Thanks to the ravaging savages at Google, I don't know when, if ever, I'll be able to figure out how to do another post

UPDATE: Well, after thrashing my way through a follow-up post-of-sorts, I decided to try inserting an image here, and it sort-of-worked -- more cumbersomely and stupidly and with less satisfactory results than the way it used to work, but still, there's unquestionably an image here. (I've also found the buried option to "Revert to legacy Blogger" -- for as long as it works.)

by Ken

It looks like no post this Sunday, and maybe no Sunday to follow, thanks to Google, which has imposed not just a new interface for Blogger/Blogspot, the blog host that has been owned (and degraded) for several years now by Google, a change I knew was coming and was dreading, but what seems, now that I've been forcibly plunged into it, to be a different way of doing absolutely everything I've previously learned how to do. I have no idea what will happen when I gather all my nerve and press "Publish" on whatever I wind up writing here.

My fallback might have been to just share some music, but ironically that's one of the things I now don't know whether I have any clue how to do, since the new interface has been dismissing my HTML code as "incorrect code" even though it's just like code that's been working perfectly well -- and still seems to read okay even in already-posted posts I've had occasion to tinker with using the dreaded new interface.

I'M NOT JUST BEING THEORETICAL ABOUT THE IRONY

I had, in fact, already happily time consumingly produced a set of six clips for possible use in an upcoming post to see if we could hear the kinship between the vocal writing of the roles of Florestan in Fidelio and Siegmund in Die Walküre. For three tenors whom we've heard as Florestan -- Jon Vickers, James King, and Plácido Domingo -- I'd gone ahead and prepared ready-to-publish (or so I thought) clips of Siegmund's Act I monologue ("Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater"), two performances by each tenor, which I was imagining we might listen to alongside the same singers' Florestan monologue. I don't know that it would prove anything, but I thought it might at least be fun to listen to. I'd want to provide readers with English texts, which I didn't expect to be an unsolvable blog-technical problem. We never got that far, though, as the code for the six performances of the monologue was described by the bloghost as "incorrect code." So much for that!

(A farther-fetched idea occurred to me. I could publish links to the Internet Archive pages where each of the six clips can be found and heard. However, this assumes I'll be able to get the New Blogger to accept my link codes. Heck, as I noted above, I still don't know when I ask it to "publish" a post of pretty much just-plain-text.)

My assumption every time the Google folks have made changes to Blogger -- none as radical as this makeover, but lots of pretty substantial changes -- is that they have been conceived and executed, for no particularly good reason, by people who have never used Blogger and never would have if not for the accident of their being in Google's employ with instruction to do, well, whatever the geniuses who unleashed them thought they should be changing for whatever-effing reason. So far the changes have almost without exception seemed to be disimprovements. The people who ordered the changes and the people who carried out the orders seem to think they're geniuses and saviors. Judging from the pain-drenched user pleas for help I'm finding online, I'm not the only one who would likelier call them vandals.

Maybe I'll eventually be able to figure this all out. Then again, maybe the idea chez Google is to get people like me the hell off their platform, which they may be this close to accomplishing. It's possible to that, at least as a stall, I can figure out how to access the old Blogger format, which the last I read was supposed to be available to users till August 24, which according to my calendar it isn't yet. 

If it turns out that I can post just-plain-text and not much else, there are a few things I've been wanting to talk about, and maybe not having actual music available will make it easier to get them said and then turn off the lights and get on with our lives.

POSTSCRIPT: Well, it appears I was able to publish this, and even go back in and make a couple of adjustments to the formatting -- trivial but helpful. If it comes to that, it's a really unexpected note to go out on.

LATER THAT NIGHT: For the next developments in this revolting development, click on.

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