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A chatbot farewell

chatbot-goodbye-FOMM — Saying goodbye (to my horse). Image by RoyBuri, www.pixabay.com. Thanks to free image websites and friends who helped out with photos over the years.

Since this is now the way of the world, I decided to Google myself and ask ChatGPT to write a blog in the style of bobwords.com.au. The topic – ‘saying goodbye’. The following (in italics) was generated in 11 seconds.

Hey there, lovely readers of BobWords.com.au! Today, we’re delving into a topic that resonates with all of us at some point in our lives: saying goodbye. Life is an ever-changing journey filled with moments of joy, growth, and, of course, farewells. As we navigate these bittersweet moments, let’s explore how we can make goodbyes meaningful and even transformative.(Ed: making vomiting noises)

Life is like a river, constantly flowing and evolving. Just as we welcome new beginnings, we must also bid adieu to chapters that have run their course. Goodbyes mark the end of one era and the beginning of another, bringing change and growth into our lives. Embracing this natural cycle can help us move forward with grace and an open heart.

Goodbyes give us the opportunity to reflect on the beautiful moments and experiences that we’ve shared. As we bid farewell, we can take a moment to savor (sic) the memories we’ve created. These cherished moments become the threads that weave the tapestry of our lives, reminding us of the laughter, love, and connections that have enriched our journey.

Saying goodbye isn’t just about closing a chapter; it’s also about finding closure within ourselves. Every goodbye opens the door to a world of new opportunities… (I cut it off here, because I was beginning to yawn. Ed)

Now I’m starting to worry about the 7 million blogs which are published every week. I wonder how many of those writers will succumb to this techno-rubbish because it is fast, free and easy? Well, so far it is free.

As The Guardian recently discovered, Rupert Murdoch’s news empire has been publishing up to 1200 stories a week confected by ChatGPT.

A Nick Cave fan asked ChatGPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave which he then sent to Nick who responded in his inimitable way.

For my money, nothing will ever beat Cave’s imagery: ‘my piano crouched in the corner of my room. With all its teeth bared.’ proof that technology cannot better creative genius.

I started Friday on My Mind to address what I saw at the time as one of the shortcomings of traditional media. It was more about what they were not reporting rather than the slant put on things they dId report. Unlike most bloggers, I started with an email list which grew and grew and spent little time fine-tuning the website so I’d be ‘discovered’. It was quite some time before I even realised I should be attending to SEO (search engine optimisation), shorthand for writing in such a way that Mr Google’s bots can find (and rank) your blog. Consequently, you will find that blogs written with SEO in mind will be peppered with ‘keywords,’ cynically deployed to help lift your offerings higher in the google rankings.

Social media and the 24/7 news cycle has changed the relevancy of blogs like mine. What might have been a breaking story on Tuesday (when I sometimes come up with an idea), is old hat by Friday. Much of the time I have picked random topics which may or may not be in the news cycle. Probably because I have been writing since the early 1980s, my ‘news sense’ is still intact and the random offering at times becomes accidently relevant.

There has also been an emerging coterie of media commentators who like the luxury of expanding online on a topic. As they do it for a living, you can find their utterances on most social media platforms. I noticed about a year ago the redoubtable Hugh Lunn started publishing highlights of his journalism career on Substack.

Last week I said Sayonara to Twitter/X after first downloading my data. I only opened a Twitter account because people assured me that is how people would find my blog (1200 words? TMTR (to much to read, for those born last century and/or who may not be familiar with this acronym. Ed)).

The most exciting things that happened to me on Twitter was a veteran songwriter proclaimed to his followers: “Hey people, bobwords48 is Bob Wilson, who wrote Underneath the Story Bridge.” Unlike my approach to shutting down this weekly offering, I left no trail on X (depicted on social media as a burning cross), for anyone to find me. The digital spring clean is ongoing.

My sister explained to me at our last meeting that as we age our world becomes smaller, and in many ways that is a desirable thing. Why have four email accounts when you only need one? Why have an Ebay account when you haven’t bought anything for two years?

I can hear John from Melbourne in my ear – ‘Bob, you’re waffling’.

As this is my fond farewell from this particular platform, may I thank you all for the many kind words arriving by email. I will answer them all over time. I was happily surprised to find messages from readers who have not once responded to any one column but claim to have read it every week ‘with dedication’.

As for the writing – I was helped from time to time by contributions from guests including Laurel Wilson, Norm Boniface, Phil Dickie and Lyn NuttalI. Sometimes FOMM even unearthed a real news story. In July 2017 while on a caravan trip out west, I discovered the re-emergence of prickly pear. I wrote about this infamous imported noxious weed, which we all assumed had been eradicated. Not so, and after posting this, mainstream outlets (Landline, Queensland Country Life) started picking up the story.

