I’m interrupting this personal blog to bring you a message from my business world: I’m writing a book!

Planned for early December release, Content Rules is a how-to guide to creating compelling content for the Web. The talented and fun CC Chapman is co-author (David Meerman Scott is writing the foreword), and together we’ll answer questions like, How can you create so-called bold stories and videos and blog posts that will inspire people? How do you develop ideas that will arouse passion for your products or services? How can you cultivate fans? How can your ideas ignite your business?

Any organization with a website is a publisher, right? So Content Rules applies to organizations of all sizes and stripes, whether you are a Fortune 500 corporation or a mom-and-pop on the corner, or anything in between: hospital, entrepreneur, nonprofit, sole practitioner or consultant, artist, government agency, church, school, political candidate, sports team, community group, marching band, butcher, baker or candlestick maker.

I’m excited about this project, because for me it represents a mashup of so many things that thrill me: Creating stuff people love. Building a community around an organization. Online tools. Good writing. (And, by the way, it also allows me to slay (or at least shame!) some demons that have long plagued my world: Like corporate Frankenspeak. Uninspired blogs. Boring craptastical content. Stuff that sucks.)

I’d be thrilled if you pre-order Content Rules now, or wait until it’s out this December.

Also, check out our brand-spanking-new blog and site, and (bonus!) watch me embarrass myself in the video.

Dear Motion Picture Association of America:

I’m freshly back from the theater after seeing Toy Story 3, which prompts me to ask: A G-rating? Seriously? I haven’t been this disturbed since the Turkish prison scenes in Midnight Express (which was rated R, by the way).

The first two Toy Story movies centered on the happy relationship between a young boy named Andy and his toys. In Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3, Andy is packing for college, and the story leaves the toys to fend for themselves in a world where there’s no longer anyone to care for them.

It’s not that the movie was mis-rated. Devoid of sex or gore, it is a kid’s movie. Technically.

But what it stirs up in movie-goers is anything but juvenile: Essentially abandoned by a grown-up Andy, it’s up to the desperate, panicked toys to find not just a new home, but a way to recapture their raison d’etre : The simple joy and richness of being loved best by a child.

The unspoken premise is this: Nothing lasts forever, and in the end you’re either the deserted or the one deserting. (Also: because this is a kid’s movie, Pixar tosses us a bone: Don’t fret too much; you’ll eventually find someone else who is almost as good as the original. But it’ll be hell – hell! — getting there.)

So, Motion Picture Association, you could have warned me. Toy Story 3 is tragically under-rated — in the sense of sketchily explained, resulting in a whole audience of popcorn-munching Americans who will suddenly be caught off guard for that scene when Woody, Buzz, Ham, and the rest of the toys — trapped on a garbage incinerator’s conveyor belt — hold hands in heartbreaking resignation as they brave a certain fiery death, and in that moment you forget that they are not just toys but cartoon toys, and you bawl like a baby at the desperate humanity laid bare on their digital faces.

And that was just one scene of several: The scene where Woody leaves for college….? The mix of wisdom and acceptance that flickers across the faces of the toys as they watch him drive off down the road, which signals a silent acknowledgment about the nothing-lasts-forever bit? It will destroy you. Unless you are made of stone.

I’ve admittedly been in a melancholy mood lately, what with the fledgling kid about to take flight and the situation with the one-eyed dog. So maybe it’s just me. But I don’t think so. As the credits rolled, only a few people (possibly robots) jumped up and made their way immediately to the exit, instead of taking what the rest of us needed, and had earned: a sensible few minutes to pat our faces dry and collect ourselves before shuffling out.

Then as we left the theater, my daughter — who tends to sprout hives when she’s really upset — could manage to only scratch broodingly and shake her head no at me when I asked her what she thought. My son said simply, “Why did we have to see that?” in a ponderous tone. He sunk into silence for the rest of the car ride home, no doubt remembering his previously carefree existence. And by “previously” I mean like 2 hours before, when the frailty of us all wasn’t quite so palpable.

