Please pardon the appearance of this blog.  I've put previous posts on "revert to draft" until I do some re-organizing and re-thinking.  Apologies.  (Then again, as the title of the blog suggests...    Nobody is really missing much of anything with that content's being on "draft".)

Unposted Forum Post About Preferring Books and Magazines to Internet Reading

Sometimes I'll see a question a forum and write a reply.  Then I'll decide not to post it for one reason or another (in the case of this one, because I didn't want to come across as having a bad attitude about the very thing on which I enjoy writing - the Internet).  More importantly, I suppose I didn't want to be on a writing site, among other Internet writers, and say I don't read stuff online - especially since I write stuff online!   The thing is, though, I don't care who reads my stuff either.  

With the exception of reading Hubs that catch my eye (and that I have time to read) on HubPages (where I spend a lot of my spare-time writing) that catch my eye, I don't read anything online.  :/  Blogs bother me, because you get to them and there's some big mess of "nothing" (on a lot of them), and you don't even know what the point of a lot of them is.  On exception:  The HubPages blog has actual article-type things on it, and because it pertains to HubPages (and is, of course, well written  :)  ) I'll read that.  I know a lot of blogs aren't a big mess of foolishness, but I don't want to be wading through all that stuff that "makes me mean" in order to find something I feel like being bothered reading.  :/

I like books, newspapers, magazines - even "real-life" local phone books.  :/  (The Internet often makes a bigger deal out some things than a basic thing, like a phone book, does.)

...and I don't expect anyone else to read any of the stuff I write either.   :lol:  :lol:    really.   :lol:

Unfinished Rambling About Duplicate Content and My Writing Identity-Crisis

Here's more true junk.  This little display of rambling and lack of direction truly lost its way.  I don't have a lot of hope for turning this one into anything any better than it is.

The question of whether or not HubPages should allow duplicate content was raised on the HubPages forums.  Both on that thread, and in plenty of other places on HubPages and online, any number of arguments against allowing duplicate content can be found.   This Hub isn't intended to resurrect that same side of the duplicate-content debate (particularly since on HubPages the duplicate-content thing is a "done deal" and well past being debated.  Before moving onto to my own view of the duplicate-content matter, I would just like to mention that one argument against allowing duplicate content is that it would help to cut down on the number of scammers, spammers, and thieves who post the products of their efforts as Hubs.  My thinking is that there are other ways for any writing to cut down on some of questionable stuff that gets posted.  Personally, I know exactly what I'd do if I were running my own writing site, but I also know that my writing site wouldn't have the numbers of members that a site like HubPages has.

In any case, I'm not qualified to presume to tell anyone who runs a writing site how to run their business.

As I thought about my own stand on the matter of duplicate content, what emerged for me was the crystallization of something I haven't quite put a name on, but something that has been working away at me for age now - and that is, I seem to live in a "chronic identity crisis" when it comes to my online writing.  In offline life, my identity if as rock-solid as anyone could imagine (more rock-solid than a lot of people could imagine).   I guess the thing is, you can't have an identity crisis until you have an identity; and in online writing, you don't have an identity unless/until you write long enough see one emerge.

A Writing Identity-Crisis

In “real” life, that rock-solid identity of which I’m so certain goes back as far as I can remember.  I knew who I was, what I liked, and what I wanted at three years old.  Depending the individual situation, family or friends have often referred to either how unwavering I’ve “always been”, or how “inflexible”.  The thing about “rock solid” is, of course, that it doesn’t tend to go with the flow.  Instead, “rock solid” keeps being whatever it is and stays wherever it is, and lets the flow do its flowing around it.

A contradiction is that, by virtue of that rock-solid identity, the person who has it can be so secure in it, he feels free to take his little, rock-sold, self to wherever the wind blows, or wherever his heart leads; because he’s sure enough of himself, and his identity, not to worry that winds nor disappointed hearts will alter his core. 

