ARE WE INFLATING INFLATION? (video)

John Cullum is laughing, Em's musing.

John is actually quite concerned about what's happening with money, these days, but feels that it isn't inflation. Prices are just going on.

Em thinks it's inflation...

Since JC is the Cullum family shopper, the one who provides the food, household, home, and office supplies -- he knows what things cost now and remembers what they used to cost.

"I'm a penny pincher," Cullum says.

Em, delighted that John has taken the shopping chore off her agenda, snuggles in, glad that he's watching over them.

PASSWORD ART

How to make sure fire, strong good, password?

You have to define yourself, and find a sequence of letters, digits, that you can remember.

So your source is significant -- it could be a ditty, a jingle, or maybe a spur of the moment feeling, or --of course -- you can go with what you've read about hackers, and create a complicated password like Google recommends.

Okay --be it numbers, symbols, cuss words, whatever you pick, nevertheless, needs to be an expression of you.

Like a profile picture? Do you pick what reveals what you are today? Or what you were? Or what you wish you could be?

I'm getting quite an education on twitter.com. I have noted, and now avoid, the f---, the s--- word users. the sexy come-on tweeters. Much of what's tweeted, isn't writing -- it's spur of the moment self-expression. And I'm seeing a lot of this on Facebook -- gee, guys -- what's this need to take off your clothes in words, and blurt out, vomit out, belch out a semi -chewed, undigested thought?

Work and think and create a passwords as if it's poetry. What you choose ought to be based on what you've learned, and what's deep, deep in your mind.

I'm saying dig into your childhood. "One, two, button my shoe" -- "Jack be Nimble" -- or maybe "Row, row, row your boat." Or latch onto the present -- what's in your bank account, or a relative's name, an enemy, a song -- some real thing from which you extract letters. Then, intersperse the letters with numbers or symbols. Your password won't be forgotten..

Signing in will be a moment, a couple of seconds of reverence -- a reference to something that is important to YOU.

Example:
"Mary had a little lamb, it's fleece was white as snow." M&hA(lLiF)wWaS

I love John Cullum

i&l%J@C

We are spending more and more time, trying to find ways to be secure on the Internet. Why not turn that process into a poem?

I LOVE EDISON

Thomas Alva died October 18. 1931 so I'm mourning him, saluting him right now.

I wrote about Edison, with passion, in my book.."Somebody, Woman of the Century." My heroine, Cordelia, after a spat with the man she loved, was hoping to hear from him. He socialized with Edison.

From chapter 32:
"Two days became four days, without hearing from Jackson. Was it already a week? Had she missed his phone call at the office? The date, what day of the week it was, was attached to names in the news, events in the lives of others. The 17th of October, Scarface Capone was sentenced to eleven years in the penitentiary. The next day, eighty-four-year-old Thomas Alva Edison died at Glenmont, his home in West Orange, New Jersey. Realizing it was a personal loss for Jackson, she couldn't help wondering if he'd be at the funeral. Newspapers and radios announced that all nonessential lights throughout the country were going to be extinguished for one minute during the evening of October 21st, as a tribute to Edison. Was it Jackson's idea? It could have been.

The date happened to be the 53rd anniversary of Edison's most famous invention — he was the father of incandescent light, and much more, so much more. The time for the blackout was 9:59 p.m. Cordelia was browsing through the celebrity files, thinking she might write a tribute to the inventor. Of course you couldn't ask the nation to play an Edison record, at 9:59 p.m., on their Edison phonographs. Or arrange a nationwide turn on of all radios. Most people wouldn't realize that their favorite radio announcer was using an Edison microphone, that stock market ticker tapes, flashlight batteries, camera film, the electric locomotive, composition brick, automobile electric starters, all that and more than a thousand other inventions which affected people every day of their lives were Edison babies. The day before he died, he'd been working on a process that turned goldenrod, the common backyard weed, into synthetic rubber. Would the world be riding on goldenrod tires someday?

"Checking the clock, Cordelia pictured Mina Miller Edison, Thomas Alva's wife for forty-five years. Would Mina mournfully watch her clock? like me, Cordelia thought, with my dream of being a woman who leaves a mark on the world?"

And me, Em the writer blogger -- I can't bring myself to throw out TIME Magazine, JULY 5 2010, and an article by Bryan Walsh, a deep digging researcher whom I also admire, from whom I gleaned:

"At Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Washington, children in the third-grade class bend over model cars designed to run on solar power. Working with a team of professional scientists from NASA and other federal agencies, they're putting finishing touches on the cars -- learning the way all trainee scientists learn -- through the sort of dogged trial and error that has always been the preface to American invention, a method Thomas Edison helped pioneer.

"Edison patented 1,093 mechanisms and processes, devices that would give birth to three enduring American industries: electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.-- it's as if he spent his career inventing the biggest things, things that for me define 20th Century."

I learned that after three months in school. Edison was taught by his mother at home, where he put together a chemistry lab. As a working teenager earning dimes as a railway newsboy, Edison spend $2 (nearly two days pay) so he could enroll in the Detroit Public Library. At 16, he was an itinerant telegraph operator for Western Union. In his early 20s he was creating his first inventions: forms of telegraph equipment. In Boston, he attended n public lectures at the new Boston Tech, which later, become the globally influential Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

in the 1870s, he created his own inventor community in Menlo Park, N.J. The laboratory and workshop -- his "invention factory" — Edison once boasted , was th eplace where he and his team could develop "a minor invention every 10 days and a big thing every six months or so."

That's a rate that would suit Steve Jobs. And kids today. And astounds me.

WHAT WE DO ALL DAY LONG (video)

The Cullums think their daily routine is normal, very standard, and average.

They feel that their daily routines aren't special, or very interesting.

It's just breakfast, lunch, dinner between work -- each in their own office. JC, between acting jobs, works on writing music for his "Jack Tales" and "Bible Ballads" musicals. Em, writing posts for Em's Talkery, is currently figuring out how to sell her novels that have just been published as e books on Amazon.com.

The fact is, they enjoy their daily routines, and think they're very very lucky.