Weekly Photo Challenge: “Freestyle”

Flying the white flag… I’ve given up waiting around for whoever is responsible for letting us all know what we’re supposed to post in terms of Weekly Photo Challenge topic material. [Actually, that’s not a white flag, it’s a former face-cloth that has been re-tasked as a clean-up rag hanging on the clothesline.] More photos follow my rant.

It seems that the good folks down at WordPress’ Weekly Photo Challenge screwed up big time! Whoever was supposed to inform us of this week’s topic has, thus far, failed to do so. Ironically, last week’s theme “Unfocused” remains a full two days past when we have come to expect the new theme to be announced, possibly indicating a lack of focus on the part of the (possibly former) WordPress employee so charged.

So, what can WordPress do to ensure that the teeming masses of people anxious to share their love for visual communication (or people like me who just like to show off and offer smarty-pants solutions to problems I probably don’t fully understand) get the leadership and direction to make this weekly world-wide exploration of a theme the visual global spectacle of Mankind?

Plenty.

How difficult can it be to get that theme reliably out there to the peoples of every culture on every continent (except, possibly, Antarctica) who toil seemingly  in-concert to beam lovely images around the planet that, no doubt, will one day be intercepted far beyond the Oort Cloud and cause aliens from other galaxies to make this little blue rock their next vacation destination and spend oodles of really foreign currency that will help the global financial crisis?

Not very. Here are some suggestions…

1. Get some wireless netbooks in the room that people have their Friday lunch and assign a monitor to make sure that nobody who still has unsubmitted assignments due gets any alcohol with, or instead of, their meal.
2. Come up with Weekly Photo Challenge themes and theme announcement posts two or three weeks in advance so that if the guy or gal responsible falls ill (succumbing to “Merlot Malaise”, for example), we bloggers still get the direction we sorely need.
3. If making a couple of “This Week’s Photo Challenge Theme” posts a week or more in advance is too problematic, at the very least make sure that they are submitted before cocktail hour on Thursday.  Have the person assigned to this task submit the announcement post using the “Schedule a Post Function“. Have the WordPress Bartender/Assignment-submission Monitor check that employees have taken measures to ensure their work is done before being served any libation.
4. Have someone design an I.T. widget app that self-generates such routine posts and actually posts them at a preordained day and time, making sure the I.T. guy or gal (and the app itself) has been on the wagon for a goodly long time. The themes could be selected from a standard database of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and nouns.
5. Have someone design an I.T. widget app that would allow the average doofus blogger like myself to submit topics and then the app either takes the one most suggested that hasn’t been used in a while or just randomly selects one. The same or different  I.T. widget app could generate an automated form-letter post informing the world (and the aliens) what they should be posting this week.
6. Delegate the task to a random average doofus blogger, giving them a week to come up with something.
7. However you choose to let us know what the Weekly Photo Challenge theme is, why not tell us at the same time every week? I suggest early in the morning or even a minute past midnight in the time zone of your choice.

While we’re talking, WordPress, why not have a Weekly Photo Challenge Freshly Pressed page to showcase some of the previous week’s submissions? Also, why isn’t the general Freshly Pressed page updated over the weekend when more people have the time to check them out? Just sayin’.

So without further ado, whatever that means, here are the rest of my Freestyle Photo Challenge submissions taken from the second-to-last photo session that’s been uploaded to my computer. The very last session that’s already on my computer is the “Super Moon” pictures that I’ve already posted and the very, very last photos I’ve taken are still in my camera and I’m saving them for a future “non-Challenge” post.

The view coming down the stairs of my house. It may not do much for you but to me it always makes me think of that first coffee in the morning (which I don’t spike with alcohol), greeting my wife at the front door after Old Navy shuts their doors for the night, and having fun with door-to-door salesman.

A beautiful sunny sky that would cause major headaches and eye-aches in people who have had too much to drink (you know who you are!).

Heat waves, mirages, and things that should be standing up straight but are tilted. Sounds like Friday lunch at WP’s cafeteria!

You know what? It’s been kind of liberating coming up with my own Weekly Photo Challenge theme!

Hope you liked the shots, and I’m not talking about the tequila kind!

Related articles

• Weekly Photo Challenge: Reflections (margekatherine.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge : Unfocused… Reflections (mystiic.wordpress.com)