For a NotBlogger

Mr. Possum is pretty funny.

A Secret Revealed

Mr. Possum has an alter ego

I'm surprised it wasn't grilled squirrel, but a secret ID isn't worth much if you can't throw them off the scent.

Lack of something

Not a real post here, more of a "yes, I am still alive" note. I don't actually know why the posting has become more sporadic - I've noticed this across the Axis of Weevil. Not that I'm a full member, and I think I might have forgotten to even pay my Associate Auxiliary Guest membership for this year.

It's not ennui exactly, and not that things haven't been going on, but a lot of what I have to say seems repetitive. The job still sucks, the country sucks even more, and my kids still don't pay any attention to me. Writing all of that once a month (or even annually) seems like it would cover me for a while.

I admit I spend a lot more time on Facebook, which may be distracting me from blogging. But overall I think I just don't have that much to say. I'm not disappearing by any means, but I may be kind of tapped out. I don't feel funny most of the time, or angry, or thoughtful. Mostly it's a lot of daily grind interspersed with yelling at the Rangers on TV (cf last night's blown 3-goal lead).

Like the job, I'm kind of keeping my head down in life and hoping not to get fired. I admit that's pretty pathetic, but that's where it's at right now. I will, however, take suggestions for subject matter. Offer up a topic and I will consider a reasoned, thoughtful post full of pithy, intelligent horsecrap.

More Blog Mucking About

Seems as though Google now has even more crap to clutter up one's blog with. (So I ended on a preposition? Whaddaya gonna do about it?) Google Gadgets seems to include thousands of little doohickeys that add everything from semi-naughty pictures to quotes from every bible in existence.



Some looked OK, so I added two on the right - Today in History and Hubble images. I'd prefer not to bother with stock tickers or Super Mario games, but if the masses request it I'll consider adding them. For about 2 seconds, and then we'll go back to the bland dictatorship that is this trivial corner of the internets.

Puttering

Took the day off, and I was poking around here & blogger has added a bloglist thingy that includes some info off the RSS feeds of some of the stuff I read. I'm going to try it for a bit & see if I like it.

There's been a Sighting

Shoulda posted this earlier, but kinda slipped my mind. There's been an Actual (well, Virtual) GOYL sighting. Check out the comments to this post.



By the sounds of it we're in similar situations, which explains her disappearance. Anyway, GOYL, welcome back however briefly to the world of blogging, and even if things are down, some of us are still checking up on you now & again.

IT'S...JUST...NOT...FAIR!!!

The great grand-daddy of us all (many of us, anyway), El Possumo, Dr. Possum hisself, is hangin' it up.



Personally, I fail to see why something as meaningless as a job is more important than the way I waste my day when I should be working.



The fact is, Terry blogs in part so I don't have to. Looking around here, you can see I've fallen off the wagon a bit myself over the last few months. But I could always count on Possumblog to check three or four times a day to see something weird, interesting, intelligent, or ever so slightly off color. And that was only in the quotes he put up every week.



I'm only blogging here because of him and Jim Smith - the two of them noodged enough that I started this here steaming pile of crappy electrons. Though truth be told we can lay some blame at Jordana's feet - I only found Boss Possum after seeing a link to her blog from National Review's Corner blog. It seems odd that I should continue when he stops - seems like the chain, broken at the top, should fall apart.



But that, in essence, is the point of blogging - once started, no matter who egged you on, you're on your own. This isn't meant to be a moralistic tale of an aging, balding Jew, raised by his PossumPappy to finally blog on his own two feet. The heading for this post is, in fact, completely mistaken. It is fair. It's entirely fair that the real Terry - not the entertaining raconteur of my bloglife - should continue to grow as a person and live the life he needs to lead for himself and his family.



That it will impact part of my life is noticeable, but in essence irrelevant. Blogging is a pastime for most of us, not a fungible career. And when advancement calls, pastimes have to take second place. I will miss the daily conversations of Possumblog, which is where the real fun was for me. It was a chance to talk to folks I find entertaining, a place to trade one-liners and gently snide insults with a group of people I would never have met otherwise.