When my daughter was younger, she’d self-police her entertainment options. A grade school friend would call and invite her to a matinee, and she’d say, “Sorry. But that movie has mild thematic elements. How about we see…?” And then she’d name another film more in line with her middle-aged sensibilities. She picked that up from reading the cautionary footnotes your association uses to elucidate and rate a film’s content suitability for certain audiences. (Like: “May be too intense for younger audiences” or “Contains mild thematic elements not appropriate for younger viewers.”)

So I’m thinking that some films could carry similar cautionary footnotes to a prescribed rating, because frankly, I could have used an elucidating footnote prior to the movie today. On Toy Story 3, for example, you might consider: “Caution: Contains mild thematic elements not appropriate for older viewers.” Or: “May be too intense: The sensitive and overwrought strongly cautioned.” Or perhaps: “Attention parents of graduating seniors: You might want to skip this one and go straight to dinner instead.”

Pixar is long overdue for this kind of action, in fact. The last animated film that similarly unhinged me was also a Pixar flick; specifically, the “Married Life” montage from Up. Haven’t seen it? Let me summarize: Two adorable kids marry with dreams of a life together, then eventually things don’t work out exactly the way they envisioned, and one of them ends up sad and alone.

Which leads to the inevitable question: Is that a cartoon – or is that life?

Thanks for your consideration.

My little dog Abby lost her right eye yesterday.

“Lost” is a funny term for it—implying that she misplaced it somewhere and can’t for the life of her remember where, like you might car keys. Maybe, in time, “lost” will be enough to define the visceral brutality of what happened. But not quite yet.

Then again, I’m not entirely sure what happened, exactly. I do know this much, in the way that your mind tills over and over the details leading up to a terrible thing, as if to search for clues that things were about to be altered forever: My daughter Caroline and I were in the backyard. I was combing the surface of a new garden with a steel rake. Abby and her canine sister, Maisy, were with us, too, roaming—as they often do—amid a thick bed of flowers and ferns some 50 feet away. Abby stands only about a foot tall from her shoulder to her paws: When she’s in the garden it swallows her whole. Rabbits and chipmunks and voles and other small creatures take refuge in that garden, and Abby and Maisy track their punky smells, noses to the ground.

Abby is a rescue dog who came to live with us just shy of her first birthday: First as a foster, and then later as a permanent part of the family. She is the kind of dog you like even when you don’t like dogs: She is gentle and meek around people, and she melts the disinterested shell right off of strangers, who can’t help but bend down to pet her as she sidles up to them; “Aww, aren’t you a good girl?” they’ll say. “Yes,” I always respond. “She’s something special.”

She seems to know, intuitively, which people are most in need of a dose of her, and those are the ones that she parks herself in front of, gently pawing the air before them, as if she’s waving a small peace flag, her soulful human eyes seeking theirs.

You can see how, if you do like dogs, a dog like Abby would grow like a wild vine around your heart, wrapping herself around your organs until after a while your hearts together beat in wordless understanding. I’ve had sweet dogs before. But what makes Abby uniquely rooted in my heart is that soulful intellect cross-wired with a spunky streak. It’s a lively bit of pluck that Vahe calls charajiji, using the Armenian to describe a kind of naughty impishness. That’s what drives her sense of fun and adventure that—the first time I set eyes on her—had her strolling the back of the sofa like a cat, as if she owned the place. (She didn’t.) And today, almost six years later, still sends her swooping and diving at tennis balls around the dining room table, and running at top speed to scatter flocks of gulls on the beach. It’s what has her stalking chipmunks now in the garden.

From the new garden nearby, I see only the tops of the flowers swaying in huffy complaint as Abby and Maisy tramp through. It went on for the better part of the humid June afternoon: Maisy and Abby patrolled. I raked. At one point I watched the dogs for a minute, leaning on my rake, and mused to Caroline: “It’s funny, isn’t it, the way that the girls in our family are the motivated ones?” Our two male dogs, Chile and Simon, were splayed on the cool tile indoors; Caroline’s brother, Evan, was inside, too, himself splayed on the sofa.

