Blogging A – Z Challenge 2021: X‽

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22363 – 827:

Here’s the haps:

I couldn’t think of anything for the letter “X.” Well, okay, there is the old standby that I learned when I learned the alphabet, “X is for xylophone.” But that seemed a bit trite and overdone, although I did consider it. I considered it enough to start wondering what sort of cool things I could find about xylophones. I did learn that it is in the percussion family and the name is from the Greek words ξύλον—xylon, “wood” + φωνή—phōnē, “sound, voice”, literally meaning “sound of wood”. I had never really thought about it because the only type I ever knew about was the toddler toy that gets pulled along by a string that has the mallet on the other end so it can’t get lost, much to the dismay and chagrin of parents who can’t understand why Grandpa would give a child a toy like that.

I was impressed by this person playing “Flight Of The Bumblebee” on one:

But that wasn’t what I was looking for. I then thought about getting the dictionary out and choosing a random word that started with “X” but that didn’t feel right. Not this time.

Of course, there are always the eXtreme copouts, words that start with an “X” sound but really start with an “E.” At first, I was ECStatic and thought about how eXciting it was. but, nah, I didn’t really want to do that. The thought did strike me to say “X is for my eXcellent audience” but you guys are such a high-class, award-winning group of people that I wouldn’t want to insult you with such a lame compliment.

Then I thought about going back to the last time I did the Blogging A-Z challenge in 2015 and realized that I never made it past “U” that time so I couldn’t go back and plagiarize myself.

So I just sort of gave up on the letter “X” and decided not to do a post at all and the way I could eXpress myself best about my feelings on the subject was to use one of my favorite punctuation marks of all time, the Interrobang, which I have written about here. So, sorry, no “X” post nor post formerly known as “X.”

37 Comments

  1. What a wonderful word xylophone is and such a magnificent instrument played by a little drum. LOL. Wish I can watch the performance in person. And it is so true that ecstasy can be spelled like xtasy. LOL. Never thought about this before, but it is so intriguing.

  2. You reminded me of my xylophone. I haven’t thought of it for decades. Each metal “note” had a picture of a flower. It was quite a nice toy. Thanks for the memory. 😊

            • Me too. My view has long been that anything other than the original standard (underlined, blue text for unfollowed links, purple for followed ones), without a good reason for it, is a mistake.

              You’d probably be able to selectively edit each link to adjust how they appear in your posts — but that would be a lot of hard work. And you certainly don’t want to be messing about trying to adjust comments, life is much too short. You might be able to modify your theme to make links more visible (but if you want that set as default, you’d have to ask WordPress.com Support for assistance, and I think they’d probably say, “Sure! Just upgrade to a ‘Premium Plan’!” /eyeroll)

              The theme on ‘Wibble’ (‘Twenty Ten’) has the old style links by default everywhere (including in comments); I don’t have to do any jiggery-pokery. Yet another example of how ‘upgrades’ often aren’t as good as they’re billed. WordPress.com keeps trying to persuade me to change to a different theme “because Twenty Ten is ‘retired’,” but I’m very reluctant. It works; it ain’t broke; why fix it?

              • I agree. Well, my situation may be more complicated because I use wordpress.org as I’m self-hosted. In some ways I’m kind of on my own. I may putz around until I break something, however, because it does annoy me.

                • WordPress,org, huh? OK, you’re not on your own; there’s a community here 🙂 Maybe I can help after all. To begin with, what’s the name of the theme you’re using?

                    • Gute‘, huh? I went there, used the ‘live chat’ widget, asked the question… and after twenty minutes — no response, Nothing. Not even a ‘Hi!’ 🙁 — and yet that system claims it’s ‘online’. Hm. OK, Remind me never to switch to WordPress.org from WordPress.com, because I always get immediate responses from the .com live chat support.

                      I did a search for ‘how to customise link styles in the WordPress gute theme‘, and ended up here, which suggested:

                      Go to Appearance > Customize.
                      Look for any tab that says “colors”.
                      Find below a section called “Content Links”

                      Does any of that help?

                    • Thanks for looking that up, I appreciate it. It depends on the theme whether you can customize it that way or not. I may try their addition css method though.

                    • According to that ‘product page’ about ‘Gute’ (which I linked, but those links don’t show up, you have to mouseover on them to see them), ‘Gute’ has ‘extensive Theme Options’ and is ‘easy to customize’. If that’s the case, it ought to be possible to (easily) set the links to something more useful than ‘no clue that there’s a link here whatsoever’. If you’re having trouble, I suggest trying to sue them for false advertising!

                    • WordPress.org says§ (in incredibly poor English!):

                      gute is a full-width, fully responsive and highly customizable gutenberg ready free WordPress Theme

                      As it’s described as such, I would have thought that basic link colour configuration should be easy to apply.

                      Or they’re lying….

                      § I’ve tried adding ‘color’ [sic] to the link text this time, using inline CSS… my previous attempts, using the simple underline element (‘<u>’), failed.

                    • Well, the css change seems to have helped. It’s change the look of links when I look at the page and you links showed up blue.

            • Next time maybe Xavier? The missionary, the school sports teams and the bandleader Xavier Cugat are all ripe for riffing. Maybe I need to try this challenge.

              Fun fact – Desi Arnaz got his start singing and playing drums while touring with Cugat’s highly successful Latin band.

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