I feel largely gratified by the comforting idea that I have more or less sever regular visitors, who are so kind to come over to give  a look at this erratic journal.

I'm aware that it's a ridiculous percentage on the web, where in every social network one can collect a huge number of presumed "friends" in   few days.

But I'm happy like that.  I like considering this space  a slightly secluded room, with the door only half-open. There is not any street sign to attract attention.

I won't find many "virtual friends" but I'm happy with my seven readers, even though I know very little about them.

I know I should say something about this old year and express some wishes for the new one and all the usual panoply of common places. I should, shouldn't I? But I won't.

I don't mean to be rude, only because I'm not conventional. Actually I cannot stand any form of rudeness and I'm deeply persuaded that good manners and politeness would be a great help to make human relationships better and, as a consequence, to make also this world a better place.

Simply old-fashioned good manners. It's not too difficult after all.  One should try to speak in a moderate tone of voice, be able to understand others, be polite, and avoid all trivial and vulgar habits.

Good manners, mutual respect, a little of elegance in little gestures, which doesn't mean being necessarily a snob.

More time to be what we are and less time to pretend to appear different. Showing off is never elegant, it's gloomy.

But I'm speaking only for myself, an old gentle contrarian, without claiming to be necessarily right.   

Call me mannered, if I love good manners, maybe you are right. But I refuse to drink my coffee in a plastic cup.

If my more or less regular seven readers, just to have a break in their Christmas celebrations (I won't get to the heart of this matter, now I don't see the need of that) will have the fancy to stop by these virtual pages, maybe they will  be  pleasantly intrigued by  an historical curiosity.

In a way it's suitable for this time of the year, even though I decided to avoid carefully all dissertations about the presumed lost spirit of Christmas and the fact that Santa, how he's iconically shown, is a relatively recent invention of Coca Cola Company.

We'll speak about music and in particular a very world famous song, which you can hear clicking here below.

It's " Auld Lang Syne". Probably many know that the lyrics are actually a poem by Robbie Burns, whom is called 'The Bard' in his Scotland. I think (but my so well educated seven readers, all of English mother tongue, will surely correct me) that 'Auld Lang Syne' means something like 'old long-ago'. This is not the point. I'd like to investigate about the melody, the music, not the lyrics, of which we know practically everything.

Burns in 1788 set his poem to the tune of a traditional folk song which was 200 years older. The composer of this melody, oddly, is an Italian. A very interesting character, Davide Rizzio (or Riccio…who knows exactly? The right orthography of a foreign name could be so easily misspelt in Scotland in 16th century…and not only then).

 He had a rather adventurous life and maybe one of these days I'll tell you something more about him. He was born in a small village, Pancalieri, near Turin, in Northern Italy. He had a certain talent as musician, composer and singers and a sure inclination to adventure and actually he ended to Scotland where he became a favourite of Queen Mary Stuart, no less! It seems he composed that music, which reminded him of an older folk song of his homeland and was very appreciated among Scots. 
He came to a very bad, awful end, but maybe I'll tell it to you another time, because it's another story….

I like repeating that personal rules are made to be broken, at least sometimes and randomly, or else breaking them becomes a rule at its turn and we get trapped in that spiral…

One of my rules or presumed ones is that –in this half hidden space of totally unnecessary erratic thoughts–I would never speak directly of myself.  I'm so scared of an apparent "Facebook" effect that I censor myself even when I might speak of something less banal than my uninteresting daily life.

But it happens, like in this case that sometimes from a little happening related to me I can find a pretext for a more general consideration. After all thinking over about things has never killed anyone…

I think to have more or less six or seven readers, who relatively regularly come to give a look at what happened in this virtual corner of cyberspace, which I like imagining like a little cosy café with a lot of free magazines and book at the clients' disposal.

The idea of keeping my virtual café open for them gives me a pleasant motivation.

So what were we speaking of? Ah, yes, this funny little episode which should lead to a more general and less funny reflection.

I receive a couple of days ago a proposal by email from an agency which wanted to insert various advertisings in this humble web site. It was not an automatic mail, like those which are sent to thousands and thousands of small websites, the url of which was captured by search engines in a way I can hardly imagine. It was a personalized letter addressed to my first name and with references to my website appearance and its content. They even proposed me to pay me regularly for that.

I wrote back to refuse politely, explaining shortly  that I hate advertising , which has started to pollute  nearly every website, and I'm perfectly happy to keep my small one in a blessed condition of advertising-free space.

Today the agency manager wrote me once again, insisting that maybe I had not fully understood and they didn't intend to put any advertising banner in my website, but their proposal was to include an advertising article in my blog as if I had written it myself.