Suddenly I heard a quick, decisive growl. Maisy. It’s the sound she makes when she’s been startled or agitated by something. I guessed Maisy had cornered a terrified little critter, and I pictured a frantic little paw swiping at Maisy’s big black snout nosing beyond the lip of a burrow.

“Maisy!” I yelled. “Abby! Come!” Maisy came trotting out of the thicket right away, but Abby is not as easily deterred from prey. Charajiji. I headed toward the garden, calling her name again, a little impatiently. “God I hope it’s not a bunny…” I said to Caroline. Suddenly Abby popped out of the brush.

There’s that moment when you look at something so unexpected, so surprising, so shocking, that your brain can’t quite compute what it is, exactly, you are looking at. With Abby trotting toward me, I looked only long enough to work out what I was actually looking at: which was her right eye hanging out of its socket, like some Halloween zombie display at a party goods store, bobbing with every step she took.

I guess I should feel lucky to say that it was the singularly most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen, but yesterday it didn’t feel that way. Instead, I felt not just revolted but inexplicably terrified, and much as I’m not proud of it now, I screamed and turned away from poor Abby and ran full-tilt into the house, Caroline at my heels, bolting the door behind us, blinking in the cool air and hoping the gruesome visage of our beloved little dog would somehow adjust itself back to its proper order.

Why, exactly? What was so scary? Did I think it wasn’t really her? That instead she’d been twisted into something bizarre and dangerous? Did I think her freakishly exposed eyeball was going to sprout legs and chase me down? I have no explanation for my response: Animals react to threats with a primal discharge of the nervous system, priming the animal to fight or for flight. Clearly, my primal neurons instructed me to flee.

But poor sweet Abby! If she was in pain, she didn’t seem it. She trotted after us, waiting to be let in first by one door and then the other, and seemingly unaware of the chaos, the screaming. It was the boy on the couch who sprang into action, swaddling Abby in a beach towel and depositing her in my arms, where I held her close and cooed to her as the boy sped—with no license and no shoes, I realized later—to the emergency vet clinic a few miles away. By then, in me, another primal urge had taken over: To fix, to care for, to squeeze every drop of essence from my own body and pour it into hers, willing it into her as she sat panting on my lap, the towel around her head. The boy stood with me at the clinic, his size 10 feet shoved into a pair of his sister’s silver flip-flops he had foraged from the back seat of the car.

They couldn’t save the eye. It turns out she was already blind as she emerged from the garden, even as she was trotting after us. I don’t know exactly what the stringy bits are called that attach an eyeball to its socket, but whatever they are, hers included an optic nerve that was severed in the accident.

There was a small puncture wound above where her eye was; the vet presumes that a larger animal bit her in the face, and happened to catch her just so, causing her eye to shoot out like a pinball from its coil spring. It might have been Maisy, who perhaps snapped to warn her away from a critter hole she wanted for herself; it might have been another larger animal lurking in the brush.

We picked Abby up early this morning from the clinic. I know she’ll recover quickly and adapt; I’ve seen plenty of one-eyed dogs. Still, I’m sick over it: For her pain and trauma, for the loss of her pretty little face, and the way she turned her one remaining eye on me this morning and moaned, searching for something I didn’t have.

Yesterday I sat in the stands at my son’s graduation, smack at what would be the face-off line of the covered ice hockey rink, counting the rows of chairs on the floor below and trying to work out which mortarboard was his in a royal blue sea of 440 graduates. All of us parents standing shoulder-to-shoulder were doing the same thing, of course: Each of us seeking out our own kid, each of our hearts swollen within our chests to the point of bursting. (We parents are impossibly foolish, aren’t we? It’s easy to mock this brand of sappy sentimentality -– I want to mock myself right now –- but still you are powerless to resist the thing that makes you so happy, so joyful, so full of love that you are full to the brim, and overflowing, and all your bones are loose and floating in the syrupy liquid somewhere, bobbing on the surface.)

