Category: Blogging

As I mentioned, gentle reader, I mostly do this blog for my own entertainment, as I like to prowl through my archives, often using the visit counter’s note of a random search engine hit as a starting point, wherein I read the post that the visitor browsed, and then I start next posting or previous posting to see what else I might have been doing/thinking/reading at that time.

So somehow, I got to browsing my archives, when I got to a post from last March about Tide’s Fresh Linen scent called Unlike The Other Leading Brands.

In recent memory, I did another post with the same gag, albeit presented differently, this very month: What Do Clean Clothes Washed With Other Varieties Of Tide Smell Like?

Sorry for the reruns. I’m getting to be like that old guy who keeps telling the same stories over and over again. Just ask my children.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from Korea. The Good Korea:

I don’t know what to make of it; it looks like the IP address from Kakao is actually owned by Kakao and hasn’t been reassigned to something like Google with an old entry showing up in my stats.

I assume this means that I’ve suddenly been indexed by a South Korean search engine or that somehow elevated in its rankings.

But, of course, I don’t wonder if it’s not something more sinister like some kind of hacking attempt or probe.

Still, welcome to the blog, Mr., Mrs., and/or Miss Park.

Is that racist, to use a popular Korean surname, one held by 8.4% of the population, in that statement? No more than saying “Keeping up with the Joneses” is somehow classist, denigrating social climbers who don’t know their place in society (or yours, peasant, so don’t try to spend your way to success and fulfillment). However, I am pretty sure saying Park is a common Korean last name is racist if you want to call someone who uses it racist.

I posted last week about Ice Pirates.

Today, the Who Dis? part of the Morning Rant is Mary Crosby and Robert Urich of Ice Pirates.

So, is OregonMuse a lurker here at MfBJN?

If so, welcome, OM! If not, leave me to my illusions.

A sizeable percentage of my blog traffic remains people finding my review of The Sire de Maletroit’s Door.

I don’t know why this is, but I fully expect something sinister.

I’ve made a slight config change to the blog. Instead of streaming whole posts to feed readers, I’ve changed it to only sending a summary, which makes some readers who were invisible to my stat tracker suddenly appear.

Wow, hey, I do have readers.

Thanks, and I hope it’s not too inconvenient to gratify my ego by clicking through.

The Artist Formerly Known As The One Hand Clapping Guy notes that he receives a lot of traffic from Spain.

Here at MfBJN, we’ve had more of an international flavor of traffic over the last couple of days:

I have no idea why this is. I do spend time speculating, though

What I do know, though, is that the book report for The Sire de Maletroit’s Door continues to be my most popular book report and one of the most-read blog posts ever. For some reason.

You know, I think we could have gotten along at that.

Kevin McGehee says that I don’t count:

As evidenced by my reduced blogging frequency in recent months, the loss of my only known occasional reader is not the sole cause of the Tally Book’s dearth of content; it’s a cause, but not the only one.

Oh, I am nothing, am I? I’ve kept you in my blogroll all this time even though you kept changing the URL to confuse me?

Bear in mind, son, we only declared a truce or got bored with the blog war. We never signed a peace treaty.

But I agree with him on this:

Another big part of it is that, when it comes to things political and social, the only thought that ever occurs to me anymore is to wonder whether it’s possible to roll one’s eyes so hard and so often that they eventually just pop right out of their sockets.

You might have noticed, gentle reader, that this particular blog has also gotten less focused on the news and politics since its inception. But that’s because after the first decade, you realize that you’re just repeating yourself and that history, or at least governments and politicians, repeats and without much, if any, improvement or learning.

So, yeah, you get twee book reports that are a couple of paragraphs about what the book made me think of and pictures or stories of life. And by “you,” I mean “me in a couple of months or years when I stumble back upon each post.” Or when I have to crawl the archives again trying to update all the YouTube links because it has again changed its embedding format. As I fixed in one of the posts from the 2006 Blog Yee Hawd.

But enough about me. Kevin McGehee is responsible for bee colonoscopy collapse disorder.

Wow, back in the day, I had a lot of blogs.

Here’s one I’d forgotten: Pop-Up Mocker.

It was me riffing on pop-up ads before pop-up blockers became standard in Web browsers.

Circa 2005.

This post violates the oath I swore on the blog back in 2004:

I won’t tell you again!

Here I am, fourteen and a half years later, flogging it.

Well, not really, but I did dedicate a lot more time to the blog in the distant past, such as that one time I put together a pod cast to make fun of something John Kerry said extraneously a couple presidential elections ago: World Exclusive!

As with the photoshops, they’re fewer these days. Where did the time go? And I don’t mean the passage of the years: I mean all the time I had every day.

Oh, yes. Children. A better use of the time, surely.

Brian J., March 2012

I went into the nursery last week, and I asked to see the Lileks.

“What?” the man asked.

“The Lileks,” I said. Well, it’s not what I tried to say, but that’s what it sounded like.

“Oh, the lilacs,” he said.

Lileks, today:

Also: next door neighbor is out back for a smoke, waves to me in the dusk, asks a favor. I come over.

“What’s up?”

“We have a dear sweet old lady coming over for dinner tomorrow,” he said. “And she just loves Lileks.”

“Well I would be honored to drop by and pay a visit,” I say, thinking as long as you’re not asking me to stay for the whole dinner, sure – pop in during dessert, surprise the old lady.

“I mean the lilacs.” He points to the bushes. “I wondered if I could snip a few.”

I included a picture in 2012 of the lilacs I hopefully planted around our propane tank. They lasted a couple years. Then we had a couple years of years of sunflowers. Then a year of tall grasses that I thought were sunflowers when they sprouted, but clearly they lacked, you know, flowers. This year, I went with hydrangea bushes. Which are almost already dead.

One of the reasons we moved to Nogglestead was to have more space for gardening, which apparently here at Nogglestead means “Making room for the Bermuda grass.” I’m beginning to wonder if that will be one of the reasons we move out.

As part of my marketing push, such as it is, for my collection of poetry entitled Coffee House Memories, I’ve started posting actual memories on the Web site.

The first one is about my reading poetry in the middle of the night on a radio station at the behest of a fellow who ran the open mike night at the Oasis coffee house and who was a substitute disc jockey at KDHX.

You can read that memory here.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m coming my archives to ensure posts have categories, and it’s an interesting and tedious process, but it uncovers a lot of nuggets.

Like this post, where I tell Steve Jobs the iPhone should have voice interaction.

I wonder if that’s actionable? Surely, some shady attorney somewhere would give it a wing.