Sunday, December 23, 2007

Here comes the sun

In case you missed it: The winter solstice happened yesterday, or the day before, depending on where you live. From this point forward, the darkness fails and light prevails. Every day gets a little longer than the one before. And about freakin' time, too.

A lot of the best stuff we associate with Christmas is, of course, usurped from older, solstice traditions -- candles and evergreens, birth and hope. There's a really nice site that explores the origins of the winter holidays, if you're curious. It's called Candlegrove. It's a fun place to poke around.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Vicki

I am writing this to inform you that you are supporting a fraudulent organization whose main target is young aspiring writers. For details please go to http://www.eliteskills.com/writing_scams/ . You are linking them in http://mymaracas.blogspot.com/ . Because of you, there are writers that may get a letter saying they were 'winners' in a 'writing competition' that is fake and only want money for the publication. If you were aware of this then you're just as evil as they are. It is not a matter of convenience of updating links, there are writers getting scammed. If you are linking them you are improving their pagerank.

If you are linking them to say they are a scam, you are still supporting them. A link from your site to theirs is like a vote from your site to theirs. When you link another site a search engine increments the other site's pagerank. If you are linking them just to have a gallery of writing you've made then try eliteskills.com lit.org literaryescape.com deviantart.com. Please remove this link. If you have any questions contact me.

Regards,

Carlos

MyMaracas said...

Carlos,

I was surprised to find a comment on a six-month-old post, and a completely unrelated and hostile one at that. My email address is in my profile, and I would appreciate it if you would communicate with me that way.

As your contact link does not go to any email I can find, I can only respond here.

It took me a while to figure out which link you are referring to. That would have been helpful information. Assuming it was the poetry.com link, I did some research on it and agree that it is probably not a great choice for a linking list. Some readers may not see it for what it is -- a vanity press site -- so I will remove the link. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

However, you might have given me the benefit of the doubt, and refrained from calling me "as evil as they are" without first hearing my reply.

Vicki

Anonymous said...

Just stumbled on your site via Google... likely the same way the other person did. (Was going to warn you about the scam, but it looks like you already caught it!) I'm pretty sure Carlos's message was a form letter of sorts from http://www.eliteskills.com/writing_scams/retaliation.php
They're on a crusade to stop people from linking that site, but their methods do seem a bit harsh. ^_^;
Anyway, nice blog!

~Yume