If there’s one thing in life that represents “where the winds blow”, it’s the Internet.  My rock-sure identity and I lived quite awhile in a world where there was no Internet.  Then, of course, the Internet was created; and the winds blew me and my identity onto it.  The lure of being able to write whatever I wanted to write pulled me farther into it.  For a long time, I didn’t have all that much writing on the Internet, so it certainly didn’t feel as if it had taken on an identity of its own.  As I wrote more and more (about a broad range of subjects, and in styles aimed to be appropriate for them); my online writing grew into something that seemed to become an entity, in itself. 

The best way to describe how it has felt would be to say it’s felt like an invisible cloud, or else blob, that looms off to the side of my life, in need of a name, a definition, a categorization, and a better defined purpose.   In the scheme of the rest of my life, and in the scheme of all of the world’s writing throughout history, I hold that invisible “cloud” (or “blob”) in fairly low regard.  I’m a snob, and a snob toward something whose purpose doesn’t deserve such low regard.  That “cloud/blob”, in all its questionable worth and uninvited status, is also actually a friend to me.  Sometimes it’s even like a child to me.  It doesn’t have a voice of its own (after all, it’s an invisible cloud/blob), but it’s always calling for my attention and asking me help it define itself.

When you play tennis in your spare time; you get out your tennis gear, go play tennis, see whatever the fruits of your pastime turn out to be, and go home with your gear and your memory of how things went that day.  When you write in your spare time, you live with your gear because you use the same equipment to write as you use for a lot of other things in life.  With writing, the fruits of your pastime (or part-time job, depending on how you see it at any given time) remain longer after you stop writing.  In the days when all writing was on paper (or even, I suppose, on cave walls), the writing was something concrete (even if the ideas it represented were not).  With Internet writing, you could print up as many copies of whatever you write as you want, but as long as your writing is “out there”, “out there” will always be what makes up that invisible cloud that involves ideas suspended somewhere between the mind and the world, without a way to know if they’ve ever landed and without the sense of closure that closing a book offers both readers and writers.

I guess, for me, what has happened is that that invisible entity, which is far from part of my own identity, has attached itself in my life (my own fault for writing, I know), and grown to the point where I feel as if I have to either shake it off or else give it better definition.  That invisible cloud is, for me, both a likable companion and a contemptible burden.  I could easily rid myself of it by killing it, but I’ve put a lot of time and effort into the components of which it is made.  There have been times when I’ve had the overwhelming urge to print everything I’ve ever put online, and the close down all writing account.  That, however, would be a lot of work, not to mention the paper, printers, and storage space it would use up.

These days we’re supposed to enjoy the luxury of being able to store our millions of words on teensy flash drives or on someone’s website (and for free).  Those of us for whom some of the allure of writing has been the idea that someone -  in some future generation might find our words on brittle, yellowed, pages in a dusty hat-box – may think about the ever-changing means through which we create and store data files, and the fact that there is sometimes something to be said for paper that gets brittle, yellows, yet remains readable for a very long time.

Then, too, there are always questions about which writing will actually be worth saving and reading.  Great and lofty ideas are, of course, always worth preserving.  Then again, how many great and lofty ideas does anyone ever come up with in their Internet writing?  On the other hand, sometimes it isn’t those “great and lofty” ideas that hold the most value or meaning to any reader.  Sometimes it’s the simplest of words that give us the best glimpse into life and history.  The words and pictures on a first-grade child’s handmade birthday card to her mother or father can sometimes say far more about life and people than even the greatest classic literature may.  No, I may not know how much of my writing I want preserved, or how much ought to be preserved; but I don’t want to kill the invisible, intangible, cloud that would embody my writing if that cloud had a body.

In all my ponderings about what should survive, what should go, and what should printed and stored in a hat-box (if I actually ever have any hats or hat-boxes, of course), I’ve covered the bases when it comes to writing sites, which could change or close at a moment’s notice.  Trust me:  For all the zillions of things I have online, I have zillions of copies and duplicate copies and duplicate-duplicate copies.

