Recently a couple of readers pointed out to me by email that they have been unable to leave comments on this site as per usual, apparently it has been mysteriously asking for some sort of password and/or log-in, which seems both heavy-handed and sinister. I’m grateful to them for letting me know, I had no idea this was going on – as you may have gathered, I’m at a sub-Luddite level of techno-peasantry. Or to put it more bluntly, I just write this shit, I haven’t the faintest idea about how to actually administer or maintain the nuts and bolts of the site itself. Not that I would ever compare myself to Willie Mays in any way, shape or form – even I’m not that crazy – but, as the Say Hey Kid once said when asked to compare several of his more mammoth home runs, “I don’t compares ’em, I just hits ’em”. Well said, Willie.

I have no idea how or why this happened, or when for that matter; probably sometime in April. It certainly wasn’t anything I did, or would want to, even if I knew how. It could have just been one of those cryptic “gremlins” that randomly play havoc with our techno-lives, or maybe it was the result of the automatic Word Press upgrades that happen periodically.

I sincerely hope no one was offended or jumped to the conclusion I’d suddenly developed an exclusive, snooty attitude, or had simply tired of the comments, nothing could be further from the truth. I love getting comments, they’re really the best perk of writing a blog – along with the stratospheric salary of course, ha-ha. Seriously though, the comments are not only encouraging, but often contain new and interesting information, sometimes little nuggets and other times big mounds of stuff I’d previously missed or overlooked. They also put me in touch with all kinds of people, far and wide – some whom I already know, some who emerge out of my past to get caught-up, others complete strangers, some of them quite illustrious and others just plain folks – regardless, it’s always been really satisfying and I’ve learned a lot from the comments and the correspondence they sometimes lead to. So much so in fact, that I’ve been meaning to write a blog about this alone, maybe called “Feedback” or something, about some of the more surprising people I’ve heard from and the amazing things I’ve learned from their comments, the things they point out and what they make me want to investigate. It’s funny, many people think the purpose of a blog like this is to inform and/or entertain its readers – and I guess that’s mostly true – but quite often it goes the other way too.

I had noticed the lack of comments in recent weeks and mostly chocked it up to the fact that I haven’t exactly been burning up the airwaves with new posts lately – I can hardly expect comments without actually writing anything. Although, sometimes people leave comments on a post they’ve just seen, but that may have been written months ago, you never know. The other more sinister possibility that crossed my feverishly self-critical mind was that no comments were being left because my stuff was suddenly boring people to death, which is (yawn) entirely feasible, I have to admit.

At any rate, the problem has been fixed, thanks in large part to my tech-assistant and all-around muse – a.k.a. my long-suffering wife Anna – who, as muses go, is quite a-muse-ing. We went into the settings module – normally no-enter territory for me – and discovered some boxes restricting comments had been activated somehow. We deactivated them, then ran a test by leaving a comment and it worked.

So, people can again leave comments at will and I hope they do, I’ve missed them. I promise to do my part and meet everybody halfway by actually writing some new stuff soon. As I explained in my last post, the long gap was partly caused by getting a little too mellowed out on the left coast, followed by a run of being overly busy, and possibly a small case of writer’s block, or in my case, writer’s blecchh. Things – and ideas for writing – have been happening too fast for me to keep up, especially with my execrable keyboarding skills – I’m unbelievably slow, yet also really sloppy and inaccurate – it’s the bad-typing trifecta. As promised, more soon from The Big Apple.

© 2015, Steve Wallace. All rights reserved.