THE MEANING OF HUB

Hubpages! Since 2006. Started out in a garage in Berkeley. Boy, does that sound familiar! And a little suspicious! What were those three guys doin’ in that garage? Being that it was Berkeley, maybe they were planning some kind of social revolution or designing bombs that sprayed the population with chocolate syrup or left plumes of weed smoke drifting over the drop zone and beyond. Or maybe they were stone sober, just working on their wheels, banging out old hubcaps or just killing time, kicking a can! Stone-sober. What a phrase, one "d" short of an oxymoron. But it all resulted in Hubpages.

I must say, the questions and answer posts not withstanding, I’ve been generally impressed with the Hubpages, and apparently millions of others have as well. Of course, one has to keep a perspective. What exactly does 90 million page views per month in cyber space terms mean? It may be a small drop in the bucket say compared to views on pornsites. Nevertheless, 90 million is something to hub about, certainly a few more views than I’ve been able to elicit by myself! Just about 90 million more to be exact! Something to hub about . Interesting how this word just keeps taking on new meaning by the second or perhaps by the thought.

So is this site named HUBPAGES because HUBPAGES is an international hub of contemporary minds? Okay, how about alleged minds? Or how about contemporary thinkers, both rational and irrational? Hey, we need irrational thinkers. Without them, we’d still think the earth was flat. Right?

So if this site is a HUB of contemporary thinking, does that make us, as hubbers, spokes? Are we now spokes people? And the phrase, "spoken word?" Does it take on a whole new meaning now? The spoken word is the contents of a hub?

Do you think HUBPAGES was inspired by God? Those three guys were kicking their wheels there in the garage in Berkeley, when God’s voice said, "Say, fellas, let there be hubs."

They looked at each other and simultaneously all three said, "Did you hear that?"

One brave soul looked up into the ceiling of the garage and said, "You talking to us?"

"I am," the voice replied. "Let there be hubs and call them hubpages."

And I am imagining with 90 million page views, God is pleased!

I got to wondering if HUB is an acronym those three guys in the garage made up.

Maybe all three loved to write and were humble enough to title their ramblings HUBS, meaning Holy Unbelievable Bulls***! Or maybe it was a word they used to describe the people in their lives who were jealous of the time they spent together in the garage! "Ah, just another hub in my life" (translated, "Ah, just another holy unbearable babushka in my life."

Well, hey, you sit down and go through the entire friggin dictionary and see what you come up with for an acronym! I bet you CAN come up with some better, and post them in the comment section, please! Rate me up as you do!

Yes, HUB is an interesting word. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Toying with the word, pawing it about in my alleged mind like a cat. When I was a kid, ‘hubba hubba" is what sailors would shout out from a convertible when they saw a good looking woman walking down the street.

I wondered if there’s a connection to Mrs Hub-bard? I also got to wondering what she looked like with her cupboards bare. OH! And, speaking of three guys in a garage in Berkeley, what about that other nursery rhyme? Might it take on a more contemporary meaning with just the slightest of changes. "Hubba dub dub, Three men in a tub....a Blogger, a Yahoo, and a Googler."

And again thinking about those three guys in the garage, no one has created a hub about those three guys in a tub. It’s amazing that way back when, when nursery rhymes were popular, that no one worried about those three guys in the tub. Maybe a premonition or maybe back then, a more down-to-earth way of acknowledging what ordinarily wasn’t "spoken" about. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Wow, those guys were ahead of their time! You can’t tell me that, even back then, no one’s imagination got the best of them! Just exactly what would a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker be doing in a tub besides blowing bubbles. Uh-Oh! Is that adult content? Is my hub going to get rubbed? Well, whatever, no one ever quoted scripture to proclaim that the nursery rhyme Three Men In A Tub was an abomination. Was that an oversight or were we just unbelievably more tolerant in nursery rhyme land?

With at least 120,00 hubbers and growing, the word HUB could become slang for all kinds of human interactions. I was thinking that the next time someone cuts me off on the freeway, I could shout out, "Hub You!" Or the next time someone looks like they need help, I could ask, "Can I hub you?" Or next time I hang up the telepone, I’ll say, "Gotta go, hub you later." or "Gotta go, hub me later."

Hey how does hubbing size up with texting and tweeting?

"Do you tweet?"

"No! Do you hub? Well, I do!"

What about the expression, "hubbing it up?" What might that mean? Could be confused for flubbing it up, but if we all just agreed it was going to mean something positive, (See there, collective consciousness or collective HUBness), then it could mean having fun, or adding something special like a kind of decoration or an enhancement of any kind. Or maybe hubbing it up could have a flavor to it, so it would be like spicing it up!

So conversations could begin to be hubbed up big time.

"I really hub you...do you hub me?....Hub you later, man....For hub’s sake....So you’re just goin’ to hub me right out of your life....No, stupid, I’m going to hub you till death do us part....What’s the hub, man?....Hub up, Dude!....I’ll have a double cheese hubburger on rye with no saucy talk, no pickling around, no let us do this and let us do that. Just a straight forward double cheese hubburger, man....This is not a war, just a hub action....the hub is down three quarters today....the hub on the dow is up 90 million....spam is being replaced by hubs....this new computer has enough hubspace for mother hubbard to never run out....it’s cold out today, I better grab my hubcap....’tis the season for hubs....you have hub in there for this stuff?....you can curse the darkness or write a hub....the new no frills airline, HubAir, where each passenger is given a laptop. Write sufficient hubs during the flight and the flight is free...and now some folks have what is being diagnosed as hubaddiction....I’ve tried stopping cold turkey, but I just keep hubbin for more....so I sit there on Monday night listening to my hubby in the garage talk to these other two guys. It’s just blog de bog de blog de blog....here in Washington, the hub pages all walked out on their respective senators....look, you create this really distracting hub, and then I’ll google the two guys and that one yahoo, and we’ll make off with the dough." That was the Baker talking. Yep, the world is going to be a different place to talk and experience just because of a three letter word, HUB. Well, I guess we could make it a four letter word, HUBS, but then the site would be called HUBSPAGES, like it belonged to some guy by the name of Hub.

Well, probably time for me to finish up this hub, and make a hub to see my therapist some time this week before I go starkhub crazy. I had a nightmare that I was caught in this giant spider hub, where a butcher was making what he called ground hub while a baker was stirring up ingredients into what he called the longest hub in the history of hubs, and the candlemaker was pruning his wicked wit and getting ready to light up what he insisted was the most brilliant hub ever, a thousand points of light he insisted. Then the butcher told him he was just full of h-u-b-s, and the baker said he was ready for a bath and invited the two guys into a tub of hub water where they could hub a dub dub all they wanted.

And, of course, with all the hub on HUBS, the pharmaceuticals will soon come up with a new antidepressant called hubzac and an antianxiety pill called hubnax, and some one will call their twins hubzac and hubnax. And maybe the pharmaceuticals will come up with an antipsychotic for schizophrenic moments like this one, called hubazine.

Well, I have hubbed it up enough, I think, I mean, I hub! To hub or not to hub. That is the question now. May I have your hub for just a few moments. There is a loose hubber on the loose and I think we need something from Amazon to stop him or perhaps someone on Ebay could pay him off to end this, this, this HUB. Someone next store is screaming at me, "Can you please just SHUT THE HUB UP! So I’ll pour myself a single malt hub on the rocks, jump in my hot hubtub, and call it a hub! Now go hub the right thing!