I was reminded about this recently when writing about the wind farm being built outside Warwick. Among the many tasks facing Acciona, the wind farm developer, 37,600 prickly pears were ‘successfully treated” as part of a weed removal project on 33,000 hectare sheep station it has leased for its 187-turbine wind farm.

“Oh yeh, it’s coming back,” my brother-in-law confirmed, on discovering several bushes/trees on his acre of land at Yangan outside Warwick.

There are some amusing pieces of writing in the FOMM archive and also a few serious ones that reflect on depression and suicide, homelessness, refugees and the climate crisis.

For those of you who received this in an email delivered by Mail Chimp, don’t forget you can revisit past FOMMs by going to the website www.bobwords.com.au and searching through nine years’ worth of archives. I have been re-reading a few, especially from our around-Australia jaunt in 2014.

I have readers in the UK, Canada, the US, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong (expat journos missing home). Among the most popular columns was an obit I wrote for Gough Whitlam and a rant about shutting down my private post box. If you are feeling bereft next Friday, go and choose one at random. The index app is very good – try the keywords Anzac, PO Box, Whitlam, Nullarbor, Killjoy and King for a Day to get started. Just a few I was pleased with for their wit and wisdom, even if WordPress kept nagging me to ‘improve your readability score’.

In closing, Narelle Chatbot would like to add:

So, dear readers, here’s to embracing life’s bittersweet moments, to cherishing the memories we’ve made, and to welcoming the unknown with open arms. Until next time, take care and keep embracing the journey! (Ed:…

LOL

In a week or two we expect to emerge from the studio with a timely song which I would like to share with FOMM readers.

And it’s ‘good night’ from him, and it’s ‘good night’ from her…

Bob and Laurel

Tired blogger in search for salty licorice

Sometimes when researching some arcane topic for this nine-year-old series of weekly essays, I get tired. No, not ‘tired of,’ as predictive text tried to anticipate. Just tired, much as political commentator Ronni Salt says in the ironic intro to her Twitter/X page – ‘I used to investigate stuff but got tired of it.’

While Ronni Salt continues (see The Shot), today I’m declaring this the penultimate (second-last) weekly FOMM. Don’t all go ‘Nooo’ at once. Nine years is a good innings and it is starting to feel like a chore. I am also finding myself repeating topics I have already vented about. The last weekly FOMM will be posted on September 1, which nicely coincides with a week away in Sydney without having to think ‘What will I write about this week and should I take my laptop?’)

The website www.bobwords.com.au will remain in place until the next web host subscription is due (November 2024).

It’s unlikely this is a complete end to my following current affairs and fulminating about this or that. A rogue column or two may sporadically emerge. You may find new songs emerging on our sister website – thegoodwills.com or on Bandcamp, as one sign of new-found liberation.

I decided to refresh my research into what I have been competing with for people’s attention. Not that Friday in My Mind counts as a blog – it’s too long, earns no money, is posted only once a week, has no ‘target audience’ as such and my attention to SEO (search engine maximisation) is fairly scant.

People find it by accident and while there are a few hundred who never miss it, there are those who have only read 6% to 10% of regular posts.

Nevertheless, I apparently have hundreds of followers on various social media portals. Given the sheer weight of blogs/rants which abound on social media, though, I suspect FOMM will, like the little list song from The Mikado, never will be missed.

Statistics on blogging make my head spin. Let me run a few of these by you (stats can be found on most online marketing company websites).

The global number of blogs is over 600 million (more or less where it was when I started in 2014), according to Firstsite.com. There are 32.7 million bloggers in the US alone and every day 7 million blogs are posted on the Internet.

There’s work in that ‘space’ for all those former newspaper reporters, that’s for sure. Most corporate, small business and startup websites maintain a blog and I assume they pay people to write them. Here’s one example, a website called Clever Girl Finance (Our mission is to empower women to achieve financial success). I started to browse through this website and realised it is based in the US. But it’s a good example of a professional website where articles are not only written but edited and fact-checked! (Who has the time for that, eh!)

I did also find this list of 10 Australian personal finance/financial planning blogs, few of which I have ever consulted, but it’s an interesting ‘space’ to investigate.

WordPress remains supreme among blogging platforms, controlling 43% of the world’s online blogs. But it’s a clunky app/programme. If your WordPress website is truly ‘broken’ you will have to pay an expert to fix it. Every time you update to the latest version, you should always do a backup, as WordPress itself advises. Updates have been known to ‘break’ websites.