Look, nobody died here. Terry remains around, and emails are always available. Heck, I might even start blogging regularly again, in the hopes that I won't lose touch with the crowd I "met" over at PB. It's nice to call you folks that I've never even met in person friends, leaving aside the oddities of a New York Suburban Hebrew palling around with a Southern Rednecked Christian Goober (hmmm - I sense a sitcom plot in there somewhere...)



Life will continue, and there's no "forever" here in the blogosphere. There's no reason Terry won't someday return, even on a semi-regular basis. But in the meantime, the internet has just become a less interesting place to hang out, and that makes me sad.



Shalom, Possumblog.

Well that's peculiar

The appearance of the word "crap" is apparently no longer damaging to young ears.



As a Noble Captain once said, "Damme, that's too bad."

Word to the Wise

be careful what you put on the internet - it can come back to haunt you, or at least make people look at you funny.



A colleague points out a young person who recently joined the organization. Apparently, YP decided to announce on their Myspace Page that they had joined the organization.



Independently, an announcement of a new position naming the company and a myspace page with personal information are perfectly acceptable. The combination of the two, however, is a bad idea. Your new colleagues should probably not know certain things about you, and your employer may not wish to be associated with those things.



Skinnydan's First Law of the Internet - Don't publish anything there you would not be comfortable sharing with your mother, grandmother, daughter, or other genteel relative. These things always come back to bite you, and they never, ever disappear.

WOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!!

I'm back, no thanks to blogger. Mr. Possum emailed today to find out what in blazes happened to me, and the answer is that I &^%$$ed up. Not dramatically, but I messed with the template of the site and it caused lord knows how much trouble.



So I went ahead and solved it through a very ridiculous procedure. I made a new blog, built my template back up (including labels and links), then copied & pasted the whole shebang back into this site. So no more expanding posts (and no, I don't think I want to try & fiddle again, at least not for a while), no more duplicate posts, just the clean fresh scent of boring blogposts.



So why no posting? Blogennui, irritation at Blogger for the problems, unbelievably busy with work crapahoola, and finally, I have decided to bite the bullet. It would be literal if we were in the 19th century, but thankfully anesthesiologists have learned a few things since then. I'm going to go ahead and let some maniac with a scalpel cut my head open next week. At this point I'd be surprised if they found anything of consequence up there anyway.



No, not the lobotomy a friend suggested. They're going to give me some kind of bionic plastic ear - though it could be old legos they're sticking in there for all I know. I think I've mentioned before that I have otosclerosis - fused bones in the middle ear. So they're going to pop in some plastic ones that will do the vibrating that the natural kind are supposed to do. But don't because the warranty on my body ran out last year.



So, I seem to be back. I could do a complete wrapup of news, stupidity, and random thoughts of the intervening month since I last posted, but frankly I have more useful things to do and you're bored already.

Blogger Issues

I seem to be having a problem with my extended entries - I at least can't expand any of them. If anyone else can do it I'd be grateful to know - it will mean it's a problem on my end, not Blogger's.



If anyone's desperate enough to read all my crap, click on the post title and you'll get the full entry.



Grrr.

Oy I'm Tired

I've been going to sleep too late, I'm busy at work, and I think my life is out of control. Blogging has taken a backseat to trying to remember what I was supposed to be doing. There are any number of balls in the air, and while nobody's life is at stake, I'm having a hard time keeping everything straight.



Boohoo. Poor me.



To make up for it, below the fold you will see several fun Pesach-related news items, the last two are courtesy of my friend Stupid.



The first apparently puts to rest a story that was floating around here:



Kosher l’Pesach Gasoline?



There were rumors around here about that, and it sounded so bizarrely ridiculous that I was prepared to believe somebody actually wanted to remove the ethanol from gas to make it kosher for Pesach. Kitniyot may be owned on Pesach, and I believe you can benefit from it, so it struck just the right tone of a crazy Hebrew who wanted to be holier than the rest of us. I'm almost disappointed that it's fake.



