Visiting Marion Boddy Evans (Micro Fiction)

This week Pegman takes us to Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom.

 Here is my fictional piece:

Visiting Marion (Fiction word count: 148)

 

Sir, the lady of the house is not expecting anyone.

 

Tell her it’s Paul. We emailed last month. She said come for tea on December first.  

 

What was your name again?

 

Dr. Paul Ryan.

 

I’ll check again.

 

(5 minutes pass)

 

Sorry, again, but Maryann is NOT expecting anyone?

 

You mean Marion?

 

No, Maryann. As in Maryann Evans.

 

Oh my. I am looking for Marion Boddy-Evans, the painter from Isle of Wight, who lives in the small castle on Derkshire.

 

Sir, this is the Isle of Wight but Maryann is a musician. Perhaps you are thinking of MARION, her artist cousin.

 

(Laughing) I’ve bloody gone to the wrong residence.

 

Actually, you’re on the wrong ISLE.

Marion Boddy-Evans lives on the Isle of Skye.

 

(Blank stares – then shared chuckles)

Maryann has invited you in for tea. You could meet her cats and then possibly Skype Marion?

 

I would LOVE that.

________

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Thanks for reading.  What pegman saw is a weekly fiction prompt to write a short fiction piece (150 words or less) based on Pegman’s weekly location using Google Maps and. Go HERE to read more Pegman pieces for this week’s prompt.

Author Notes:

This week I wrote about the case of a “mistaken island” because I actually made this mistake when I first saw the Isle of Wight prompt (suggested by Georgie Moon). I initially assumed this was where Marion Boddy-Evans lived.  I immediately flashed back to this artist – who I used to follow on “about.com” –

Do you remember About.com??

I remembered when Marion resigned from her position with About.  Their policies had changed and she resigned from hosting the “about.com painting” forum and for many followers it was as if a light had gone out.  The painting forum was NEVER the same without her.  And then only a few years after she resigned – the “about.com” site dissolved completely.  I think when Marion left it marked the beginning of the end for that online site.  I find it interesting that sometimes we can see signs of demise with little things like “great employees exiting.”  Many times this is indicative of new leadership, troubled leadership, or just big change. 

So….

This post is dedicated to Marion Boddy-Evans (here) – who is from the Isle of Sky (not Isle of Wight) and I have no idea if there is a real Maryann Evans on Isle of Wight. 

Also, if you want to read more about the ending of “about.com” – check out this article from Wired: 

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/rip-com-look-tumultuous-life-web-legend/

Here is a snippet of Wired’s post expounding on About.com:

This is why About.com thrived for so long; its legacy dated back so far, its pages ranked high in search results, and this toehold served it well long after Google search changed the internet forever. But in the late aughts, when the web started to change and user behavior shifted more toward social and mobile, About.com didn’t keep up. Under the Times, About.com did not have social share buttons—those icons that sit near the top of articles and encourage you to share it with your social networks. Neither was it optimized to look good on a smartphone screen. When IAC finally invested in making those changes, it was playing catch-up in a game others had stopped playing. Vogel cleaned up the tech and optimized the site, and it didn’t change anything.

“About.com had good search-engine traffic back in the day, but then it got worse and worse,” Vogel says. “We confused Google, because you just can’t be an expert in diabetes and how to stain a floor.” Same thing for Facebook and Pinterest and all the sites that now bring information to readers: the algorithms, as far as Vogel could tell, didn’t value the generalism of About.com.

“We had this brand everybody knew. If you asked people if they’d heard of About.com, 100 percent said yes, but if you asked where do you go for health advice? Nobody said About.com,” Vogel says.

Now, About DotDash Dot Com

After Vogel spent two years at the helm, About.com was still big and still profitable—but not growing. And he had to tell his bosses at IAC. “Guys, everything we’ve done was wrong,” he says he told them. The right thing to do, he told them, was to break the site into smaller bits, cut out the old content that wasn’t good, curate the best of it, and present it in separate verticals. Verywell, launched last year, took about half of About.com’ssting health articles with it, after being edited and updated.

“And then we put it out in the world, with the hopes that humans would respond and, more importantly, that algorithms would respond,” Vogel says. At least for that vertical it seems to be working. Vogel says About.com’s content was getting about 12 million uniques a month before Verywell launched; Verywell got 17 million last month.

So the name change to DotDash is not just a last-gasp attempt at rebranding, like when Radioshack became just The Shack a few years before it sputtered out of existence…. read the rest here.

Oc course I need to end with a comic. 

And because Marion Boddy-Evans has shared that her cats are always peeking in on her as she works, here are some cat comics (which also go out to all the cat-lovin’ bloggers out there – like Linda, YC, LoisJ, Musings, etc.) – well most are also doggie comics too – so woof and meow. 🙂 

cat comics 4

cat comic – dog whispering put cat out

 

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