OptinMonster, an online marketing company, is another source, among many, that periodically reminds readers of the powerful statistics behind blogging. For example, about 70 million posts are published each month by WordPress users (four or even five of which were mine).

Reader like commenting on blogs – 77 million opinions every month. (My experience in the first year was that 95% of comments were spam. After I found out how to block Olga from Sweden and Svetna from Slovakia, legitimate website comments were few and far between).

The average blog post takes 3.5 hours to write, ‘they’ say. You could safely double that for FOMM, much of the effort going into fact checking and proof reading. (Yay me. ED) Even when this happens, occasional hiccups occur. Last week, I referred to a 23m wind turbine tower, the zero at the end having been whisked away by an errant August westerly. Thanks Randall for pointing that out. (Ed was asleep at the wheel?)

This statistic I knew about – bloggers who write articles of 2,000+ words are far more likely to have strong results. (I started with 1200 words and on occasions drift out to 1400 or 1500. Nobody notices.)

For a while I subscribed to platforms which encourage fulsome writing – Long Reads, Medium, The Big Round Table, The Atlantic etc. Without exception, I fell away from following them as my inbox became cluttered.

I should warn that some of these essays run to 15,000 words, so are best read on a tablet with an e-book reader.

The experts reveal that while 77% of people say they read blogs on a regular basis, 43% admit to skimming blog posts. The nature of online posts, many of which use bullet points, lists, videos and photos to convey their message, encourages this skim-reading.

OptinMonster came up with this reassuring statistic; that while 46% of bloggers edit their own work, 54% have editors or have at least shown their work to someone else to review.

Elsewhere, you will find statistics that suggest the average blogger will last two years before deciding they are scattering pebbles into the ocean and barely causing a ripple. They either tire of the work involved, become discouraged by the paltry income or (more commonly), move on to other things.

I have a couple of bloggers on my list of recommended reads who have been writing longer than I have and show no signs of giving it away. Unlike me, they have books to sell and reputations to uphold.

At this point, I have no thoughts at all on how to end this long-running column/blog other than to say the final episode will be posted next Friday. Suggestions welcome!

In the interim, you might like to delve into the FOMM archives, or better still amuse yourselves with this account of an overseas junket by a New York Times writer.

Here, to prove you can actually be assigned to travel to Finland to write about such things, is Mark Binelli’s lengthy investigation into the origins of salty licorice and why some people cannot be without it.

We grew up living down the road from a Dutch family who received regular care packages from home, including that peculiar sweet (I wouldn’t call it sweet. Ed) treat. It is definitely an acquired taste. The upside is you don’t have to share with others! (True love is also buying one’s spouse salted licorice when one indulges in their love of Rocky Road…Ed.)

(PS: the local sweet shop stocks mild, double and triple strength, and no, they are not paying me to write that).

Time capsule tips

Time-capsule-photo-of-Colin-Meads — Photo of Colin Meads: Commons wiki/File:Colin_Meads_Sheep.jpg

From the misty annals of childhood comes a memory of the town fathers burying a time capsule, not to be opened for 100 years. They had asked the townsfolk for suggestions as to what the capsule should contain and our little urchin’s cabal suggested such items as an alarm clock (with two bells atop), a gob-stopper, that famous photo of All Black Colin Meads with a sheep under each arm, a train ticket and a can of pick-up-sticks. Somebody said we should get an episode of Life with Dexter and put that in too.

Digression alert: it is untrue that Meads (1960s rugby version of Paul Gallen), kept fit running up and down hills on his farm with a sheep under each arm.

Historians and archivists may scoff, but the practice of encapsulating the trivial lives of a cross-section of society for future generations is still in vogue. Time capsules are often buried beneath the foundations of a new building to mark a special occasion, a centenary, perhaps. The idea is to set a date in the future when they should be dug up and opened.

General interest in the concept increased after Westinghouse created one as part of its exhibit for the 1939 New York World Fair.

The 2.3 metre long, 360kg capsule, made of copper, chromium and silver alloy, contained items including a spool of thread and doll, a vial of food crop seeds, a microscope and a 15-minute newsreel. There were also microfilm spools containing such prosaic fare as a Sears Roebuck catalogue.

Wikipedia’s entry says Westinghouse buried a second capsule in 1965. Both are set to be opened in 6939, that is, 4,922 years from now.

Sometimes time capsules rise to the surface before the appointed time. When the statue of John Robert Godley, the founder of Christchurch, toppled to the ground during the 2011 earthquake, workers pawing through the rubble found two time capsules under the plinth. A glass bottle containing parchment and a long metal container were handed to the Christchurch museum.

