Twitter!

I won't go so far as to say I've abandoned this blog entirely, but a cursory perusal of post dates should suffice to demonstrate that it's no longer the passion it once was.

Having participated as a blog commenter, as a member of several group blogs, most of which ultimately ended because of technical catastrophes (but one of which, still flourishing, I was summarily fired from before I so much as managed to make more than a couple of posts), I also tried the solo blog route for a while. Some people can maintain a blog and not care how often or, from what I can gather, what they post. I found it was either too much work to make it the way I wanted it to be or not worth bothering with at all if I was only going to post infrequently.

Still, the damned thing is still up and I'm not entirely ashamed of everything I've written here, so I've linked it to my new Twitter account should anyone care to read some of my longer than 140 character scribblings. Should you have found your way here recently, be welcome, enjoy poking around but don't expect much new content.

As for the Twitter account, well, we'll see. My objective there for the time being is to post the occasional aphorism of the sort Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker might have written if they were, you know, alive.

And talentless.

John Hannah (JsubD), RIP

John D. Hannah, known in various online libertarian circles as JsubD, died several days ago. He was fifty-five years old. A retired Navy Master Chief Petty Officer and a widower who years later still mourned the death of his wife, John lived in the Detroit area and was reportedly homeless and living in shelters the last few months of his life. He would, according to one shelter operator, walk over to Wayne State University library every day, presumably to use their computers.

Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom wrote of John's death here. Ironically, had he not decided to write about John and "the death of being forgotten," those of us who knew John as well as one can know online friends, knew of his terminal illness and were distraught by his failure in the last several months to tell us of his status might never have learned of his death. One member of the discussion forum we all frequented, a woman known among her friends for her relentless tenacity and in general for her feral genius, found the Albom column. From there we had only to perform the sad task of correlating what Albom wrote with what we knew of JsubD to confirm it was one and the same person.

John may have died homeless or, in any case, having chosen to live at the shelter for several months prior to his death. He was, however, a highly intelligent, knowledgeable and articulate man who was also clearly aware of his situation and the options available to him when we heard from him last on that discussion forum. I have every reason to believe, in other words, that the circumstances of his final months were significantly of his own choosing.

Far from forgotten, John had simply become temporarily disconnected from his family and his many online friends, one of the inevitable risks of exclusively internet friendships. I counted him as a friend, I mourn his passing and I will remember him.

Housekeeping - July 2008

Throughout most of August, I shall either be on the road or on the beach, though in neither case at all like Jack Kerouac's nor, I pray, Nevil Shute's characters. Neither beach vacations nor road trips lend themselves to blogging, but little goes on in August, anyway, as politicians and journalists alike pay homage to one of the three great French contributions to Western civilization; namely, taking a full month off from what are largely phoney-baloney jobs, anyway. (The other two contributions, by the way, are baguettes and Pepe Le Peu.) It would be churlish of me not to follow suit, so new postings here will be few and far between until, at long last, schools re-open and the NFL season begins. See you then.

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Retired Header ‘Quotes’:

March 2007 – “Pay no attention to that man behind the veil!” – the Wizard of Rawls

April 2007 – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one may still post on the internet.” – Ludwig Blogenstein

May 2007 - “Don't follow leaders, watch the blog hit meters!" - Blog Dylan

June 2007 - "Thanks to minoxidil, Russell is a damned liar!" - the present King of France

Houskeeping - June 2007

As the summer season begins, site hits have begun to slack off, indicating either that readers have better things to do during the summer than read blogs or that readers are wising up to me and finding better things to do than read this blog regardless of the season. I'm going with "either" for the time being and will do a bit of sluffing off, myself, in July and August, what with family vacations and what not.

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Retired Header ‘Quotes’:

March 2007 – “Pay no attention to that man behind the veil!” – the Wizard of Rawls

April 2007 – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one may still post on the internet.” – Ludwig Blogenstein

May 2007 - “Don't follow leaders, watch the blog hit meters!" - Blog Dylan

Housekeeping Notes -- May 2007

The blog is two months old today. I continue to get random visits from around the globe, amusingly enough often following the foreign visitor’s search for information on Foley catheters which I once mentioned in a piece about House MD. There must be some cosmic symbolism to that. Thanks to links from such sites as Reason’s Hit & Run, memeorandum and Unqualified Offerings (to name but a few) the site has moved from invisible to merely obscure.

There have been many big stories I have, for various reasons, not written about, and I continue to intersperse the political and current events topics with human interest stories, odd news, movie reviews and assorted nonsense, occasionally of a somewhat personal nature. Purely political blogs probably gain more credibility more rapidly, but if life is not a business (and it isn’t) neither is it a campaign. Besides, not even my ego is yet so vast as to presume I have something worth saying about every breaking story.

