A Few Unnecessary Details (unless you are me)

1. I type in Times New Roman, font 14 because that is what the Supreme Court of Ohio uses. If it’s good enough for my employer of the past 20 or so years, it’s good enough for me.

2. The last post (“Pandemic Reading List”) was post 100. I should have created fanfare upfront, instead of mentioning it after the fact. I am not a born marketer, nor a learned or learned one either.

3. One hundred posts you say, how can I find the one I’m looking for? (Thank you for asking.) I just added an index, which has all 100 posts by title in chronological order. You can also search by broad category on the home page.

4. The picture on the home page is of friends hiking with me last September in Acadia National Park in Maine.  Five couples went and there were no arguments — except about my hike selections and descriptions. For instance, the hike pictured is four miles long, starts at 100 feet above sea level and ends at 1,500 feet above sea level.  I said the hike was “straight up,” meaning, colloquially, that it’s a continuous uphill climb.  I didn’t think anyone would take me literally and think that we would essentially be climbing a ladder. But someone did. Not surprisingly, it was more gradual than that.

5. I wrote five short posts in 2015. I was testing the system and my desire to write. I took eight months off, testing my inertia (and passing I might add), then (in an unprecedented burst of energy) wrote 36 posts in the last six months of 2016, an average of six per month. Never again. In 2017, I published 38 posts, a seemingly tolerable three per month. Alas, the toll of trying to get a business off the ground sidelined me in 2018, when I fell to just 12 posts. And the negative momentum increased in 2019, with only six posts. I’m on that same approximate (slow) pace this year.

6. I read a fair amount and often chide myself about not remembering as much as I should. Then as I typed the titles of the posts for the index, I realized that I had no idea what some of them are about.  How is that even possible?

7. Thank you for the comments you send, both public (on the blog) and private (email, text, face to face). You are encouraging, complimentary, and many times complementary (with additional details and stories). I also appreciate criticism and correction; I didn’t use to but like to think I have matured a bit over the years. (Ask Phillip sometime about the joys of having a discussion with a 25-year old me. Spoiler alert: not pleasant.)

8. Several posts generated zero public comments. “Are you well-read?” generated the most: 13. The most views on a day was 136 on September 9, 2016, which coincided with the publication of “Freedom of Speech.”

9. I’m not sure how people who don’t receive an email from me find the blog. Well – it turns out that not many do. But through the years, people have read the blog from some exotic places. For instance, this year, with only three posts, the blog has been viewed by people in China, New Zealand (college roommate), France, Australia (nephew), Finland, Dominican Republic (another college roommate on vacation), Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Belarus, and Pakistan. Last year, people from 23 countries read a post, including someone in Gabon.

10. Blogging for some people is a living. For me it is a hobby, which is good because my earnings so far would fit on a single coronavirus with room to spare.

11. One hundred posts at an average of 1000 words a post – wait, let me do the math – that’s 100,000 words, the approximate equivalent (in length) of a whole To Kill a Mockingbird (100,388) or half a Moby Dick (206,052).

12. I’m reading a book called Brief Lives by John Aubrey, who died in 1697.  It’s a series of biographical sketches, including luminaries such as Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. Most of the lives are obscure and most of the sketches are indeed brief, and to be honest, rather dull.  

The following vignette about Richard Corbet, the Bishop of Norwich, is not dull:  “One time when they went in procession about the cathedral church, he would not do it the usual way in his surplice, hood, etc. on foot, but rode on a mare, thus habited, with the Common Prayer book in his hand reading. A stone-horse [stallion] happened to break loose, and smelled the mare, and ran and leapt her, and held the reverend dean all the time so hard in his embraces, that he could not get off till the horse had done his business. But he would never ride in the procession afterwards.”

The “but” is a strange usage; it may be archaic, like “stone-horse” in the same passage. Having witnessed a breeding session at a horse farm, I can quite understand why the good bishop was reluctant to get back on the horse. 

As always, thank you for reading.