Director Anthony Wright told the Daily Mail a third capsule was discovered beneath the base of the cross of the badly damaged Christchurch Cathedral. All three capsules were opened a month later and were found to contain items including old newspapers and photographs, a City of Christchurch handbook (1922-23), what appears to be a civic balance sheet, a few coins and a brass plate.

So what’s it all about, then? As self-confessed time capsule nerd Matt Novak writes, time capsules rarely reveal anything of historical value. In many ways, time capsules are like small private museums which are locked up for 100 years or more and nobody is allowed to visit.

Buried-capsule-seeds — Time capsule in Seattle containing seeds. Photo by Eli Duke (flickr)

The exemplar of the genre so far is the 200-year old Boston time capsule, discovered in January by construction crews. The capsule was set into the cornerstone of a building by one of the nation’s founding fathers, Samuel Adams, and patriot silversmith Paul Revere. The contents of the capsule (coins, newspapers, photographs and a silver plaque inscribed by Revere), now belong to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

The National Archives of Australia maintains a web page dedicated to serving people who are planning to bury a time capsule for posterity.

The NAA says careful choice of materials to be included in a time capsule will contribute to the longevity of both contents and capsule.

The latter is worth bearing in mind, given that witnesses to the Christchurch unearthing said one of the capsules ‘smelled like blue cheese.’

The International Time Capsule Society estimates there are between 10,000 and 15,000 time capsules worldwide.

The notion is popular with schools, particularly those with a strong sense of tradition. In celebration of its golden jubilee in 2007, Epping Boys High School of Sydney (whose alumni includes rock musician Iva Davies and barrister and TV presenter Geoffrey Robertson) invited Prime Minister John Howard to plant a new time capsule but also, as the Old Boys Union reported, open the one buried in 1982 (the silver jubilee). Alas, the school was closed for the holidays, so your intrepid reporter was unable to unearth a description of the capsule’s contents.

This set me to thinking just what should be inside a time capsule buried, for example, in the foundations of a massive new public housing eco village planned for, say, Wentworth.

It would have to be a big-arse capsule, because I’d be recommending items for posterity include the mechanical rabbit from Wentworth Park. If that is not possible, then at least include a Dapto Dogs racebook, so citizens 100 years hence can ponder the curious sport of dog racing.

The capsule should contain a large lump of brown coal (they won’t miss it, honest), so future generations can see why the planet went amiss.

She Who is Glass Half Full This Week says we ought to include some Aussie inventions: plastic money, the electronic pacemaker, the black box recorder, the cochlear implant…

Countering all this world-changing innovation, we need to show the substance abuse issues of the 21^st century – a hemp shoulder bag filled with all the illicit drugs of the day, and for good measure a bottle of whatever young kids turn to when binge drinking, and a packet of fags, adorned with graphic images of tongue and lip cancer.

It might not work in a hundred years’ time, but we should include a smart phone, charger and spare battery, along with a hard-copy cheat sheet. And yes, what 2016 time capsule would be complete without a victorious Queensland State of Origin team photo, hunkering down, singing aye-yai-yippy-yippy in 17 different keys, making odd, triumphant finger gestures.

The NAA might warn us not to use ephemeral recording materials, but what else do we have? I’d suggest a special DVD edition of Q&A with Alan Jones, Steve Price, Andrew Bolt, Phillip Adams, John Pilger and Marcia Langton discussing indigenous land rights, refugees and free speech, with Tony Jones trying to keep them all on point.

One could have such fun filling a time capsule. Items bound to puzzle people in 2116 could include: a (new) disposable nappy, a coffee pod, a Go Card, a government-issue hearing aid, one of those ear-expanding discs some young people wear so they can look like primitive tribes from darkest Africa. We could employ a taxidermist to stuff a cane toad and a feral cat and include literature explaining their stories. I’d be tempted to Include copies of every newspaper editorial before (and after) the 2016 election, just to show that whatever passes for punditry 100 years from now was always thus.

It could be fun to somehow preserve a ‘best of Facebook photo album’ to show future generations what people did with their spare time. It would not take long to curate images of tattooed people, pierced people, nude bike riders, hipsters, cats and dogs doing odd but cute things, photos of what people had for lunch, independent bands nobody ever heard of (now or in 100 years’ time), absolute proof that the earth is flat, out of focus selfies, a video of a serious young dude performing a handfarting cover of a Pink Floyd song (this really is on YouTube. Ed) and 17 versions of the same sunset.

Oh, and let’s not forget to include a laminated copy of that Friday guy’s take on time capsules.