While the copies of writing files stored on my PC (and flash drives) remain within my personal reach, and are therefore not part of what makes up that invisible cloud; the thoughts and facts the words contained in them represent are very much a part of that cloud.  As an Internet writer (and one who is already struggling with sorting out any number of things on any number of levels), I like things kept simple when it comes to actually doing the Internet writing.  As a person who hasn’t yet neatly categorized and packaged any number of writing endeavors (which remain only side issues in a life that isn’t just about writing or working), I need things kept simple.

Back to the Subject of HubPages and Duplicate Content

For me, one of the biggest things that continue to make HubPages appealing to me is that writing on HubPages is simple and comfortable, and there's aren't a whole lot of rigid rules and formats that make writing online more of a big deal than some people want to make it.

There's a huge, huge, mix of people who are Hubbers.    It's probably not necessary to go over who makes up that huge mix, but I'm not one to let "not-necessary" stop me from adding a few (or a lot) of words to whatever I'm writing.   Anyway, some Hubbers see their Hub-writing as a kind of extension to their day job.  The marketing person may write Hubs as part of an overall larger marketing interest.  The person who writes one kind of thing for a company may write that same kind of thing on HubPages.  Then there are the people for whom writing Hubs is more of a supplement to their day job (full- or part- time).  It doesn't matter what any of this group does for a day job.  They're here to earn some spare money, and their aim is to make their Hubbing more of a second-job.  There are even people (at-home moms, retired people, etc.) who view their writing here as a mini-job.  Either way, these are all people who view their Hub-writing as a job or something related to a job.

Then there are the people who "are only here to write and don't care about earning anything".  Some take the craft of writing very seriously.  Some see it as a nice way to spend some spare time.  This group usually wants their writing read.  A sub-group of this group are the truly, purely creative, writers (most of whom, I'm guessing, take their writing very seriously), who do aspire to earn a living with their work but who realize that living won't likely be earned on a site like HubPages.

There are the "I've-always-loved-to-write" writers, and the "I'm-here-to-learn-to-how-to-write-better" writers.  Neither of these two types of writers are (I'd assume) all that likely to do anything very questionable or seedy, as members of HubPages.  While no group is ever completely free of scammers, sleazers, and inadvertent-mistake makers; these two types of writers tend to be the kind who appreciate what a site like HubPages offers them.

Well, I don't really fit into any one of those groups, but then again I fit into all of them in a lot ways.  In any case, and from a completely selfish standpoint, I'm very much in favor of HubPages continuing to allow duplicate content.  As I said above, I like the fact that writing on HubPages doesn't involve a whole, big, structured, deal before writing even gets to be published.  Personally, I wouldn't mind if things weren't published until someone reviewed them.  My complaint about a lot of writing sites is the "boxing in" and structure that's often involved before the writer even begins to write.  Things are freer on HubPages, and I like that.  Having the option to post the occasional piece of my own duplicate content is also part of that freedom.  Another part of that freedom is the freedom to remove my own Hubs if I want to.

A lot of other writing sites (the ones with the structure and the rules against things like duplicate content, or no option to delete articles) will send the message, "We aim to be a site for professionally written articles, and we aim for consistency - all because we want to help you earn as much from your work as possible."  The thing is, though, a lot of people with a whole lot of writing on some of those sites aren't earning what people earn on HubPages.

I'm not suggesting that HubPages is some big, "wild, free", site run by people who aren't interested in quality.  There's a whole lot of interest in quality on this site, and that's evidenced in any number of things written and announced by the HubPages team.  It's just that, at least for now, this site seems to manage to emphasize quality without seeing the need for a lot of nitty-gritty format boxing in, and without taking away some freedoms from writers.

First, I'm not a big pusher of duplicate content, and the vast majority of my Hubs are not duplicate material.   If HubPages became one of those sites that said, "If you post duplicate content your account will be immediately terminated, and Google will hate you forever," it wouldn't be the end of the world.  It would, however, take away some of the niceness of a site that's a little more flexible with its contributors.

Unlike people who neatly fit into some of those types I mentioned above, as an online writer I find that, more and more, I'm writing my way into an identity crisis, of sorts.  When I first began writing online it was just something I stumbled into, and it was something that was "better than watching television in my spare time".  Originally, the only real reason I started to write online was to dust off my writing-on-demand skills.  (I'd worked on assignment for newspapers years earlier, but over time I'd found myself writing in one area, about one thing (for the most part), most of working hours.)