Next, some genuine craziness from Genuinely Crazy Jews:



NY bus converted into oven for matzos



Leave it to some nutty chasid from Monsey to decide that a flaming school bus 10 feet from the house with an illegally tapped gas line was a good idea. Think of it as the Partridge Family with peyos, unleavened bread, and a complete disregard for safety and building codes.



And finally, thanks to the Israeli Chronic Lobby, we get this one:



Israel group nixes pot on Passover



Once again the specter of Kitniyot appears. Loosely translated as legumes, this is essentially an Eastern European minhag that is meant by non-fried people to refer to corn, beans, peanuts, and various other foodstuffs. These items are, again, not forbidden for ownership during Pesach by halacha, and I guess one can argue about benefiting from it.



So I guess the only thing to take from this is that Pot is essentially acceptable to those who eat Kitniyot during Pesach, and that one should be extremely careful during attacks of the munchies to eat only kosher L'Pesach certified snacks.



We report, you decide.

As you may have noticed

I'm mucking with the template a bit - trying to reduce the margin size and not feel so cramped.

Whaddaya think?

This is a test

Pay no Attention to This test.

This was only a test. If this was a real blogpost, your local emergency services department would arrive to provide you with educational tools and copies of Pride and Prejudice to make up for the brain cells you lose in reading this blog.

Thanks to Hackosphere for this new feature.

A blog

I think worth looking at - Breath of the Beast. Tough reading sometimes, but important reading is often difficult to face.

Hat tip to the Corner.

This post

marks my 500th as a blogger. I've been aware of it's impendance for a while, and I resolved not to try and pad my postings just to get to it. Clearly it has arrived anyway.

As a historian I note anniversaries in a way I guess other people don't. There's nothing especially notable about 500 moreso than any other, and when you're talking about blogging, the relative value is lowered as compared to say, the 500th toothpick used at the annual Mango Lover's International conference.

Either way, when I started this nonsense I had no large plans beyond distracting myself from stuff I'm supposed to do. Blogging in most cases (this one included) is largely an exercise in online onanism, which is appropriate given the most common use of the internet. I clearly had 500 posts worth of stuff to say, and I leave it up to the rest of you as to whether any of it was worth reading.

Blogging has made me some virtual friends, and given me an opportunity to talk to folks and read things I would not have otherwise. Sure, I could do that without writing my own crap, but this way no one can say I'm only taking useless garbage off the internet and not putting any back.

Pass it forward, right?

Thanks to Blogger's

messages on the dashboard I bumped into Boston 1775, which looks like an entertaining place if you're interested in the Revolution.

Why is it

that I finally have time to blog, and nobody is around? The internet is as quiet as the office these days, and there's almost as much parking available.

I have nobody around to amuse but myself, and thus I will post this one article about global warming. Or the environment. Or something.

Researchers: Baking impacts Puget Sound

The only answer, of course, is to stop having food so the fish don't have to smell the cinnamon.

Hey everybody!

Welcome to the Axis of Weevil Thursday Three! Everyone's favorite internet...


::SIGH::


It's just not the same.

You may notice

a few changes around here. I have bitten the bullet and moved on to Blogger Beta, meaning things are supposed to be easier.

Leaving aside the issues with getting haloscan to work with the updated framitz, there are some nice benefits to beta. Certain parts, like the link lists and organizing the page now have a PhD interface (Push Here Dummy). I have also been adding labels to my posts, but if I do 25 at a time, it's still going to take a while to get everything added. This is all supposedly better connected to my new gmail account, which would be lovely. Except I haven't given anyone my gmail account, so I'm not sure I'm going to get anything special out of it.

The best news is it finally kicked me in the pants to update my links on the side. I didn't look at half of them at all (let alone regularly), so it was time to clear out some of the dustier ones and add a few new ones. So apologies for those of you I ought to have added ages ago.

Let me know if you like things, or hate 'em. It's the same pointless writing either way.