rainystorm

What a big rainstorm you have, Grandmother!
The better to grow tall weeds that will blow up in next summer's wildfires, my dear.

That was what I was thinking as I drove my slow way home last night from the staff meeting of my classical-music journalism outfit. The intense rain had driven off some of the intended attendees - one, I know, had to stay home to deal with a flood in his house - and, in the end, there were only six of us writers there to meet with the journal's three in-house staff members. There should have been twice as many.

There was definitely enough food for that many. Since we don't have a large enough office space for a meeting, we'd brought in deli food and hired a by-the-hour meeting room in an old but upgraded building in the middle of the City's Soulless Tech Company district. (Yes, that is a thing.)

As the copy editor poured me a glass of what must have been Cabernet, as he referred to it as "Cab" (which sounded like "Cav", leading me to expect that the other wine would be "Pag") and I settled in with a plate of blackberries and kiwi, the most appetizing foods on offer, our manager briefed us on funding and other big-picture structural issues that we writers can't see from way down here, and then we moved into an open discussion of how to make the website more attractive, easy to use, and popular.

This consisted largely of turning to the two writers in their 20s - the rest of us there were rather older than that - and asking them What Young People Want. That this irresistibly reminded me of the time that Roland Burton Hedley put the same question to Zonker Harris is probably merely a sign of how old and cynical I am.

Apparently one of the things that Young People Like are video clips that aren't embedded in the web page, but which float around the screen getting in the way of whatever it is you want to look at. What those make me want is to find the little red X button to click on and make them go away.

We also had a prelude discussion of opera, particularly the plots (which is a question of drama, not music), which moved me to say, "I have a button that reads 'Never Judge a Book By Its Movie.' Never judge a book by its opera, either."