So, besides some other writing sites, I signed up with HubPages and started looking at the "requests" section to see what answers I could challenge myself with.  I'd done something similar with Helium titles.  Heck, I'd done an embarrassing amount of something similar with Yahoo Answers, for that matter.  Because I do find writing enjoyable, I found challenging myself this way in my spare time fun, as well as - maybe - good practice.

With a mostly empty profile page, and before writing many (if any) Hubs, I thought I'd load in a small handful of articles I'd written on other sites.  I knew the thing with articles competing with themselves in search engines, and I knew the thing about how they weren't going to do well.  I didn't care.  I figured, if someone were to run into my profile, I, as a writer, would at least look like I had a little something "legitimate" and of quality offered with my profile.  I figured, too; search engines and Google-blessings aside, it looked better to readers browsing HubPages to run into Hubbers who looked like they took writing on HubPages seriously.  So, with that small handful of duplicate articles, I felt as if both HubPages and I looked just a little more polished to anyone browsing.

Because I wanted to show what I thought was my best spare-time work, I selected articles that I believed were that.  I wasn't about fooling anyone, or trying to earn money.  It was nothing more than wanting a profile that offered a few decent looking pieces of work (all of which were my own, of course); because, to my thinking, an empty profile looked just that - empty.  There was one thing I was sure of, and that was that nobody wanted to land on my profile with nothing but some information about me, and barely any writing.  That's like going into a store, only to discover that the shelves are all empty.

I didn't really believe I'd be earning anything on HubPages, so I just kept answering those requests as if the person asking the question were a friend, and as if I were simply giving my best answers to that friend.  After several weeks of that kind of thing I got sick of it and found some other way to spend some of my spare time foolishly.  After abandoning (for the most part) the approach of writing Hubs in response to (sometimes very weird) questions/requests, I didn't really know what I wanted to write. 

The thing is, I write for "real work" (income) in my "real" life.  I also write for no money in my "real" life, with the idea that I may/will sell what I've written and eventually get money for it.  I've also spent many years working on volumes of legal writing.  Some of my offline work is related to the field where I have the most background, which is medical/scientific areas; so I do seem to have a tendency to always be spending time on projects that tend to generate headaches (even if not of the physiological variety).

Separate from these work-/earning-/money- focused writing endeavors, I have a fairly epic and serious personal story that's related to "social issues" and that could best be presented in the form of a lengthy report, submitted to the right authorities (that is, if I wanted to either try to sell it to someone as a consultant, or else if I just wanted to do the "save-the-world" thing of handing it over free, and hoping someone would pay attention).

Money and/or altruism aside, that same story is one that I need to tell in its entirety, but can't - because of privacy concerns for myself and people I care about.  This story that I need out there is one that can't be complete without some details, because in so many ways it's the smaller details that would make the story as horrifying and shocking as it would potentially be to any reader.  In any case, because I can't tell the whole story it's particularly unsatisfying to imagine telling parts of it.  So, for now anyway, this story is one I can't tell, even if I need to.  I've not ruled out the idea of putting together that "report" in the form of a book, and trying to get it published.  For now, though, the matter of the story that needs to get out remains up in the air.

In the meantime, to be honest and as a writer, I don't care a whole lot about any of those other projects or types of writing I do.  None of it means any more to me than, say, envelope-stuffing (do people really have those jobs stuffing envelopes, I wonder?) or french-fry scooping (which I've never done, by the way, but I'm guessing it's not very rewarding).  For a writer (or a non-writer, for that matter), there's a big difference between "a project I'd really love to take on" and "a story I, as a person, need out".  In any case, I have my "real" work and my "spare-time" writing, so that story that needs to be out there just kind of looms everywhere without anything ever happening with it.

