Whatever

Sharp-eyed Kentucky Living readers will notice the mailing label on the cover now being printed upside-down.

It�s a postal service regulation. In the language of the day, we meant to do that.

I worried when I first heard about the regulation. New machines in the post office would make mailing more efficient. But magazines would have to be printed upside-down to take advantage of the improved technology.

That alarmed me. We can�t print the magazine upside-down.

Sure we can, explained the experts. The machines just need to see the label in a certain place, printed a certain way. The magazine will look normal to people pulling it from their mailboxes, except for the upside-down address.

I love the U.S. Postal Service. Every month they deliver half a million copies of Kentucky Living. So I shrugged and used another common expression of modern life: whatever.

I felt turned upside-down at home soon after signing up for the Internet phenomenon Facebook. It�s a Web site where you fill out a form about yourself and share that with other people you invite to be your �friends.� That�s called �friending.�

For a long time I resisted what I saw as herd behavior to join Facebook, until a real friend recovering from a heart attack asked me to be his Facebook friend.

Lots of people friend me now. Most seem to be acquaintances of my 15-year-old daughter. When I told her about rejecting one of those friends because I didn�t know them, she scolded: �Don�t ever do that without checking with me.�

So now my daughter is approving my list of friends.

Whatever.

As I prepared to write this column, I thought it would be appropriate to refer to one of the foundations of my elementary school education. I learned long ago that when the British surrendered to George Washington at the end of the Revolutionary War, the British bands played a song called The World Turned Upside Down.

When I went to the Internet for background, I learned that information I�ve carried in my head most of my life is probably wrong. Scholarly articles posted on the World Wide Web say there�s no evidence that song played at the Yorktown surrender.

Whatever.