'Sleeper Posts'

I appreciate that several of you saw fit to send me comments and emails expressing personal feelings about yesterday's post... ranging from disinterest to disgust.  :-)

That's fine... really!

I know that I can't make everyone laugh or cry with every journal entry I post here... in fact I don't even try.

But if you take a look at the archives here at treppenwitz, you'll see that the posts that regularly appear here can probably be herded into the following basic categories:

Funny... Something struck me as funny and I wanted to share.  More often than not I find out that what I consider to be funny is not universally perceived as such. 

Sad... This might be my thoughts on a personal disappointment, a national tragedy... or anything in between.

Weird... Anything worth mentioning that falls between 'funny' and 'sad' (sometimes with elements of both).

Doh!... This is a genre of posts that describe me doing, saying, or experiencing anything painful, embarrassing or humiliating due to my own unique ability to make a fool of myself.  This type of post is a favorite of many treppenwitz readers... as well as my children (hmmm... I wonder if there could be a connection?).

Family... Stuff going on with my immediate and extended family (can overlap with most of the other categories).

Israeliness... Stuff I experience / learn as I become acclimated to life in this wonderful, frustrating, beautiful, exasperating country.

Political Rants... These tirades are usually followed within 24-48 hours by an apology and/or partial retraction.  I've discovered that discussing politics in so public a forum is very good for one's humility (if it doesn't kill you first).

Sometimes it is important to remind everyone that when I sit down to write something here on treppenwitz, I have a broad range of personal agendas to address... and sometimes the subject matter doesn't fit perfectly into one of the categories above.  That's where this last category comes in:

Sleepers... These are difficult to describe.  Sleeper posts are usually written around a kernel of information that I found to be both useful and timeless.  I write the occasional sleeper post  knowing that it will be a big snooze for most of my regular readers.  My goal is not to bore you, but rather to get some useful tidbit of information out onto the Web so that people doing searches for specific information will have access to it.  Think about it... how many times have you done a web search for some obscure or arcane bit of information and found it, simply because someone took the time to post it on their site?

Yesterday's post was a pretty good example of a sleeper post... but the best example so far would be a journal entry I wrote a long time ago called 'Itching to tell someone'.   You can go read it if you have nothing better to do... but simply put, the 'Itching to tell someone' post was the result of a personal epiphany I experienced over a persistent itch that I'd had in the same spot on my back for most of my adult life.  This itch had been a constant nuisance and had stumped several very competent medical professionals. 

I knew it had to be a fairly common condition because nearly every vacation spot and resort seemed to sell back-scratchers in their gift shops.  Why would back-scratchers be so ubiquitous unless many, many people were also walking around with a chronic itch like mine?! 

I had done web searches for years looking for some hint at what this problem might be called, and what others were doing about it (besides buying Mickey Mouse and Goofy back-scratchers), and came up with bupkes.

It wasn't until I asked a fellow musician to scratch my back on the bandstand that he asked if I also suffered from Notalgia paraesthetica.  Apparently his doctor had been able to put a name to the problem... and it was only the through the coincidence of having asked a fellow sufferer for a back scratch that I found out about it!

Even after I knew the name of the problem I found precious little on the web about it (you can see that I had to resort to the New Zealand Dermatological Society web site to find a working definition of it!), so I decided to write a post in order to get some helpful information out onto the 'Net.

Since publishing that 'Sleeper Post', I have received thousands of hits from search engines with keyword strings like 'itchy shoulder blade', 'back itch', and 'persistent itchy back'.  I have also received dozens of emails from grateful people who have expressed profound relief, if not from their symptoms, then at least at finally knowing a bit about the cause of their problem.

After all this self-congratulatory carrying-on, I will add a caveat stating that one needs to be very careful about publishing 'Sleeper Posts'. 

If you post medical advice, you run the risk of misleading someone or (G-d forbid) giving someone with a life-threatening condition the mistaken idea that they have something fairly benign.  The same can be said about posting legal advice or even blogging about new and interesting uses for household products like flea & tick treatments.

I encourage any of you who keep a blog or journal to also consider creating an online record of interesting/useful information you acquire during the course of your lives. 

However, if you do decide to post a helpful marker along the Infobahn... please be aware that the Internet - like love and taxes - is forever!  Search engines will inevitably lead people to your doorstep who have far less common sense than web-surfing skills, so try to anticipate all the ways your words can be misinterpreted or taken out of context. 

What I'm really trying to say is that from time to time you may see a post here that seems particularly out of place among my typical fare. 

Now you'll know why.