Then there's writing that I might, in ways, benefit from doing (mostly because a part of me wants these out there too) but won't ever do; and that's "inner-most thoughts" kind of writing.  When it comes to "inner-most thoughts writing", I NEVER share those when they're happening.  I may consider sharing a fraction of some long after I've processed them into something more "intellectual" (rather than something of present emotional impact).  And, of course, being both polite (with regard to other people) and proud (with regard to myself), there are a lot of things I just wouldn't ever share - ever.

On the other hand, and in spite of a certain amount of Fort-Knox-like security; there has always been what I call my "hat-box writing".   This is the writing I do because I'm a mother, and because I want to leave some kinds of writing, family history, and/or wisdom for my children and any future grandchildren to find one day.  There's no real hat box right now, and it isn't likely I'll ever really move any of this writing to one.  I pretty much keep even this writing on my PC and/or in a metal file box - not to mention a cardboard box full of floppy disks that may or may not have survived time,   

The point is, I'm someone who lives with the written word always, always, calling me to remind me there's some project I need to be doing, for one reason or another.  It doesn't help that, besides the writing I have to do, and the writing I want to do, and the writing I think I ought to do for one reason or another; there's the part of me that sees all of life and all of everything else as a potential article; and with any number of thoughts or incidents or remarks that I run into on any given day, the beginnings of articles and books open up new "mental files" for themselves, waiting for me to return when the time is right.

I've always enjoyed writing.  I like the science and the art to put words together, and I like the clicking of the keyboard keys.  I'd say it isn't really the writing I like, but the typing; but even without a keyboard nearby, the putting words together "for later typing" goes on.  Some people say they love writing.  I kind of hate it, in some ways.  It's often as old and boring to me as walking across the kitchen floor or buying groceries.  It's always, always, that same "writer's voice" I'm hearing, and I'm sick of hearing that same voice.  (How do you change your writer's voice, I wonder?  Can people do that?)

Where the identity crisis comes, I guess, is that some people can see writing as their work.  I'm guessing if the work is being a writer, a  shoe salesman or pizza-maker, there's that thing where a person sees himself in relationship to his work (I do it, myself) - end of story.  ("Here's me.  Here's my work/job/profession.")  On the other hand, I'm guessing there are people who "do their whole life" separate from any online writing, but who use it as, say, someone else uses crossword puzzles.  ("Here's me.  Here's the thing I do when I have nothing better to do.  No confusion or blurred lines here.")

Then, I suppose, there are the creative writers for whom their creativity runs through their veins, and for whom "the rest of life" is actually a sideline, or sorts.  ("I am my writing - and, oh, by the way, there's the rest of my life over there.")   I'm far from that kind of person.  What I would say would be more along the lines of, "Here's me and my life - and, oh, by the way, there's some of the crap I've written over there.  You may run into something good here or there, I guess."  OR, I might say something like, "Here's me and a bunch of the interests I have in life...   Oops.  Turns out I seem to have only one interest in life, doesn't it?"

If this were entirely true there wouldn’t be much need for, or cause of, any identity crisis.  One problem for me is that, for all that the writing thread runs through my life, writing is, in fact, also something that isn’t so much “an interest”, as it is something I do even though, in a lot of ways, I’m not all that interested in doing it.  Writing is, for me, more like walking.  I do it because I can (just as a lot of people do).  I do it because I have to get somewhere, or because it’s easier to do it than figure out another way to do what I want to do (accomplish what I want to accomplish) some other way.  Like walking, writing serves many purposes for me.  Unlike walking, writing can involve the intellect, even the “soul”, often the heart (although equally often, perhaps, nothing more than typing skills and a preference to pay the bills).

In other words, I have that invisible-entity and cloud  I described earlier.  When I sign up at a writing site, that invisible cloud is pretty much tethered to me by an equally invisible cord. 

I'd say "to be continued", but I highly doubt it this will be either continued or cleaned up.  Who knows, though....   Moods to write about one thing or another come and go.

Unfinished Thing About The Internet and Baby Boomers

Now this one is truly junk:

The Internet is something most of us have come to take for granted, so those of us old enough to recall a world without the Internet sometimes need to take a minute to be kind of amazed at how quickly the Internet went from birth to what it is today.  Those of us not old enough to recall a world without an Internet can't even imagine it.

