Grandiose Opening

Welcome to the first real post!

This may well be one of the many, many blogs that's abandoned after a short time. I took a look around, and it seems like most people blog like celebrities get married. Kick the tires, try it out for a couple of weeks, realize that commitment and work are involved, and bail out. Some estimates are that 60% to 80% of blogs are abandoned within a month of creation. If you want to see the source data for that, do your own Googlin'.

I was forced to maintain a journal in high school, and hated it. Most of my entries consisted of expressing my hatred of the journal and casting aspersions on the credentials of the teachers who required it. By the time I got out, I had gotten used to it and kept it going for a little while. Then one day I noticed my latest volume on a shelf and picked it up to find that although I had never consciously stopped writing, I hadn't written an entry in some years.

Then I decided to convert it to a reading log. I always have at least one book on the go, and usually several. I maintained that for, oh, perhaps as long as several weeks. It's probably been over ten years since my last entry. I'm afraid to actually look. Besides, the book is way over there on the bookshelf on other side of the room.


I first got into / onto the Internet in 1994. I posted a lot to Usenet, always under my real name and with my real e-mail address attached, and did a lot of websurfing. It occurred to me then that it would be fun to start a webpage of my own, but I didn't have any single area I wanted to focus on. And, I figured, no one would ever be interested in a page that was frequently updated with small posts about whatever happened to be on the author's mind at the time. That sort of thing could never catch on.


I still don't know what I'll be writing about. Politics and religion, mainly, I expect. Those are about the only topics I can comfortably discuss, which means I'm completely socially dysfunctional in polite society.


So, who am I?


Who cares?

Really.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono occasionally made a good point. One of those rare occasions was their "bagism" phase, when they'd go onstage or show up for a press conference hidden in a huge opaque bag, arguing that the message was - or should be - more important than the messenger.

So, I'll be remaining anonymous. It's not like I'm Bruce Wayne over here; plenty of people who know me personally know (or soon will, 'cause I'll tell them) that this is my blog. I won't be advertising it, though, and one of my comment moderation rules will be to edit / delete any comment that uses my real name or other identifying info, on the off chance it ever happens.

I'll discuss my other comment moderation rules some other time, maybe. The short version is a quote (or perhaps paraphrase - I'm too lazy to check the original wording) of Sam Malone on the last episode of Cheers: "I am not your mother. This is not your home."

For now, my "about me" (the actual page for which I haven't bothered with - and may not bother with) is as follows: I'm a man living in Canada. I'm a husband and dad. I've had a few varied and interesting jobs, and I currently do office work that I enjoy but that would bore you if I were inclined to discuss it in detail, which I'm not. Religion - conservative Christian, Baptist tendencies. Politics - generally nonpartisan. My ideological positions tend to be libertarian informed by Christian morality. If I were American I'd be a Republican by default; whenever I take one of those "Which presidential candidate is most like you" quizzes, all I have in common with Hillary or Barack is that we're all carbon-based bipeds.

I'm a hardcore geek in the areas of comics and music, and lower-level geek in the areas of technology, gaming, and movies. Expect some "Worst. (Whatever). Ever." posts.


I am planning to eventually write extensively and narcissisticly (wow, that should make the spellchecker cramp up) about my own views, mainly in the aforementioned areas. Maybe if I'm cranky enough some readers will actually drop by.


I always try (but frequently fail; I'm no more consistently consistent than the people you know in real life, or, for that matter, you) to evaluate ideas and actions, not people. That is, while I may think someone's ideas are moronic and their actions are reprehensible, I hope to refrain from referring to them as a reprehensible moron. In churchgoing terms this is frequently described as "hating the sin but loving the sinner", and it's a grace of which I've needed to avail myself many times. Feel free to call me on it if/when I fail. I'm amused by rationalizations, including my own.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my hand and the back of a goat's head.