Many blogs and website include pages for FAQs, Frequently Asked Questions, which we think is a fine ideas; however, here at Meme Merchants we noticed that most of these supposed FAQs appear to be an invention of the site’s administrators in an attempt to preempt site users from actually asking any questions so the Admin will not then have to take time out of their busy schedule to answer them.  You can tell this is probably the case because there never seems to be a FAQ for any question YOU have about the site, how it functions or it policies – in other words anything you actually care about.  While this situation is not altogether wrong, it does seem to smack ever so sightly of intellectual dishonesty.

Think about it for a moment, if a FAQ page is actually doing its job successfully, none of the questions should ever rise to the level of being asked frequently, doubly true if the site Admins are doing their jobs properly in responding to queries, correcting problems, and have clear, well stated and easy to find policies.  It seems more correct then to call these type of pages something else like, “Things You Need to Know – TYNKs” or “Needful Facts – NFAC,” anything other than FAQ.  Thus the notion of a FAQ seems to be infact some kind of a fairy tale.

Here at Meme Merchants we do not have a FAQ page, because no one has asked us any questions yet, and the Editors would not presume to know what questions are burning in your mind.  We make up A LOT of things around here, our imaginations overflow, but we would not dare to make up what you think [that seems somehow very basic].  You have to set a limit somewhere, and that’s were we set ours.  We have included a contact form on our Contact page which you are encouraged to use to have answered any questions about Meme Merchants related topics or concerns.

We do have an idea to do a feature periodically called:

Question of the Day

Assuming someone ever asks a question – – we will then post it up and rave about it for a while – basically until we are sick of it – and you can then comment.  Eventually those questions and answers will be turned into a FAQ page or filed appropriately someplace else.

To get the ball rolling on this process – recognizing that folks are shy about this kind of thing – we will on this one occasion prime the pump with a question that the editorial staff have devised as representing what a hypothetical reader of this blog [as yet there don’t seem to be any actual readers of this blog] might have on encountering such a contradictory hodgepodge of ideas as this blog:

Q:  “Ok, so which is it!?  The Coraline Meme or Meme Merchants!?”

Now that sounds like a REAL question doesn’t it?

A:   We are so glad you asked!  We are ‘Both-And‘ types around here, so both blog titles are equally valid though the domains of their validity differ.  Here are some thoughts.

The Coraline Meme is the exoteric, [outer] machine searchable title of the blog, it has no real meaning, and is meant NOT to have any real meaning, it is in fact gibberish, [good alchemical word that] and very difficult for a computer program to get a handle on.  The name Coraline Meme is also happens to be a pun on, “Coraline Theme,” the name of the WordPress theme the Meme Merchants Consortium originally selected for use with this blog prior the the release of the superior “2011 Theme”, but we kept the blog name we devised because it rhymed.

The exoteric subtitle for The Coraline Meme:  “Planetary evolution in a not-shall”, begins with a fairly direct statement, which is that this blog is somehow germane to discussion of the evolutionary processes that are at work driving history on our planet and by extension its human inhabitants.  The tag “in a not-shall” is of course a multi-level pun and a reference directly to Finnegann’s Wake [from book III, “Allspace in a Not-shall”], and a frequent quote by uncle Terrence when referring to the Wake.  It is also a play upon the notions of “in a nut shell” in the sense that this blog attempts a kind of compaction or compression of the subject, and also “in a not-shall” in it sense of the blog and its situation and being laden with contradiction – not/shall-shall/not.

The title Meme Merchants then would be the esoteric, [inner, secret] name for the blog.  The words Meme Merchants being embedded within the graphic of the blog header it is non-machine readable and unindexable.  It is for humans only not web roaming software.  There is a deep notion embedded in the title Meme Merchants, that a meme, one definition of which is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture,” functions as a kind of quasi-biological carrier of cultural information, and can be exchanged, traded, bartered or upgraded because they are somehow arbitrary or provisional rather than fixed like one’s own cellular DNA.  This ultimately points to the deepest theme of this blog which is to point out that what we consider to be reality is itself is completely provisional and subject to replacement at any moment.

The subtilte for Meme Merchants:  “Towards a science of authentic experience,” is the inner statement of intention for this weblog to explore the issues of how our our ways of knowing condition and ‘authenticate’ how we experience our beings, lives and relationships, and implies that  it is our intention to work toward a new way of knowing, understanding and talking about experience and consciousness as a phenomena and live it out in our daily lives with conscious intent of our own.

Is that perfectly clear?  Any questions?

Regards,

Wygart