Growing Up A Second-Wave Baby Boomer

In order to share the perspective from which I view both the world and the Internet, I suppose I should share that I'm a Baby Boomer.  Because the perspective and experiences of Baby Boomers can be slightly different, depending on which "wave" of the Baby Boom it was that swept them into American society; I'll mention that I'm, I guess, a "second-wave" Baby Boomer.  There's actually another reason I feel the need to make it very clear that I'm a second-wave Boomer, and that is my apparent insecurity about having to admit that I'm over 45 in public, and on the Internet about which I write.  The thing is, there is the "real world" (the offline world).  Then there's the "Internet world", which is sometimes only the Internet world but sometimes a blend of both real world and Internet world.  Then again, with its role in the real world, one can't forget that the Internet and the real world are also, in most ways, all part of the same universe.

Whether or not someone is considered a "Baby Boomer" depends, of course, on whether he was born in those years following the end of World War II, when the peace, prosperity, and American Dream that followed the war's end resulted in the population phenomenon that would result in a seismic shift in American society and culture.  Exactly, which years are encompassed by the term, "Baby Boom", depends on who (and for what purposes) is defining that term, but the narrower (and most commonly used) definition of the Baby Boom is generally associated with the ten years following the end of World War II.

In any case, I always like to point out that I'm a second-wave Boomer, not just to hang onto any shreds of illusion associated with "not yet being THAT old", but because have actually been fairly noticeable social and economic differences between first-wave Boomer, second-wave Boomers, and "end-wave" Boomers (who sometimes aren't even really considered "Boomers" at all).

Even as a second-wave Boomer, my high-school graduating class marked a peak in terms of number of students (246, I believe) for the barely developed suburb to which my family had moved from the city.  I assume that was a matter of a first influx of Boomer parents moving into the town and having younger siblings for their first-wave-Boomer kids; with the parents slightly younger than my own reaching the financial stability to buy one of the plentiful, new, homes to which they could move from cities.  Some differences between my older sister's (and even older girl-cousins') place in the wave and my own was that I got to be among the first generation of girls to play with Barbie dolls; I get to count myself among the many, former, Romper Room viewers; and long, straight, hair was the most popular hairstyle shown in pictures in my high-school yearbook.  (One girl in my high-school yearbook did have "a tease job", but who knows what her problem was....  but I digress.)

Another difference between first-wave Boomers and second-wave Boomers may be reflected in careers that were highly valued for high-school kids of the first wave, as compared to those that were most valued for second-wave kids.  When my older, boy-cousins, made their parents proud by pursing degrees in business; aunts, uncles, and cousins all had faith that each of those future business-men would live an impressive, admired, and comfortable, lifestyle.  It's probably worth noting that this kind of thinking was, I think, fairly typical of the suburban, middle-class (partly White Collar/partly Blue Collar) environment in which I lived.

By the time kids of my graduating class had begun thinking about careers, first-wave Boomers were already in college, or had recently graduated, and had already either created, or been influenced by, "The Peace Movement".  Peace, love, drugs, and hating "The Man" , "The System", "The Establishment", and anyone over thirty was a common thread of thinking for those first-wave Boomers.  By the time I was over the age when my friends and I were considering careers and educational pursuits, "The Businessman" wasn't held in awfully high esteem for a lot of kids (or teachers).

There were, I'm sure, kids for whom business and management was what their fathers did, and who knew their fathers weren't "horrible and corrupt people".  A lot of these kids did grow up disregarding the then-popular contempt for business and going into business.  Then again, there were kids who didn't think much about their business-man-father's values and who vowed never to be like their father.  The point is that while there were certainly people of my age who went into business, a lot of the bloom had worn off the being-a-business-man rose. 

Alongside the major shifts in a lot of the thinking at the time, advances in technology had blossomed to the point where not seeing where technology was taking the workforce and the economy would have required even the least tuned-in of Americans to close his eyes, or else turn his back on the world completely.

to be continued - or not.

