25th Nov 2008
Dancing In The Country
The countryside beckons. Worn out roads need their picture taken. They aim to put on asphalt makeup and cover their bots dots for a “Roadway Pinup Monthly” centerfold (daring Cornwall cliffs shed retaining walls, show you all!). I aim to see a few roads.
I love to travel, and so have been mulling over dastardly plans on how to do that and get paid. Snicker not, kind reader, for I am armed with a skill or two! I shall Dance In The Country! Techstyle!
Perched in the midst of Getaway Central, Somewhere in Europe. Perhaps I am in Tuscany. Go with it, y’all… Some people cant make it that far, ya know. They have boring jobs and soccer brats and mortgages and neighbors with habits that scare them slightly and one too many frikken meetings to go to this week, and, yep, looks like the next one after that. Their life is living them.
However, some people love to live vicariously…. We’re not just talking about the Peeping Toms and Tanyas…
And therein lies the country wheat germ of a hint of an idea. Somewhere in this post I will spell it out, but I am going to my damnedest not to crystalize it in one sentence. This is a post about the country, where paths meander.
Back to Tom and Tanya and their Peepers…
Would they watch an irreverent slidecast that shows the beauty of Dancing In The Country? Which country? Which part of the country? Well, send me money and I’ll alter my travel plans! I sense that there is an opportunity to cater to the wannabe traveler. Ok, well a subset of them. I aim to displease those who would look down their nose at anything less than a high minded exhaustive treatise done by thee Almighty BBC. Think of David Letterman and Monty Python pulling into town in a noisy oil smoking 1969 VW Bug with a grinding clutch and rusted shirt hanger antenna. Whoa there, move it, we have weak brakes! Park, grab camera, some cafe coin for coffee, cheerful attitude, and a hankering to satisfy the insatiable desire of Jonathan Livingston Armchair Traveler Seagull.
I love to write and photo and video. I also enjoy talking to the locals and getting the sense of things. As it turns out, I’ve been doing this sort of thing in Second Life for the last 2 1/2 years. Yeah, and the experience surely does spill over to the Real World. Something about SL has made it much more comfy to strike up conversations with strangers. Amazingly, most of them do not recoil in horror when I do this. Could be all of the free Lindens I give em.
So the threads are .. travel, take in the gist, write and photo it, and …
Omg.. is he going to talk about yet another fucking Social Networking Website? Bucky! How could you? It’s almost 2009 you big smelly gorilla!
Now hang on there pardner. We have the advantage of history. We know what doesn’t work (like Sarah Palin applying for Mensa), and we know the world economy is on brink of collapse. What a great time of opportunity! Nobody can afford to travel, so we’ll do it for them! We’ll mash it up on a web site with commentary, supplement with local feeds, point to Amazon Associates items that actually talk about the locale in question, and laugh all the way to the credit union.
So that is the thought .. how to mash up skills and local feeds, and turn the situation of traveling into a self sustaining gig. It would be a side project.. a weekend here and there to start. The two keys would be the power of the mashup info (content from elsewhere), and the irreverent look at things (local discontent :)
And that is the Dance in the Country. Cha cha cha.
