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Honk if you read the Journal
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Honk if you read the Journal
  Personal communication these days can be really dynamic, as opposed to what it was like when I was in high school. If you've got a fairly basic, relatively new computer with a web cam, you can talk face-to-face with almost anyone anywhere in the world. In the late 1960s, when I was in high school, this was still the stuff that science fiction was made of.  And e-mail can be sent or read from a variety of mobile electronic devices, things that in the past might have better been described as phones. Despite the ease with which e-mail can be received, I've noticed some incredibly rude folks seem to think there's no need to reply to e-mails. Just because they may not be important to the person who receives them, that doesn't mean the messages aren't important to the sender. But now I find myself facing a communication problem and I think I'll have to resort to something really retro. With the hundreds of addresses I have on my e-mail address list, which I use for sending out the update for The Weekly Journal, I don't get a lot of personal e-mail, which is good and bad. I do get a lot of business-related messages, but they don't have the same feeling.  As a part of recent efforts to promote the Journal, Zeigler's Screen Printing installed a vinyl sign across two doors on each side of the Journalmobile, a late model Taurus. It says simply Go "Green" with www.weeklyjournal.net. The vinyl lettering is really cool. It looks like it has been painted, but it can be removed with a hair dryer.  While this method of promotion is not exactly new, it's hardly as retro as I plan on going. When I was in high school it was common practice among teenagers in my age group to signal others they might come across while in their cars with a series of honks from the car's horn, designed to let the others know which high school they attended. It roughly corresponded to a phrase, which in my case was "Rangers, Rangers, we are the Rangers." The pacing on the car's horn became one two, one two, one two, one two three. That simple signal became either a friendly greeting to a fellow classmate, or a call to battle if they were from another high school.  Of course only the most daring of us would cruise through another high school's turf blaring our allegiance, unless it was along one of the several popular "strips." And it did result in more than one skirmish each Friday night, though they weren't as serious as they might be today, since no one was armed. So my big idea to get feedback for The Journal is to ask everyone who has read this column to give me a simple two-honk signal, which will stand for "Go Green" when you see me driving around town. I suspect it might be a few days before I stop flinching, especially if you're in the lane next to me. I'll try to recover as soon as possible and wave to you in response. After all, we don't want to make too much of a disturbance.  We could never get away with this if we were in Houston. A few honks heard by the wrong driver there is all it takes to draw gunfire, which is not exactly the kind of critique I was looking for. So let's try not to feel too foolish and give it a try for a week or two. Be bold. Stand up (or rather sit down in your car) and be counted as a Journal fan.   |
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