Two Comments

I got a bit inundated with comments to the previous post (275 so far*, including the Featured ones) and a lot of them are not all that quick for me to parse because they mention more than two cameras. But enough with my griping already!

Anyway, as I sometimes do, I fell down on the job and got behind on the comments to a few of the posts prior to that. Everything's posted now, but here's the problem—visitors don't look at older posts. After a post has been up for 3–5 days, it's only getting a small fraction of the views it got when it was fresh. And people who've already read it often don't go back later to read it again. What this means is that if a great comment comes in six days after the post is published, there's little point in adding to the post as a Featured Comment because no one will see it.

Then when I'm responsible for burying comments in this way, I feel ashamed. Bad Mike!

Long story short, here are two comments I thought you'd like to see. I should have added them as Featured Comments to the respective posts, but too late now.

The first is from Chap Achen, who responded to the post "Electric Trains and the Electric Flash Lamp" with a picture. I wrote that "the center of the train-loving generation in America is males who were 10 in 1950, when electric trains were the number-one Christmas wish for boys."

Chap replied, "I am one of the boys you talked about (76 years old) and I looked forward to every Christmas morning when new items were added to the layout. I still have boxes of train items and accessories that my wife asks me to dispense with but alas not to be. Here is a photograph of my Grandfather and me on Christmas morning 1948."

This is the perfect illustration for my little aside about the toy train generation (which I learned about when I worked for Kalmbach Publishing), right? But it doesn't do much good to add new items to yesterday's newspaper. I didn't want Chap's lovely old family picture of himself and his grandfather to get lost. (As an aside, don't forget to take and print pictures like this. It might sound superficial to say, but the documentation of our lives and the lives of those we love is one of the great joys of photography. I can imagine what the above picture means to Chap now.)

Tributes
The other comment I neglected to post soon enough came from our friend Ken Tanaka in response to the post "Random Excellence: John and Yoko by Lilo Raymond." Ken is a patron of the arts (although he never blows his own horn in that respect), has been a loyal reader of TOP for many years, has written posts for us, recently self-published a book of his fine city scenes that I've perused and enjoyed several times now, and has been the featured artist in a TOP Print Offer (the print hangs at the top of my stairs). He was responding to Marcelo Guarini's picture in Marcelo's own Featured Comment. Here's the picture again, his homage to John Lennon:

Marcelo Guarini, We Miss You John

"Lilo Raymond's apparently casual moment image of John and Yoko is really lovely," Ken writes. "But Marcelo Guarini's 'We Miss You John' is magnificently clever and potentially iconic. Wow. Love it. (Can I buy a print?)

"Since most of your readers are fellow boomers who have their own Beatles/Lennon stories I'll keep mine short. I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia to teach a three-day class on December 8, 1980. The weather was raw and I really didn't want to be there. I was looking forward to the coming weekend when my first wife and I were buying our first good stereo system. As I was slobbering over the gear lit in my hotel room that evening, the news bulletin struck me like a bolt of lightning. I was distraught. I was angry. I still am. Fast-forward to the evening of December 8, 2009. I was in New York on museum business and was attending a cocktail party at an apartment across the street from Central Park. I was admiring our host's art collection when I glanced out the window and noticed a candlelight gathering across the street in the park. Another bolt of lightning struck as I realized I was seeing a Lennon memorial in Strawberry Field. I couldn't help tearing-up for a moment. I wanted to join them...but couldn't. I am not really a big pop-music fan. But the Beatles were the most important musical group of my life. And they still are.

"Thanks for posting the photos."

Mike
(Thanks to Chap and Ken and all our commenters)

*The record for the most comments for one post is 701.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Comments

[Richard Parkin]

but here's the problem—visitors don't look at older posts. After a post has been up for 3–5 days, it's only getting a small fraction of the views it got when it was fresh.
I’ve commented about that before. You don’t make it easy. Firstly it must be trivial to put a searchable marker after each batch of fresh comments are added (though I accept that some comments seem to be added later out of posted order and featured comments are sometimes (not always?) removed from the ‘stream’.
Also we do not know when comments are added/updated. I think there must be some mechanism to indicate this so it either shows up on the blog, you tweet it (probably the best way), or ‘renovate’ the notifications sent by IFTT or RSS. I have trawled through the Typepad instructions (most of which are Greek to me) but there doesn’t seem to be any way the reader can discover these things :(.

[Richard Parkin]

Furthermore :) ... among the many jobs you do at TOP are Writer and Editor. Maybe you should relax on the Editor one a little and allow some to post comments without moderation — maybe you can have a ‘whitelist’ and/or and make people ‘sign in’?

[Speed]

You know ... you've just invented the solution to your "buried comments" problem. A periodic post of "buried comments." Dig them up, so to speak.

[Peter Wright]

"*The record for the most comments for one post is 701."

But what was the post?? Something to do with pool tables I expect.

[Well, naturally. And not even all complaints! --Mike]

[MikeR]

What about a Monday morning wrap-up of the prior week, "Belated Featured and Noteworthy Comments?"

A good friend from high school, (he and I are both 78), has had a train set since forever. Once we're through this pandemic time, I plan to invite myself to his house to see what the decades of his pursuit have wrought.

[Rob Campbell]

Yes, the fact that we tend, in this digital age, to be afflicted with three-minute minds makes older threads well-nigh invisible to us. We need a little black dot beside each thread that receives a fresh comment for at least a month after initiation.

I also need a little black warnining dot to spring to mind before I post: in the recent thread about most-used cameras I mentioned having an unused Nikon F: I should have written Nikon F3. The F went decades ago. And so we slowly slip away...

;-)