The Chinese family with the camcorder in front of me put a good face on it. But I knew that, like me, they were boneless, too, even if it’s not immediately apparent when you looked at them or at any other family in the stands. What you see instead is all of us passively bearing witness to the usual stuff: the amazingly brilliant class valedictorian turns to face the class of 2010 and the whole place roars at once for him; the principal says a few words; someone sings a big number with meaningful lyrics to befit a momentous occasion like this one. Like most of the canned stuff, this girl sings well enough, but the whole thing still comes off a little lame and overdone. One of the students lets fly an inflated beach ball that his classmates keep randomly alight.

Then before you know it, they’re lining up, and someone starts to call the names, and you watch as they cross the stage, one by one. And finally, my boy is the one crossing a stage, accepting a diploma in his left hand, and with his right shaking hands with his high school principal. He looks the guy directly in the eye and smiles, which momentarily strikes me as odd, because just last week he was a toddler and way too small to stand eye-to-eye with an adult. Or so it seems.

I’ve been dreading this day, in a way. Probably because this is one of those big moments – like the first day of kindergarten, which again was only a day or two ago — that signals a shift into a different point in time. It sounds dramatic to say that a high school graduation bookends a childhood, but I can’t help but feel that a little bit of that is true, and with it a part of me has been bunged, too. For parents, it seems there’s a subtle shift from player to onlooker, participant to armchair fan. Literally we were already there, of course, installed as spectators behind the arena hockey boards.

Then again, parents are good at watching, aren’t we? And in fact, our first responsibility is to watch. Newly pregnant Moms watch what we eat and how much we do. And later, after the birth, we watch for everything so as not to miss anything: the first smile, the first tooth, first steps. And we watch them sleep. Hours and hours of rocking and willing them to sleep and then more hours, too: If you could collect and mash together all those minutes spent hovering and covering and making sure they are still breathing.

They grow a little, and still we watch: for things that could harm -– kitchen chairs they could topple from, the things they can choke on: the impossibly stupid stones or grapes or nickels or anything they might swallow in a flash, before we can stop it. And later, we watch them jump into the deep end, and we catch the first glimpse of the kindergarten bus rolling toward your stop. And school plays and what’s-your-homework and a one more birthday candle on the cake, year after year.

We watch their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road, the site of them running across a field or dancing across a stage or whatever it is that they love to do. We watch where they put their stuff so we know where to tell them to find it later. We watch the back of their heads when they leave and they don’t turn around — which makes you wonder, for a minute, When did they stop looking back to you?

And maybe –- if one or both of you are lucky –- we get to observe their own pride in something they did or created or achieved, and maybe some recognition from some institution or individual that matters to them. Or we watch things that I can right now only imagine in some unfocused way, the way you try to imagine life on another planet, maybe: Their own transition into watching over some little being of their own.

I thought of this yesterday, as I watched him walk across the stage, and it occurred to me then: Has anything really changed? Isn’t this how it always is? In a way, aren’t we -– as parents — always waiting, already watching, always on the side of the field? From the moment of conception, aren’t we always sidelined?

Does that sound glum? Morose? I don’t mean it that way. Because yesterday, I actually took some comfort in the sudden perspective that being sidelined has always been a fundamental part of the job. It’s less about being marginalized or nonessential or other words that you might use to describe anything that’s a little off-center. Rather, it’s more the idea that, from birth, they have their own path to follow, which sometimes has surprisingly little to do with us.

But anyway, watching is a great thing to do, whether you are in an armchair or in the bleachers. Maybe you’re there to see a sports meet, or a dance recital, or a Tai Kwon Do exhibition, or — one amazing day — the walk across the graduation dais. Or, most thrilling of all, maybe one day you see what really counts: The glimpse of the broad smile that lights up his face as he strikes the bottom stair, and continues down the aisle, right past where you’re seated.

