by Bob Sparrow
Red Posey?
I haven’t traveled in several weeks, and there is not much of interest going on in my life currently, so my options for writing this week’s blog are significantly limited. But you belong to a loyal following, who have come to expect something interesting, entertaining or thought-provoking each week. That’s what you paid for when you signed up for our blog . . . oh, wait a minute, the blog is free! But you understandably still have some expectations.
Those of you who have been with us from the beginning (that’s the summer of 2011) know that we started out, not with a blog, but writing ‘tribute poems’ for people who would request something for a birthday, anniversary, or other special occasions. That was called ‘Red Posey’ – I forget why. It was fairly short-lived. We then
started a blog, something that, prior to saying “Let’s write a blog”. we’d never heard the term, but plunged in, writing a four-stanza poem, twice a week, following the format of the popular national newspaper of the day, USA Today, which had four sections, world news, business, sports, and entertainment. This iteration of the blog was called, Morning News in Verse, with a by-line that read, All the News that Fit to Rhyme. If we were still doing that today, it would look something like this:
We read of the soldier who escaped to Korea
And all of this year’s political diarrhea
Of flooding and fires and all that looks grim
Of airlines that cancel their flights on a whim
We hope that our stocks continues to rise
And that interest rates stop reaching those highs
We see that AI is improving with haste
As we’re praying to Google that we won’t be replaced
The Open was won by B. Harman with ease
Bringing the rest of the field to their knees
Sooner, no, probably later, baseball will end
Which means college football season begins!!!
The writers are striking the actors are too
With no movies or TV, just what will we do?
You could stop browsing your phone to find a new friend
Try face-to-face meetings and re-start an old trend
After reading that, it becomes fairly obvious why that format only lasted about six months and why we were ready to move on from poetry to prose – my Iambic has clearly left my pentameter!. We moved on to the current format in March 2012.
We’ve seriously considered taking the blog off of Facebook, as we don’t agree with some of the information gathering algorithm they use (If you don’t see our blog next week on Facebook, you’ll know that they took us down after reading this!). So, even though we’re not big fans of Facebook, it is popular with our peers (the ‘older’ age groups), and thus it is where most of our readers read our blog, so big tech wins again.
If you too are not that happy with Facebook, you can ‘subscribe’ to this blog by pressing the ‘Subscribe’ button in the right-hand column of this blog and have it go directly to your ‘Spam’ folder in your email.
While Suzanne was enjoying the cooler environs of Nipomo and I was trying to sneak into Russia, this past August marked a small blog milestone – our 4-year anniversary. Those of you who have been with us for the entire ride may remember that our blog started in August 2011 – we certainly don’t remember back that far! Initially it was a way to use social media to drive visitors to our ill-fated tribute poem writing business, Red Posey. The blog was then entitled Morning News in Verse and we would follow a USA Today newspaper format by writing four rhyming stanzas about topical news – one stanza each about Headlines, Business, Sports and Entertainment. Suzanne and I would alternate publishing a poem EVERYDAY! That everyday thing lasted for about two months, when we realized that it was occupying way too much of our life – like all of it; so we cut back to twice a week. Every once in a while we would deviate from the poetic format, as deviates are wont to do, and write prose about various subjects. An example of this occurred in September of 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, when Suzanne wrote a moving piece entitled, Small Moments – A 9/11 Tribute, 
