Comments

Calling upon my Bergsonian intuition, I'm gonna opine that all bloggers love comments. Calling upon reality and honesty, I'll admit that I love comments, even the strange and unexpected ones. There was that time a coupla years ago when I made a brief throw-away mention of cold fusion as pathological science in a lengthy post which was mostly about common sense vs. gullibility and wound up with a stern talking-to in a series of comments from the librarian for LENR-CANR. Fascinating. That was the first time I emotionally accepted that my blog was openly accessible to the entire series of tubes which comprises the interwebs rather than just being an occult fairy glen in the deep forest at the end of a secret path known only to a bare handful of family and friends, who didn't exert themselves to make the parlous journey there with any regularity. I thought of my blog as the Hades/Inferno/Pandaemonium of Vergil, Dante, and Milton, a locale difficult to access, mostly unpleasantly creepy, and, ultimately, not really worth visiting for sensible mortals. It is, instead, just another cowpie in a vast meadow of cowpies, perhaps a bit stranger than some but a cowpie for all that.

So, anyway, I was greatly pleased and entertained to receive this comment just the other day on a post I made a bit more than a year ago:

Anonymous said: Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

I hastened to post a thank-you as a followup, although I dunno if this particular anonymous saw it. So, I'm turning the whole thing into a new post here.

When I first saw the email which told me that I had a new comment on an old post, I figured it was spam. I get those occasionally because I don't do any moderation. Instead, it was this gracious praise followed by an honest assessment of the author's opinion of my style over delta-T and concluded by an exhortation to continue posting better stuff. (I wonder, however, if anonymous went all the way back to my first real posts - my 3-part math rant, which I consider as heartfelt and creative as anything I've done recently.) All in all, a delightful combination of thoughts rolled into one comment.

Thank you, anonymous, thank you to everyone who has ever commented here, and thank you (and I'm sorry!) to anyone who has ever read anything I've posted. The old folk tune declares, "Have you been to jail for justice? Then you're a friend of mine." I'll paraphrase that to say that if you've waded through one of my self-indulgent blog posts, then you're a friend of mine!

Hello, friend! Wanna go for a ride with me?

New and improved!

We started our new year with the girls driving away on their own to attend a party and sleepover.

Ronnie and I are alone, rattling around the house, reading, eating bon-bons, watching tv, having HDS, listening to music, playing music, etc.

Wow! It's a new year, indeed.

Laugh (December blogfest)

Laugh. What was your biggest belly laugh of the year?

Too many to single out just one. As the four of us have grown together and developed our own, individual, comfortable sense of self, we've had so much joy over the last few years that it seems like one long laugh, punctuated only infrequently and stochastically with occasional sadness or sorrow, like the death of my father.

In stark contrast to my younger self and life, I am a happy person. My wife and kids are responsible for that remarkable transformation. And that makes me happy, too!


L'homme qui rit! I should have my own cheese.

Stationery (December blogfest)

Stationery. When you touch the paper, your heart melts. The ink flows from the pen. What was your stationery find of the year?

Well, it's not new this year but I'm a traditionalist as well as a classicist so I've always had personalized stationery. The stationery I use now is a design I've had for a lotta years. I like it. There's something very civilized about using quality, personalized stationery. If my handwriting weren't illegible, I'd use a fountain pen as well; but, alas, even my printing is barely decipherable so I simply use a ballpoint pen for clarity's sake.

Gift (December blogfest)

Gift. What's a gift you gave yourself this year that has kept on giving?

I guess that would hafta be Marty and Wolfgang, my electric guitar and amp, respectively. Music has charms to soothe my savage breast.

Marty:


Wolfgang:

Project (December blogfest)

Project. What did you start this year that you're proud of?

This is an easy one for me to answer this year: The Greybeards.

I hadn't played music in front of an audience in almost twenty years and then Jeff and Russ accreted to initiate the inescapable gravity well of The Greybeards. I was pulled in, unresisting, closely followed by some Hot Backup Chicks. Playing with The Greybeards and Hot Backup Chicks has been a fabulous experience and an onging project which I hope will continue into the indefinite future.

Our incarnation at LIFE is Good 2009 without drummer Alex:


Here's one at Good Vibrations 2009 with Alex but without the Hot Backup Chicks.

Shop (December blogfest)

Shop. Online or offline, where did you spend most of your mad money this year?

The thing that comes most directly to mind for this past year is music gear. We disposed of a great deal of income at Guitar Center, Kennelly Keys, craigslist, and even got some stuff from eBay. Overall, we bought:

Guitars: 2 acoustic-electric guitars, 1 electric guitar, and 1 electric bass.

The four facing the camera are the new ones. From left to right: MJ's acoustic-electric (Isolde), Ronnie's acoustic-electric (nameless), Chloe's bass (Cornelius), and my electric (Marty).

Amps: Fender Princeton combo amp, Fender 100B (Bassman) amp head, Peavey Centurion amp head, Fender cabinet (2X15), and another cabinet with one 12" and one 10".

The Fender Bassman head powering the Fender cabinet.

The Fender Princeton (named Wolfgang) sitting on the additional speaker cabinet.

The Peavey amp head under my synthesizer (Synthia), who is 20 years old and, therefore, not part of this year's purchasing.

Percussion: A coupla djembe drums (one seen clearly and another half-hidden by the keyboard stand above, under Synthia and the Peavey) and an assortment of other rhythm devices, many of the small ones in the orange bag seen above.

Plus an assortment of peripheral and/or miscellaneous extras like cords, stands, etc.

Word of the year (December blogfest)

A word that encapsulates your year. "2009 was _____."

My fellow dudes and dudettes, if your year can be encompassed by a single word, YOU AIN'T LIVING! Get out there and do something. Or investigate inside your own head. Just please, c'mon and show me something: think something, learn something, watch something, explore something, try something, rediscover something you'd forgotten you love, Hell!, fuck something up (I excel at that one!), but don't just sit there merely existing in a one-word state, Mr. A. Square of Flat(-affect)land. LIVE fer gawd's sake!

This past year for me was, like most years, encyclopedic. Dictionaryous? Lexiconic? Thesaurian?

Busy.