Five Before Chaos

Been scarce again, I know, I know. Missing all this great political lunacy (Massa, more batshit insane GOP shenanigans, etc.), but I’m balls-deep in working on my master’s thesis, which is not fun. Well, at times it is, as I’m reading a lot of interesting stuff, but I’m a horrible procrastinator and easily distracted, so it makes it a lot harder than it needs to be.

Heading south to see the parents, so don’t expect much in the next week, other than postings about Mexican food, beaches and cheap beer. In the meantime, go educate yourself at the Museum of Uncut Funk. There will be a test.

…or Swedish, Slovak, Hindi, or quite a few other flavors, thanks to those little flags in the right sidebar. Now one can ask, “Keď sa David Broder nie je idiot?”

Back on the 19th of December, and, as usual, I forgot about it. I remembered in the middle of the night. You know the story, half-drunk after an Xmas party, I started up a Blogger account on a whim… and the rest, as they say, is history.

Soooo… 2009, what a year. On the personal front, I lost my job of 15 years, and my wife of 7 months. In hindsight, both were incredibly irritating and sapping the life out of me, so I’m okay with that.

So far, if my Sitemeter is to believed, I’ve had about 53,000 visitors so far. A-list status is right around the corner. As I spent some time going over this year’s posts, I have to admit… not my best year in terms of quantity or quality. I think the aforementioned personal foibles coupled with a still-lingering outrage fatigue are primarily responsible. I came up with a new, cleaner look for FBC 3.0, which I continue to like.

The biggest Google hits still continue to be “secret + New Age bullshit”, in regards to this 2 year-old post, “Matt Taibbi + gay,” for whatever reason, and a lot of links to the “Prayer” motivational poster. And of course, “Sarah Palin + idiot” remains a solid one.

As usual, lots of posts about the right wing stupids, such as Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin. Also, FBC features such as From the Grindhouse and Dumb All Over continued to thrive. Obama was inaugurated, then proceeded to capitulate, like expected of any Democrat. I took an incredible trip to the southwest and also infiltrated an abandoned hospital. As to other interesting stories, there was the man who lived on bacon for a month, and right-wing VT blogger Charity losing her godidiocy and calling me up for a bit of advice or whatever it was.

The first half of the year sucked for me. There was actually a time where I considered giving up the blogging, but I figured once my life got a bit less chaotic, the urge to blog would return, and I stuck it out, and so here we are on year number five. I have no intentions of hanging it up, lucky you. And, as always, a heartfelt thanks to all of you, in particular, those who stop by on a regular basis. You need help; that’s obvious, but thanks, nevertheless. I look forward to 2010, with a new sweetie, a new cat, and maybe even a new job, but with the same dashing good looks and intellectually superior, condescending delivery. Thanks for playing, and tell your friends.

So, went for a new look here. This one’s got a bunch of nifty photostuff that I still need to mess around with. Thoughts?

Thanks to a tip from Charity, I realized my RSS feeds weren’t working, since March. Jeez. Anyway, they’re all fixed now, you can access them in the second sidebar, towards the bottom. The blogroll is also back.

In which we discuss the origins of FBC…

The new issue has an article by Patrick Ripley that covers the recent iBrattleboro libel story that’s been all the buzz lately. The coverage is a bit different from the others in that it also discusses the some of the VT blogosphere’s reaction to the suit, which was decidedly different from that of the Reformer and the Argus. The newspapers were quite supportive of the claim against IBrattleboro. And of course, there’s that “old media vs. new media” vibe that runs through the whole discussion at length in the pice. And it mentions a few familiar names, as well. Have a read.

Added Worldwide Sawdust, another Soapblox blog, to the FBC Read:

“Is a left, liberal, political blog offering news, commentary, a whole bunch of links to the useful, the entertaining and the just plain silly, as well as “Surprise Features” which means we make this stuff up as we go.

and is by: 

Lifelong liberal of the Tom Paine wing. Marine Vietnam vet, Have worked as a photographer, cab driver, bartender, carpenter,and cabinetmaker, I’ve seen it all. I’m getting old. Somebody get me a glass of water.”

Also, I don’t post at Daily Kos too much. Although there’s some great stuff there, dealing with diaries means dealing with the Dem Kool-aid drinkers and such and can often turn into a mess. But I happened to put today’s energy diary over there and lo and behold, an informative and civil discussion broke out. Now go recommend me.

Lastly, I’ve been burning the midnight oil putting together my spaghetti western site. It’s a crash course in XHTML, CSS, and PhP, none of which I have any experience with, so it’s been challenging. It’s not going to be up ’till the end of summer because I want it to look good and somewhat professsional. Anyways, I came up with my banner last night. Here it is:

Yeah, in case you were wondering, it’s Gianni Garko as Sartana. So how’s it look?