Category: Blogging

Someone in St. Louis found this post and read a couple other recent musings on the news:

I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to speculate as I have, whether this is:

• The newspaper columnist.
• The city’s revenue collector named in the quote.
• An intern at a law firm involved in the litigation.

I know who the Duke of Wellington was:

I KNOW nothing should surprise us these days about dumbed-down Britain. But an article on the moronic Mail Online website the other day had me choking on my cornflakes.

It read: ‘In 2020, Mandy Lieu, 38, bought 935-acre Ewhurst Park in Hampshire, once owned by the inventor of the wellington boot, the Duke of Wellington, and vowed to turn it into a world-class organic farm and nature reserve.’

The inventor of the wellington boot!

Good grief, I know teaching of British history is nowadays outrageously skewed and bowdlerised, but I didn’t realise things had got this bad.

Sharpe’s Trafalgar only mentions the duke in passing. The pompous politician or his wife is a distant cousin.

By the end of the year I shall know a heckuva lot more about the Napoleonic wars, and I should probably read the firsthand account of his retreat from Russia that I have around here somewhere.

(Link via Sarah Hoyt on Instapundit.)

I mentioned Charles Hill / Dustbury a little over a week ago, and the Daily Star is helping to keep his legacy alive with Zooey Deschanel’s hottest snaps- from short plunging dresses to toned torso display.

Not a Zooeypalooza by any stretch of the imagination. And, to be honest, the Daily Star and its writers probably never heard of Charles.

But those of us who did remember.

In his Sunday Night Open Thread post (subscribers only), Jack Baruth mentions Dustbury:

I was right about it, and most of my peers were wrong. But, as my old friend Charles G Hill once said, it hardly matters now.

He links to his post eulogizing Charles Hill (available to the public).

We bloggers, no matter what media, have to keep each others’ memories alive since they’re more ephemeral than most ephemera.

Doiing my bit, on Facebook on this day in 2011, I posted:

Brian J. Noggle confesses that, whenever he sees a Hyundai Equus, he wants to smash its headlights.

and Charles got it, commenting:

Way too literary for this crowd.

Definitely a well-read fellow.

Oh, and I’ve only subscribed to four or five Substacks in my time, and Avoidable Contact is the only subscription I’ve kept up. Make of that what you will, but you should make it into an endorsement.

Severian said today:

And yeah, I deliberately chose Taylor Swift, because she’s pretty much already an AI. As I’m sure I’ve written, I “admire” her in a way, for a certain deeply cynical value of “admire” — Sir John Hawkwood himself wasn’t that openly mercenary (did I mention that one of the reasons I love this place is that I can drop an allusion to Sir John Hawkwood and bet everyone will get it?).

Yeah, I got it. After all, I read John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy fifteen years ago and briefly tried to get the Internet to replace Chuck Norris jokes with John Hawkwood gags (such as John Hawkwood invented the color Burnt Sienna. Poor Sienna.). I also had the domain name johnhawkwood.com for a number of years before I started culling my portfolio (I’m down to 18).

It makes one feel smaht to get allusions and references, and it’s cool to drop them into conversations. Even when nobody gets it.

The blog turns 20 today. It started on Blogger and Blogspot in the days before blog posts over there had titles; in January 2010, I switched over to WordPress and my own domain (I think the first post is this one), and I have since imported all the Blogspot content here and cleaned it up to replace all the internal links to point to this blog and to replace my old Amazon affiliate links with my new Amazon affiliate links (which are now also old Amazon affiliate links, as Amazon kicked me out of the program again, this time because you cheap bastards gentle readers weren’t buying anything through them).

I started it after having read other blogs for a couple of years. I had just finished my novel John Donnelly’s Gold, and I thought a blog would be a good place for me to post essays–something to keep me writing daily, or at least semi-regularly.

But it didn’t work out that way; instead, I found myself posting short, snarky bits on news items. You know, like a blog. More of a linker than a thinker (which was not the original intent, note), but I guess I found I did not have the time to write a well-reasoned essay every day.

Ah, in those early years, I was quite up there in blogs. I was in the top, what, 5000 blogs on the planet (according to the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem). Of course, there were fewer blogs then, and they tended to be individual blogs. And then the consolidations came.

I didn’t really make a whole lot of blog friends, or blog contacts that led me into the wider blog industry. I mean, some people have made a go of it for fifteen years, whether supplementing income or deriving side income from blogging, but I never got called up to the bigs. I did some work for 24th State for a while, but that has been, what, a decade? And I never hit the big time.

These days, I’m mostly writing book reports and thoughts on movies I’ve seen interspersed with stories from my life, little humor bits, and the occasional snarky bit of commentary on the news. I’m not overly political these days because frankly, that’s wearying and boring. I can’t work up the same zeal for it as I did twenty years ago.

But I write it mostly for myself, gentle reader, for myself in a couple of years when I’m wandering back in the archives for some reason–looking to see what I thought about a particular book (and surprised how much time has elapsed since I read it) and then wandering a couple posts forward or back.

I hope you continue to find some amusement in some of the posts. Or, at very least, pleasing photos of actresses on select movie reports.