The freedom to write whatever one wants whenever one wants is both addictive and dangerous. I don’t believe that whatever one posts on the internet is really preserved for all time (witness the loss of my earlier writing at Inactivist and many extensive comments at Left2Right), but there is little doubt future historians will have a field day poring over the various eccentricities of our contemporary computer assisted logorrhea. If there is one thing bloggers suffer from it is the absence of sane, objective editing. Not only would it be an advantage to have some other eyes proofread for composition and other mechanical errors, it would be lovely to have someone one trusted who could say “Fergawdsakes, Ridgely, you can’t seriously intend to publish that, can you?” before hitting the Post key. On the other hand, the blogger is free to ignore or override his inner editor as the professional journalist is not free to override the real version.

I’m basically a wordsmith, or at least fancy myself as such, so I’ve tended to keep the blog text oriented, using pictures sparingly. For the time being, I am refraining from the popular trend of posting video clips on the blog for the same reason, although I will link to such clips as appropriate. I have a Quine-like preference for desert landscapes, not only in my ontology but in my web design, so I intend to retain the sparsely furnished look here. I am, however, modifying the current page to include two weeks of postings, as I have found stories remain relevant at least that long and people do not like searching back pages and archives any more than necessary.

My thanks to those slowly growing numbers of you who have supported this blog with your readership. Questions and comments are, as always, most welcome.

-- DAR

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Retired Header ‘Quotes’:

March 2007 – “Pay no attention to that man behind the veil!” – the Wizard of Rawls
April 2007 – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one may still post on the internet.” – Ludwig Blogenstein

Housekeeping

I've been on the road -- well, in the air, actually -- this weekend, back now in the Old Dominion (aka Virginia) to do a bit of real housekeeping for the next month or so. So, if anyone's wondering why I haven't posted anything in the last couple of days or why, as I suspect will be the case, my blogging slows down for a while, that's the reason.

Housekeeping Notes

The blog is one month old today. I’ve edited the blogroll to reflect the blogs (and similar sites) I’ve been frequenting over the past month and changed the header “quote,” a practice I expect to perform on a monthly basis.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs on the internet, perhaps millions. My personal short-term goal for this blog is to increase readership substantially and for the blog to crack the top 100,000 of those tracked by Technorati. So by way of a minor “bleg,” I’d appreciate it if those of you who have been reading this blog so far would take the trouble of recommending the site or any particular post to anyone you think might enjoy it and especially for those of you who operate blogs yourselves to consider linking here now and then. As Arlo Guthrie once sang, I’m not proud ... or tired.

More direct feedback would be nice, too. I know I don’t always respond to every comment and avoid getting into lengthy discussions even when I do, but I do appreciate all comments (well, all of them so far) and encourage your suggestions and criticism.

Finally, although I intend to continue this blog as a solo act, it occurs to me that some of my readers might like to take a shot at doing a guest blog, either on an independent topic or perhaps as a more extended response to something I’ve posted. If there is any such interest, please feel free to contact me about it.

Adorable Kitty Prostitutes?

This blogging business continues to intrigue. I say business, of course, not in the sense of profitable enterprise, at least not in my case, but in the sense of cultural phenomenon. This site, for example, in existence less than a month so far (twelve days, in fact), has already attracted visitors from domains as far away as Ireland, Australia and Thailand, though I honestly can’t imagine why. Unless, that is, titles with words and phrases like “prostitute” and "rape fantasies" popped up in those viewers’ searches. Not to be too cynical, but that seems more likely than being led here by a Google search for “reductionism.”

Installation of a hit counter has helped assuage my curiosity to some extent about such matters, and I’m pleased to announce that readership is rapidly approaching triple digits. (How about them apples, Huffington Post and Michelle Malkin!) A few days ago, Memeorandum had begun to link an occasional post here again, as it had been linking a fair number of my posts previously at Inactivist; but then that seemed suddenly to stop, perhaps because I got boring, perhaps because I jokingly told former co-blogger Mona in a comment that it saddened me that she’d noticed a post here only via Memeorandum? Who knows. C’est la vie. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, no man but a fool ever wrote except to be read; but I really haven’t a clue how web traffic works or why, and there is only so much pandering to the masses I can bring myself to do. I am, however, shamelessly planning on a special Shoes! article in the near future to lure former reader Susan W-G back to the fold.

Constant Viewer, my modest homage to Dorothy Parker’s far wittier reviews of yesteryear, has been disappointingly idle of late, there being damned little on the big screen worth seeing. In fact, my last such venture to the cinema house was to accompany my twelve year old son to watch TMNT, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" for the over-thirty crowd, but I’m afraid a review of same would have to focus on the quality of the popcorn. (Not enough salt.) Perhaps the current drought will lead me to an occasional review of older films -- I hear that Citizen Kane flick is pretty good.