Actually what she wrote was:

"Our advertising model uses text-based adverts. We aim to give you an article that would complement your existing posts and fit the theme of your site. We have highly competent writers that will create a custom article specially made for you."

And she was so generous to offer me 100USD for that.

I immediately wrote back, voluntarily in a slightly melodramatic way, that I was not on sale.

Then I started thinking over about all that. Obviously they have made the same proposal to a lot of niche small websites and very probably many of them have accepted. So that proposal was not so shamefully extravagant after all and several people might consider absolutely normal to sell spaces in their personal websites without any control on that and even accept to mix the posts of their blogs with articles written by others to promote items they don't care for.

I suppose advertising is a necessary evil to sponsor newspapers, concerts, shows and many other extremely expensive activities, which might be useful, educational, entertaining. But I don't see the need favour its proliferation in websites, which are not expensive to maintain.

Once again I don't feel either better or worse than a large majority, but I feel different.

In all cases, I refuse to make compromises with any site with an overdose of advertising. I will not get many visits here, but I'm honoured for the attention of my six readers and their existence is the best spur to keep on doing of my best.

If you're not scared of Friday the 13th, you should be scared of the word used to describe those who are: friggatriskaidekaphobics. 

For a superstition, the fear of Friday the 13th seems fairly new, dating back to the late 1800s. Friday has long been considered an unlucky day (according to Christian tradition, Jesus died on a Friday), and 13 has a long history as an unlucky number.
Many people may fall prey to the human mind's desire to associate thoughts and symbols with events.
If anything bad happens to you on Friday the 13th, the two will be forever associated in your mind; all those uneventful days in which the 13th fell on a Friday will be ignored.
The association may also be biblical. The Last Supper's 13th guest was Judas, who betrayed Jesus. His crucifixion was the next day, a Friday.
In reality, the Friday the 13th superstition is a relatively modern phenomenon indeed. Less than 100 years ago, the number 13 did not have this sinister meaning.  But its manifestations can be seen in a number of areas: High-rise buildings and hotels often skip the 13th floor, and hospitals often do not have a Room 13. Some airports and airlines skip a gate 13 or row 13, respectively.
Thinking over about superstitions can be intriguing and also illuminating. Often history is made of details, of apparently irrelevant little things.
Maybe I'll come back to this topic, which deserved more attention and space.
What is superstition after all? Some call "superstitions" the beliefs of others. But here we are approaching a very delicate subject rich of nuances.
A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.
Bertrand Russell said: “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” 

Personally I agree that laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired. Nevertheless one of the very few rules of this half-hidden journal (another one is that it has not any fixed rule…) is that I'm not supposed to speak directly about myself and my surely uninteresting daily life. If I considered worthy informing a large audience that I broke one of my nails I could create an account on Facebook. So far I can happily live without.

So my purpose is starting from particular to get open, if it's possible, to more general considerations.

My topic doesn't intend to be my personal praise of laziness. I have a kind of reverential admiration for all the people who are ready to run and jog every day with all kinds of weather. They gloriously sweat in summer and bravely face the icy wind in winter. They usually run alone, all concentrated in their own surely rewarding effort. Sometimes energetic mothers include in their healthy activity also their unaware babies, who are installed in technological strollers, probably made of tungsten or some other mysterious material and are pushed at high speed nicely shaken by all the ground bumps. Maybe they like that, probably they do. Babies like to be shaken, well, with moderation anyhow.

A common feature, which practically all runners and joggers share, is that they carry an iPod or an  iSomething, well, shortly, a reader of music files and they have their ears well plugged by the earphones of the little omnipresent device.

They are in a private world full of their own music, probably loud, and they run, indifferent to the sound and the noise of the real world which surrounds them.  You know what I mean, banal boring sounds like the song of the wind in the leaves, the cries of seagulls, the call of  hidden little birds, the pastoral symphony of cows' bells ( sorry, this is just a Swiss matter, I'm afraid). In a word all what make the environment vibrant and real and make you feel part of that with all your senses.

Also running mums wear earphones. I saw one, crossing the road, a few days ago, beautiful and fit she run at a speed that I could keep only for 5 metres, and only when I feel in particularly good shape and she seemed to barely touch the ground. Her baby, comfortably installed in   his stroller, looked in front of him, because he was turned that way, considering probably his mother like an engine which he could neither control nor see. The baby bumped lightly when his stroller was pushed over a little imperfection of the road, his little head followed the rhythm of the run. Nobody spoke to him, but fortunately he didn’t wear any small earphones. I'm sure that the birds' songs were a good company for him.