My 17-year-old will be in college next year, and right now he and I are deep in the process of applications and school visits and talks that spring up suddenly at dinner or in the car and begin with, “Maybe I should think about…?” or “Have you considered…?” It’s a process that feels very much how I once heard a writer describe the process of writing: Like feeling your way, a foot or two at a time, along a very long and very dark tunnel; you can’t fathom where it ends up.

Sometimes it’s my son who starts the conversation, and sometimes I do. But either way, it’s clear that this is less a new topic than it is a thread of a conversation we’ve been having for many months, and probably years. It’s the same conversation every parent has first with a spouse and then later with the child himself, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I know I’ll miss him next year, and I know that will feel right. My friend Andy has a son who is several years older than mine, and when his went off to college Andy told me that little boys evolve into teenage boys so that you are more than happy to help them pack when the time comes.

In fact, I missed my son when he was away for six weeks this past summer. (I didn’t realize quite how much I missed him until suddenly there he was, grinning at me in the kitchen, and as I wrapped my arms around him I thought of that line in the poem by Walter Dean Myers, “Love that boy, like a rabbit loves to run.”)

When I told people then how he was loving the long hours he spent in the school’s clay studio and how he went back after dinner, and when I tell them now how he wants to study Ceramics in college, people often nod in a vague way about how wonderful that is before they ask something along the lines of, “So how’s he going to make a living at that?”

I can’t blame them, really. It’s crossed my mind a few times, as well. And about 25 years ago, it crossed the minds of my own parents, too, which is why my mother said to me, when I announced then that I wanted to be writer, that I might want to have a backup plan.

She wasn’t trying to be cruel; in fact, she just wanted me to have what she lacked: independence, and self-reliance, and the ability, when the guy you marry turns out to be a shit in a few key ways, to not to have to take it. It’s true that money can’t buy happiness. Yet ironically, I’ve noticed — and my mother certainly knew — that the lack of it can bring plenty of misery.

A few weeks ago my friend Paul Williams created something he called the Killer Phrase BINGO. We’re all familiar with the game BINGO: Fill out the game card, trying for five in a row to win and shout, “BINGO!” “One key reason new and potentially innovative ideas don’t get implemented at companies is because skeptics and scaredy cats kill ideas when they’re first proposed,” Paul wrote. “They use killer phrases like: ‘We’ve tried that before’ and ‘Yeah, but….’”

And so it goes in parenting, too. How many of the phrases do we use, as parents, because our own parents said them to us (here’s where I’ll admit to “Don’t make me turn this car around!”) or because we can’t bear to see our kids in pain (”Don’t make the same mistakes I did…”)? How much of our own parents do we bring to our own roles in the job, all over again?

Once, when my mother and I were having an uncharacteristically frank discussion about sex, she said to me, “Your generation didn’t invent sex, you know.” But didn’t we? Isn’t sex something we were left to puzzle through? Isn’t it up to every teenager to figure out, mostly on his or her own?

In that way, too, every generation thinks it invents parenting. Or, maybe, it’s every person who is reinvented as a parent: Sometimes, we are inspired by our own upbringing, and sometimes we exorcise it. And sometimes, as is the case with me, it’s a little of both.

In any case, Paul created this BINGO card for parents strictly for fun. But then again, you could use it for awareness, too—a reminder, of sorts, that we didn’t invent parenting, but we certainly can guide its evolution.

It’s alarming to talk with someone on the phone and realize they suspect you are a liar. This past week I received, via FTD, a belated birthday package—a gourmet basket with some of my favorite things. Like tea, biscotti, and dried apricots. There was a warm message on the card accompanying it, wishing me lots of post-celebration, feet-on-the-ottoman relaxation this autumn… but there was no signature. No name. In effect, I got a thoughtful gift from someone I couldn’t thank for their thoughtfulness. Weird.

I called the customer service number in the packaging, and someone named Danielle answered. (On a Saturday afternoon… Kudos, FTD!) I explained the predicament, and Danielle said she understood but couldn’t tell me who sent the package.

“You mean you can’t tell me, as in you don’t know?” I asked.