My intent was and remains to blog about the passing scene from a less than rabidly ideological libertarian perspective -- no, I don’t think children under twelve should be permitted to own nuclear weapons -- at least as opposed to what I call the “My Adorable Kitties” web-log alternatives. However, I think it’s already fairly obvious that my interests are as eclectic as my knowledge of many such matters is, or so I’m told, highly doubtful. One reader, not even here but over at Jim Henley’s shop, thought not only that my opinions regarding digital audio files were “absolutely full of sh*t” but that I, personally, was, as well. I quote: “You’re saying things that sound like they might be sensible, but are in fact completely crazy.” Sadly, he is not the first person to arrive at such a conclusion, nor will he likely be the last. What the hell, he may even be right.

And so it goes. Purely political blogs bore me almost as much as adorable kitties. I have lived most of my life inside or at least right next to Washington’s culture of political obsessives, and I have grown weary of self-important people espousing their self-important opinions, more often than not for mostly self-serving reasons. Yeah, I’m one of those people, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the fact or can’t occasionally resist my own self-important and self-serving inclinations, however briefly.

So this is the result so far. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, maybe a dog’s breakfast at the end of the day, but at least it’s fun in the making. Sure, blogging is largely an exercise in ego gratification. Who the hell am I, anyway? But when it comes down to it, what isn’t? And more to the point, will that guy from Thailand be back?

"... I'm a man of wealth and taste."

If by "wealth" one means something a bit better than abject penury and by "taste" one means strong opinions, that is. Still, to complete the title quote from "the philosopher Jagger," however dyslexically, please allow me to introduce myself or, more to the point, this blog.

I've been stringing words together and pulling them apart for a living for longer than I care to remember, primarily as a lawyer (and if there's one thing the world needs more than another blogger it's another lawyer, right?) but also, long ago, as a writer of the freelance variety. Having recently forsaken the full-time lawyering racket for the putatively full-time writing racket, this blog is intended both to facilitate and to impede that transition. That is, on the one hand, herewith is Ridgely the citizen-pundit offering to a largely (and appropriately) indifferent world criticism, analysis and commentary from a largely pragmatic libertarian and decidedly ante-post-modern perspective. If those labels, juxtaposed as they are, seem a bit confusing, stick around and perhaps I'll be able to elucidate them for you.

On the other hand, at least for the foreseeable future, the extent to which I labor to fill this virtual space is inversely proportional to the extent I write anything in return for which I might ever see, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, "the necessary." Even so, the state of things being what they are, to quote one of Plum's fellow Dulwich College alums, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Okay, so maybe a little tarnished, worried just a tad and occasionally a wee bit mean.

I came to become a participant in the blogosphere several years ago, having had my appetite whetted by becoming a (too) frequent commenter on a now unfortunately defunct group blog called Left2Right, where I played, if not the Devil himself, at least the Devil's Advocate. I was subsequently recruited to participate in another group blog, of a more libertarian flavor, called Inactivist. For various reasons, the prime mover(s) behind Inactivist have largely moved on after the site crashed some months ago, taking with it a fairly substantial body of my published musings into the nether regions of net space, quite possibly never to be seen again.

Now, I'm no more egotistical than the next blogger (how's that for damning with faint praise?), but that experience finally convinced me that if I was going to bother to do "this thing that we do" at all, maybe I should do it with a bit more control over the process. Being (1) cheap, and (2) a cyber-naif, I've settled for the time being here under the auspices of Blogger, a free service of Google (Motto: "Do no harm that doesn't cut into profits") under the assumption that any company with a market value rapidly approaching its misspelled name is probably a safe haven. We'll see.

Anyway, back to the apologia. I know just enough about law, economics and philosophy to be dangerous, mostly to myself, so one way or another these are the most likely perspectives, however tenuously connected to a given topic, you'll find here. On the other hand, a steady diet of nothing but steak, however salivation inducing it may be at first, gets old really fast. So I reserve the right to blog on just about anything else, especially including films, odd news and adorable kitties non-political news and current events.

Finally, a few words on comments and the ethics of cyberspace. I encourage comments and I'm fairly tolerant when it comes to such matters. However, I reserve the right to delete comments I unilaterally deem to be beyond the pale and to ban any commenter I deem to be too much of an *sshole. Note the asterisk. Yeah, I used "dirty words" from time to time and you can, too; but let's not get carried away. As the newspapers say, this is supposed to be a more or less "family friendly" site. Also, my understanding of the blogging ethos is that, once published, a blog entry should remain as is unless the author informs the reader of any editing or updating. I will follow that rule as far as the substance of my comments goes. However, having no editor, I reserve the right to fix spelling, grammatical and similar errors and occasionally to change a word or phrase here or there if it significantly improves my original intended meaning in my posts without notice. This last may not be strictly kosher by blogging standards, but I intend to do it only rarely and even then only fairly soon (say, within the first 24 hours) after the original post.

This is a work in progress. Much tweaking will need to be done and I haven't a clue how it may evolve. Suggestions and criticism, constructive or otherwise, are welcome. Meanwhile, on with the show!