Technology and social media have made possible an entirely new kind of celebrity. Along with movie stars, and sports stars, and rappers, and singers, we’ve now got people who apparently are famous, at least among a segment of the population, for their YouTube videos or some other kind of social media presence.
I’ve come to realize that there is an entirely unknown field of “personalities” when I’ve seen them as the subject of articles on the msn.com website, or the news stories that now pop up when I access the Google website on my phone. One recent example was an article about the untimely death of somebody I’d never even heard of — a woman named Emily Hartridge, who was described as a popular YouTube personality for her video posts about herself and relationships. And given the size of the internet and the different channels for social media communication, for every Emily Hartridge there are probably hundreds or thousands of other people who have become famous to their specific cadre of followers.
It’s an example of the how modern communications technology is more democratic and a lot more diverse. You don’t necessarily need to be found by an agent or producer or record company executive to become famous these days. Anyone who has a cellphone and a computer and something to say or something to show can take a shot at posting self-made videos and hope to carve out a niche for themselves and find an audience. These days, people can become self-made celebrities.
It’s a step forward in some ways, but of course there are hazards, too. How many videos out there espouse political views that contribute to the splintering of society? How would the Hitlers of the past have used social media to disseminate their hateful ideologies? And how many people, in their lust for self-made celebrityhood and “likes,” are tempted to film themselves doing dangerous things in hopes of attracting more followers and becoming one of those new personalities? Just this week, a Chinese “vlogger” died while livestreaming himself drinking and eating poisonous geckos, centipedes, and mealworms in hopes of attracting new followers. It’s hard to believe that any rational person could be so desperate and so reckless — but a personal tool as powerful as the internet and social media is bound to bring out the crazies, too.
So, what’s the best way to emphasize the written word? The basic options, currently, are using underlines, italics, or boldface. Some people then use a combination of the three to give even more emphasis. (Back when I first started working, in the days long before social media and texting, some people used all caps to provide emphasis. Now the all-caps look is generally perceived by the reader as screaming, and there’s very little being written about that needs that much emphasis. What you want is for the reader’s internal voice to “think” the word being emphasized just a bit louder than the rest of the text, and not have them mentally screaming like a character in a bad teen horror movie.)
Well, apparently because . . . it’s Facebook and it can do whatever the hell it wants. 
When I was going to college, lack of happiness and “deprioritizing” personal happiness and fulfillment was not a problem. If anything, Ohio State students of the ’70s tended to overprioritize their dedicated, incessant, deep-seated, Frodo Baggins-like quest for happiness. The notion that fresh-faced students, still possessing the bloom of youth and newly freed from the constant supervision and irksome rules of Mom and Dad, need to take a college class to learn how to be happier would have been totally alien to the undergrads of my era. And it’s really kind of depressing to think that, in any era, college students would need to sit in a lecture hall to get tips on how to be happier. College must have become a grim, hellish place indeed!
Sometimes, though, the words aren’t exactly easy to fit into everyday conversation. On Monday, for example, the word was “eclogue.” What’s an eclogue (pronounced ek-log), you ask? Why, it’s a poem in which shepherds converse, of course. The sentence the calendar offers to illustrate its meaning is: “The poet’s new volume offers modern translations of Virgil’s eclogues.” Even at an erudite workplace like mine, it’s hard to imagine a discussion where you could smoothly use “eclogue.”
When I saw we hit 400,000 views, I searched Google for photos representing 400,000. There are a lot of pictures of odometers hitting 400,000, and when I thought about it I realized that our family blog is a lot like an old, dependable car. Vehicles that make it to 400,000 miles aren’t the flashy, expensive cars that men buy when they’re experiencing mid-life crises. No, vehicles that make it to 400,000 miles are the basic, everyday sources of family or work transportation that have suffered some battle scars during their years of service. They are the battered pick-up truck, or the dented station wagon with the scratch on the side, or the Honda Accord that still has a faint but familiar sour smell after one of your kids spilled milk in the back seat years ago on a hot summer day and didn’t tell you until you got back into the car and the spoiled smell made you want to gag, but you really liked the reliability of the car so much that you scrubbed the back seat and aired it out and used air freshener and took it to the car wash for a shampoo and couldn’t quite completely eliminate the smell, but decided you were willing to live with it.