“Oh, I know who sent it,” Danielle said. “But it’s just that I can’t reveal it to you.” When I asked why, she said, “Well, it’s our policy. A precaution, you know, in case they don’t want you to know who sent it.”

But why would someone who sent me a birthday gift want to remain anonymous? This was a gift basket, not a wing at the Met. Danielle paused for a minute before replying, matter-of-factly, “Because maybe you aren’t supposed to know.”

Danielle emphasized the “you” in a manner that implied that I might not be, in fact, who I said I was. Maybe I wasn’t, her tone suggested, the recipient of the gift, the one who would be sipping hot tea by a roaring fire, dipping almond biscotti. Instead I was some person who was inquiring about a gift given to someone else.

Perhaps I was just nosy, or perhaps I was someone more emotionally freighted… a jealous someone who happened upon an unexplained gift. Perhaps this gift basket wasn’t a gift basket at all, but the last straw in a series of other things I’d noted amiss: some late hours at work, unfamiliar numbers on a cell phone bill. I recalled an article I had read recently about how the owners of some hotels and restaurants work hard to accommodate their guests’ dalliances, including requiring staff to sign a letter of confidentiality, ensuring that they won’t divulge anything they see or hear. Does this apply to mail order? Did Danielle sign something, too?

“Wait,” I said to Danielle, on the phone, attempting to clear up any misunderstanding. “This is my gift. It’s really to me.”

“And anyway, if this was a romantic gift,” I reasoned, hoping to sound casually un-jilted (what might jilted sound like, anyway, over the phone?) “wouldn’t the contents of a gift basket be a little more—I don’t know—risqué, maybe, than, say, tea?” Tea was something you give a friend, or a relative, or someone English. It wasn’t usually a gift you usually gave to a romantic partner. When she didn’t say anything, I added, “I mean, seriously? Tea? Really?”

Danielle stayed silent, but I could hear her unrelenting breathing on the other end of the phone, and knew she wasn’t going to budge. I was less irked that she wasn’t going to tell me who sent the gift than I was by the notion that she thought I was a figure to be pitied.

She eventually said that she’d sent an email to the giver of the gift and would call and leave a message, too. She ended our encounter by thanking me for calling, adding, “Have a nice day.” But I could tell that she thought I wouldn’t.

Later that day, my friend and colleague Beth Harte sent an email. It was she who had sent the gift, she said, and she didn’t include a signature because she assumed her name and address would be on the box, somewhere. “Sorry for the confusion!” Beth said.

It was nice to know that Beth was thinking of me, and wonderful to be remembered. But more than that, it filled me with a kind of relief: that the gift basket was, in fact, just a gift. It was nothing more—and certainly not anything close to resembling a burden.

This morning I got an update on a former foster dog — a Cavalier King Charles spaniel who lived with us two years ago, from just prior to Halloween to just before Christmas.

The dog had some kind of skin condition and arrived hairless, itchy, raw, reddened and miserable. He was about as sad as sad can look. He didn’t come with a name, so I named him Georgie, because his naked face reminded me of the  illustration of the children’s book character Curious George.

Another volunteer, Huntly, picked Georgie up in Vermont and a mutual friend delivered him as far as a highway exit in New Hampshire. The first time I saw him, he was in a dog crate in the back of a van at a rest area, growling and snarling, his skinny body pressed as far back as he could get against the crate’s back wall, and looking for all the world more like a gremlin than a Cavalier. (More “Lilo and Stitch” than “Lady and the Tramp.”)

Prior to the pickup, he had been living by himself in an unheated trailer, with a litter box and a bag of cheap kibble. Details were fuzzy, but there was something about a divorce, and an owner who had moved to a place that didn’t allow dogs, and a hope that he might have been adopted to someone the owner knew.  But who wanted a hairless, irritable dog with some kind of undiagnosed, ugly skin condition?