Attempt to Answer Parent's Question About An Out-of-Control 4-Year-Old

Since he behaves in school it's not very likely he's a child who can't control the behavior if he wants to. Chances are there are a few different things at play here (although I can only guess what they may be).

Chances are you haven't managed to come across to him with a calm, but "take-it-for-granted-I'm-in-charge", demeanor. That comes from having a "middle ground" voice that is neither too sweet and "baby-talk-ish" or one that is loud and yelling. Kids respect parents most when parents are nice to them but come across as "the leader". If parents establish themselves as a "kind leader" who tells right from wrong but who is also interested in the child's needs, kids tend to behave better for them. It's kind of like building a foundation on which all "encounters" will be built.

Part of that foundation also, though, has to include pleasant time alone with the child, with the chance for you to talk calmly about your expectations of him, as well as "how nice people act". There should be regular talks about this kind of thing, but they should just be about how people should act in general and what the benefits are for being calm and treating others with respect. This kind of conversation is a good chance to state - on no uncertain terms - "I don't yell at you, and I don't call you bad names; and you are not going to yell at me or call me bad words either. People at home love you more than anybody in the world does, and that is not how we treat the people who loves us."

I'm wondering if he's around older kids. Not only do older kids make a "great example" of how to talk with disrespect (because they can be talk really disrespectfully to littler kids), but they (or anyone who talks with disrespect to a small child) can create a bad cycle of the little kid's feeling bad, feeling mistreated, and acting out in anger. Also, little kids can get particularly frustrated if they try to keep up with older ones, if older ones continually frustrate them, and/or if adults don't seem to notice that they need some positive attention and a break from the frustration.

Also, a child who never, ever, gets what he wants may have a "low frustration tolerance point" and be more likely to be absolutely angry and frustrated if he can't get what he wants. When it comes to what you let him have and not have, ask yourself if you need to pick your battles, based on how important something is; and once in a while give him some of the minor things he may want. I'm not saying give in to him all the time. If, by any chance, this is part of the problem, let him know you are the one who decides what he gets and what he doesn't; but sometimes parents just won't let a child do/have anything he wants, and that can make him think, "Why bother trying to please this person who never lets me do/have anything." Certainly, don't give in on the important things; but maybe ask if you refuse a few too many less important things he wants. (Not saying you are, only mentioning one possible problem.) I'm just wondering if he feels that somebody (a parent or older sibling) is "ordering him around", because children often really do "learn what they live". (As in Dorothy Law Nolte's poem, "Children Learn What They Love" :) )

What may work is having yet another of those calm, pleasant, but "leader" talks; and saying something like, "We are not going to have yelling and kicking things when something is bothering you. If you are unhappy or angry tell me, and we'll try to figure out how to make you feel happy again. We won't have yelling, though, and if you do yell at me then I won't buy you one single thing when we got out, and you will know why. And, if you yell at me or kick anything I will take away your (favorite activity here) until you tell me you are sorry and won't do it again." Since you haven't managed to make the naughty chair effective I wouldn't keep using it. Whatever consequences you dole out must be effective, because he has now become used to not letting anything "get to him".

If there are others in the house who talk to him without respect tell them they cannot do it. He's a very little boy and may need some kind of "protection" from anything he perceives as "mistreatment" or frustration of older people. If he thinks you'll protect him from being treated poorly by others (even in small ways that nobody realizes is as hurtful/frustrating to a small child as they may be) he'll be yet that much more interested in "working with you" on learning the right way "nice people act".

Tell him (in a calm, authoritative, but kind way) that anyone who demands will get nothing. Asking nicely is "what nice people do". Don't give in to any demands, but don't let anyone else demand anything of him either.

Hope some of these things helps. (Also, try not to look at, say, a week's worth of his behavior and start seeing him as a "naughty" kid. Deal with, and view, each incident on a case by case basis; and try to let negative views of him color all your interactions or your relationship with him.) When a little, tiny, child like he acts up most of the time it means there's something underneath that makes him generally feel frustrated, "at loose ends" and not interested in cooperating with others. It may also mean, though, that he has learned lack of respect and demanding from someone else and just modeled it (without really knowing that's what he's doing).