Serious Derby festivities kick off today with...golf!
It used to star with the ceremonial rolling-in of the bourbon barrel. Now, I have to pace myself.
Jonah Lehrer contemplates people we know through blogs:
I feel like I really know my favorite bloggers, in a way that I would never presume to know my favorite novelists or newspaper columnists or magazine writers. Partly, I imagine, it's the informal voice of the blogosphere, and partly it's the enticing mix of idiosyncratic personal information and opinionated commentary that defines the bloggy format. A blog, at least for me, is the writing genre that most closely approximates a friendly conversation.
It's an interesting piece and, as both consumer and producer of blogs, I see a lot of points of resonance in it. That said, when I finished reading the piece I found myself navel-gazing about the things I don't write about here. I don't write about my business or workplace, for example. I don't write about my friends except in caricature. Part of the reason for that is that most of the people I know in real life don't know that I write a blog. My wife mentions it once in a while in public and I always snarl at her that she shouldn't do that. My children don't know I do this, nor do my parents, nor does most of my extended family. If they did, I'd have to be more judicious about what I write. And I don't want to be judicious.
This blog is a secret life for me. It has never been anything but totally self-indulgent. I do it because I enjoy it, and the day I stop enjoying it is the day I stop doing it. I shouldn't do it, because it takes up a lot of time, and when I get to the end of my life I'm going to regret the book I never wrote, and this blog will be tiny solace.
Nonetheless, I'll be back tomorrow.
Not much going to happen here today, unless something ironic and quick interrupts my otherwise incredibly busy day.
By the way, I went out over the weekend and tried to buy an investment bank, but JP Morgan beat me to it. Damn.
Birdzilla, commenting last night on a post from six months ago:
You know your a liberal if you think that RIGHT TO LIFE are a bunch of religious fanatics but NORTH AMERICAN MAN BOY LOVE ASSOCIATION is perfectly okay bibles should be removed from schools and replaced with DADDIES ROOMATE and HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES, CREATION is unproven but EVOLUTION is how we came to be guns should be banned by cocaine should be legalized ITS A WODERFUL LIFE is silly oldfashioned poppycock but DACNES WITH WOLVES is the absolute truth crime victims dont have rights but rapists and child molsters can sue their victims that shoot them
By this definition, there are no liberals.
This is funny: CNN made a mistake in their interpretation of the tax rebate the President and Congress just agreed on. I read it and spent 25 seconds doing a post reacting to a line on CNN online that seemed to indicate that the rebate was really a loan against next year's tax refund. I, personally, don't generally get tax refunds, so I expressed distress and asked my regular reader if I was going to end up paying more in taxes next year in order to get a "rebate" this year.
Nothing spreads across blogworld like news that politicians are screwing us. A couple of websites linked to my post. A couple of other websites linked to those websites. Links got posted on bulletin boards and people started sending my link around in email, using F/A as documentation that CNN -- which had long-since taken its mistaken interpretation of the law down -- seemed to be covering something up.
My hits went through the roof as a full-fledged Internet panic set in. I did a little research (very little) and documented it in real time for all the people pouring onto the site. The apparent screwing of us taxpayers turned out to be nothing, just some clumsy wording by a CNN journalist who's clearly as knowledgeable about tax law as I am. But while it lasted...oh, what fun!
To my regular reader: No reason to visit for a few days. I've made my traffic quota for the month.
If you're profoundly observant, you'll note that I'm doing a little work on my blogroll. I'm cutting out some deadwood and rearranging a few things. It's nothing serious and will continue for a few days. If I accidentally delete someone significant, let me know and I'll fix it.
Today, the 4,000th comment was posted on F/A. Posted by regular commentor Mike S. it was, fittingly, a mistake -- a hit-the-button-twice-by-accident reposting of comment #3,999.
For those of you keeping score at home, remember that I counted all 6,365 comments by Squidley as only one, since they all say basically the same thing.
I follow the comment metric a lot more than I do any other. Keep those cards and letters coming in, folks.
Just a quick note to say thanks for all the good wishes and prayers expressed by readers of F/A during the last week. To address the two emphatic concerns of site regulars:
Thanks again for the great support.
