss Nettie Briggs because I find her charming.

Thus it has come to be that Nettie’s photo is now framed and hanging on the wall in our study where I do my blogging, old-school style on a desktop computer.

Meaning that whenever I do anything related to blogging Nettie is looking over my shoulder, keeping my thoughts mostly civil, my sense of humor firmly intact, and my vibe jovial enough.

At least most days.

Questions of the Day

What’s your attitude today? Are you receiving the kind of attention you want?  
Do you have any old family photos of somebody who is a mystery to you? 
Do you have any old or new photos of people framed and hanging on your walls? Once upon a time that was frowned upon you know!

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* Last month in various places online I, a kind-hearted person, was criticized for:

  • watching TV shows rather than reading books
  • suggesting that not all men are worthy of adoration
  • noting the demographics of people who got in my way
  • proposing that not all old things are worth saving
  • not obsessing constantly about The Donald and his First Buddy

Bomb Diggity: Staying In Your Good Books By Sharing Memes About Books + A Very Special Reader Comments

/ Ally Bean / 203 Comments

Yesterday I learned a new-to-me idiom. It is “in someone’s good books” and is defined by The Idioms as:

If you are in somebody’s good books, it means you have done something good that has delighted them, and if you are in their bad books, you have annoyed them, and they are now angry with you.

Granted over the years I’ve said something similar [to be “in someone’s good graces”] but now I have another respectable idiom to add to my personal lexicon.

Also, I have what will be the catalyst for this blog post: BOOKS.

You see, my little popsicles of profundity, I’m currently at loose ends, a blogging wordsmith with time on my hands because somehow or another IT IS STILL FEBRUARY and not much is going on in my life.

Thus with the aforementioned catalyst in mind I perused my folders and files that are in order for once because I’ve used this winter to get my little bloggy organized for the first time in years.

[To wit please note, there’s a revised About Ally Bean tab; a new Best Of The Bean tab; an updated Blogroll 2.0 tab + a new Header image.]

Getting back to the issue at hand, after looking into my recently organized folders and files I found the following which I present without any personal commentary. Yes, this is unusual for me but I’ll admit that at this point in February my bomb is less diggity than usual.

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AND FINALLY A VERY SPECIAL READER COMMENTS…

After writing the above I realized the following bloggers who comment here regularly are also authors of published books. Seems like a good time to mention them. Click on a name and go say “HI!” Tell ’em Ally Bean sent you.

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📚 Now it’s your turn to stay in my good books, and I know you want to delight me, so leave a comment below! 📚

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What A Hoot! 6 Random Things To Tell You On A Tuesday Morning In February

/ Ally Bean / 277 Comments

I am reminded. Many, many years ago around Valentine’s Day I learned about a simple Spanish cocktail called a Kalimotxo. It’s Red Wine & Coke, a take on the Cuba Libre cocktail of Rum & Coke. It’s not my favorite drink, but I won’t disparage it either. I remember it at this time of year because it was deemed the perfect Valentine’s Day cocktail. Think whimsically and look at how it is spelled: KalimotXO. Kisses and hugs automatically included with each drink.

I am grateful. Colette, a former blogger who is now HERE on IG, has a relaxed idea about how to embrace thankfulness. I am doing it. Instead of a daily gratitude journal, each week you decide what’s your one favorite gratitude experience from the week. Then you write it on a small piece of paper, fold the paper into a square, putting the square into a jar designated: Good Things. After a year you’ll have your bestest gratitude moments in a pile of notes in front of you.

I am irked. WordPress’s current commenting system is an exasperating multi-step process— if you can even get your words to show up in the comment box. I contacted WordPress yesterday and asked why I was unable to comment on WP blogs. The Happiness Engineer gave me the link to WP problem updates +  had many suggestions of various possible solutions. The one that worked for me was to change browsers, so now instead of Safari I’m using Chrome for iMac when I visit bloggy friends and want to leave a comment.

I am delighted. I’m a fan of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series of cozy mysteries that feature octogenarian sleuths. Thus I’m looking forward to the movie version with its perfect cast: Helen Mirren [Elizabeth], Ben Kingsley [Ibrahim], Pierce Brosnan [Ron], and Celia Imrie [Joyce]. The movie is set to release in 2025 and it well could be the best thing to happen this year.

I am underwhelmed. If you enjoy NYT’s Connections word game and would like to create your own, go HERE and have at it. However, a truth bomb: I put together a couple of these games and discovered that my results were weaksauce, not even worth saving. But you might be better at making one than I was.

I am nerdy. According to the Jock-Nerd/Prep-Goth Test I’m a Nerd who’s slouching toward Goth. To wit: “Nerds are sometimes seen as being more interested in academics, technology, or other ‘nerdy’ pursuits than in popular culture or mainstream social activities.” Hell yes, NAILED IT! A joiner I am not.

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Questions of the Day

Do you have a particular drink that you think of around Valentine’s Day?

If you have a gratitude practice, what is it?

Are you finding it increasingly more difficult to leave comments on WordPress blogs? And how does that make you feel?

Do you read mysteries? Do you do the NYT’s Connections game?

And finally, if you took the Jock-Nerd/Prep-Goth Test, who is ‘ya? Spill the beans

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Ain’t We Just: Rambling Thoughts About Superpowers And Using The Powers For Good

/ Ally Bean / 190 Comments

Let’s just say for purposes of discussion that my superpower is mind reading. A fact [?] I discerned after taking this nifty National Geographic Superpower Quiz.

You see, and this was news to me but considering the source we must conclude that, superpowers aren’t just for fictional characters anymore. To wit, I proudly tell you this is who I am:

“You can read minds! Well, not exactly, but you’re very aware of how others feel.” Yep, true dat

Naturally I wanted to get a deeper understanding of who I am so I went to my old friend, Merriam-Webster, to research the word.

As one does.

According to M-W a “mind reader” is “one that professes or is held to be able to perceive another’s thought without normal means of communication” and that the first known use of the word, which in this case is actually two words but who am I to argue with M-W’s way of explaining things, occurred in 1875.

[A studious aside: In case you’re unfamiliar with M-W’s Time Traveler feature it’s fun for a wordy person. To see what it is like, click HERE and learn what other words* were new in 1875. Information like this is available under most definitions, just scroll down the page to the feature.]

Anyhoo, getting back to the discussion aspect of this post, after learning the aforementioned I started pondering, in an abstract rhetorical way, about how does one use any superpower for good:

• In general do you think, like I do, that determining and acknowledging your superpower is one thing? But implementing it, like a hero** not a villain, is another thing? Two different skill sets, two different moral cores

• And further, specifically, what do you do with the ability to read minds? It’s one thing to know what someone else is thinking but that doesn’t mean you have the capacity, or desire, to change their mind. ‘Ya know?

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

If you took the quiz, what is your superpower? OR if you don’t need a quiz to know your superpower, what is it?

Are you a wordy person who likes knowing a bit more about interesting words that appear in your life? Is Merriam-Webster your old friend, too?

When you think about fictional heroes with superpowers who comes to mind? Is the source from myths, literature, movies, TV shows, cartoons, comics, or games? Other?

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* Ilsa Rey from Writing and Martial Arts is going to find one of the words on the 1875 list, linked to above, especially pertinent. Yep, I’m a mind reader.

** When I think of the word “hero” this brief conversation from the TV show Firefly flashes through my mind:

  • Mal: “Well, look at this. It appears that we got here just in the nick of time. What does that make us?”
  • Mal: “Ain’t we just.”