Georgie was with us for a few months. Turns out he was allergic to pretty much everything; had raging ear infections; and needed regular dermatology visits, medicated baths every other day, and deep ear cleanings. I kept him sequestered from our other dogs until he was stable, which meant he and I spent a lot of one-on-one time… unlike any other foster dog I ever had. Boy was he high-maintenance! But so sweet and such a little impish personality. I fell for him hard.

The nature of the foster relationship is temporary, of course. I couldn’t keep Georgie, and anyway, even if I wanted to, we weren’t the right kind of family. We already had three Cavaliers, and Georgie needed a home where he could be the only dog; he wasn’t particularly good at sharing.

So eventually, the day came when, stronger and fuzzier, he went home to his new life. If I tried to describe how much I missed him, you’d think I was describing how I had lost a lung. How much can you miss a creature who squirms at the endless ear cleaning? Who struggles in the bath? Who growls at your son? Who nips at your other dogs? Who hops over gates? Who hoards his food? How much can you miss a tense, skittish creature whose naked tail quickens like the reverberations of a violin string when he sees you? How much can you miss something that presses his lean body so tightly against your leg that you can feel his heart keeping time with your own?

It’s surprising how much, really.

In her note, Georgie’s new Mom calls him fabulous. Playful. A love. “I cannot thank you enough!” she writes. She includes a picture of Georgie as he is today, poised expectantly above a tennis ball, furry as a collie. There’s something about his eyes that’s familiar. Otherwise, I barely recognize him. Which thrills me.

Georgie is one of those rescue miracle stories; the kind of from-the-brink of disaster stories you hear sometimes at a party or whatever, about animals or people or about other kinds of reformations. And you think, “Really? Could that really be true?”

But it is true. It really happens that way sometimes. Which not only fills my heart but also gives me a kind of faith in humanity, and reminds me of the enormous capacity of love.

As goofy as that might sound.

Remember AOL disks? If you owned a mailbox in the late 1990s or early-2000s, you know what I mean, because America Online’s aggressive direct mail strategy probably distributed CD-ROMs and diskettes into it with irritating frequency. More than a billion disks were mailed between the late 1990s and 2006, when AOL stopped the mass mailing. Or mass irritation. However you look at it.

In fact, the end of that era likely came without you being aware that is was, in fact, the end of an era. But that’s how evolution is, right? One day you have to bungee-wrap your trash cans against the bands of marauding wild animals outside your cave, and the next thing you know you can’t remember the last time you saw a mastodon happen by.

Things change. Technology evolves. And suddenly you’re dealing with a whole different set of problems. When was the last time you got a busy signal? Or went on (or heard of anyone else going on) a true “blind date”? Looked up a number in a phone book? Had one of your kid’s friends call the house phone? PC World compiles a list of these and other obsolete things here.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. The other day I unearthed the item pictured below from an old desk drawer. It didn’t seem that foreign an object to me, but my 12-year-old daughter had no idea what it was. “Is it some kind of violin bow?” she asked.

But you guys know what it is… right? Anyone…? (Shout it out below!)

Posted via email from annhandley’s posterous

I had some happy news last week: The story of Gigi’s adventure with her beloved green tomato has been picked up by The Bark, a magazine I happen to love. In other words, if I were a dog, my tail would be wagging like that of a retriever with a tennis ball. (Or Gigi herself with a pork chop.) Big shout here to The Bark editor Lisa Wogan for making it happen.

If you don’t know The Bark, it’s a bi-monthly magazine about modern dog culture, with a literary twist. If NPR’s office dog hung around after hours, The Bark might be what he’d produce as his moonlighting project. I’m tempted to say that there’s plenty in each issue to appeal to the non-dog lover as well. But I have four dogs, so you shouldn’t trust my opinion anyway.

Either way, check out Gigi’s story again. Just for the thrill of it. And thanks!

My childhood friend Ron Ploof was so inspired by the pathos of Gigi’s story that he adapted it to the small screen. I think he did a fine job with it, and I particularly like the tweak of the ending. So what do you think?

Gigi Spies a Green Tomato from Ron Ploof on Vimeo.