One Year of Blogging

Today marks my 1 year blogiversary. That is one full year of blogging on a fairly regular basis, along with about 7 million other people who are as in love with their own opinions as I am with mine. The question I get asked most often is – how do you find the time? The answer is quite simple – there is no limit to what a man can do if he is willing to ignore his family. And then people say – how is it even possible for you to ignore your family, given its ample size? What they don’t understand is that the very size of my family makes that possible – if you have only one kid, ignoring him is quite conspicuous. But with four, my wife and kids just figure I am tending to someone’s needs at any given time, when in fact I am spending an inordinate amount of time tending to my own need for attention. So there you have it. That’s the secret. Go forth ye and multiply.

Other motivations include:
1) Getting to give friends whose names pop up in stories hip hop nicknames to keep their identities partially obscure. It’s more fun than you think. Plus, it’s great to have a public venue to be able to give a shout out to my homies, so to speak. That seems to be a staple of the rap genre – one song per album where the guy just raps out a list of names of his homies, saying “this one goes out to Wall Street G …” The Diabolical Biz Markee has a classic song in that genre – he names about 40 people, including every living cousin, and a few dead ones who I assume got caps in their asses.

2) Being able to make observations like the following, about a new reality show that features the mother of Paris Hilton as the arbiter of good taste and etiquette choosing from among 16 low brow contestants who aspire to be as classy as a Hilton. I can imagine the pitch that was made for this show – “let’s find the gold-digging wife of a third generation heir to a fortune that he couldn’t squander if he tried, let’s make sure she dresses like she’s sixteen years old and that she’s had enough plastic surgery to make her look like she is sixteen, and let’s see if we can find a women like this who also raised a young lady who has made herself famous for being a talentless slut, and let’s have this lady teach people about class.” Wow that was fun!

3) Being able to googlebate with some probability of success. Ideas Hatched, for whatever reason, sometimes ranks high when I google those words, other times very low. Once, I was on about page 17, when I found a link to Professor Vic’s CV, which lists an article he did for the paper version of Ideas Hatched back in 1999 among his publications. As fair warning, if you link to the site one day, and find that it is populated with pornography, you can rest assured that it is timed to coincide with a long meeting taking place in Worcester Massachusetts at the Catholic College of the Holy Cross to decide the tenure fate of Professor Vic.

Many thanks after a year have to go out to the frequent and infrequent commenters, which is not to say that the free-riding silent types aren’t appreciated, but if it weren’t for the frequent commenters, I might be tempted to do my job all day rather than obsessively check the site. Professor Vic, Pbryon, Incredible Dirigible, Lime, PatB, and the ubiquitous Anonymous have provided some great comments. Am I forgetting anybody? Relax, giant, I’m just kidding.

I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up the pace, and it has already slowed, but I'll do what I can. I contemplated a severe restriction on output along the model of a bar on the Jersey shore, which allegedly (i've never been to it) only opens for two weeks each year. Apparently they do a year's worth of business in 2 weeks because the very notion of making it a limited opportunity to indulge at their bar has given it legendery status.