Welcome, New Readers

After yesterday’s link storm (hmmm, “Link Storm”, isn’t he that new action hero?), I’m going to be coasting a bit for a day or two. I started this blog a week ago last Sunday, and I’d like to take a little breather. In the meantime, I’d like to invite any new readers to peruse what’s already here. Since it started, there’s already been 77 posts. Some of them are probably a bit “stale”, but if I’ve been doing my job correctly, most of them are still of interest. There’s been enough interesting stuff that sometimes I regret seeing good items buried by newer items, so cutting back on the posting for a day or two might give some items a greater chance to be read and appreciated.

Just a note about my purpose and how this blog got started: I’ve been a “webhead” since before Netscape went public (not difficult, since as the web came onto the scene, I was a worker bee at a semiconductor company). I remember the “bulletin board” era of the net, when about all you could do was browse around on FTP sites. I fooled around with Mosaic, when it first came out, and at that time you could get a poster illustrating pretty much the entire web. When the first conservative websites started (World Net Daily, Newsmax), I was reading those. During the Florida 2000 debacle, thanks to the Internet, I was reading the rulings from the Florida Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme court minutes after they came out. If I remember, it was about that time that National Review Online became a major resource.

9/11 was (to use an unfortunate analogy) the “Big Bang” of the blogosphere. It was around this time that I discovered the early blogs like Rachel Lucas, Eject! Eject! Eject!, U.S.S. Clueless, Mean Mr. Mustard, and Andrew Sullivan.

I consider this revolution in the cost of publishing to be a Rennaisance of sorts. There is so much excellent writing and analysis out there, so many things to give you a handle on what’s “really going on”, that I found myself frequently e-mailing and forwarding things to a handful of friends. I’d also sometimes write comments on other sites, and would occasionally get some positive feedback from those. I also noticed the problem that e-mail did not give me any ready way to return to or revisit previous stories. I also felt that the time I was spending browsing the web, my “taste” in what is worth highlighting, and my experience of knowing where to go to find good stuff, should be of benefit to more than just myself and a few other people. Also, I noticed in conversations, that there are still a lot of intelligent, “with it” people who don’t know about the blogosphere, and could use some sort of introduction.

So for a few months it was in the back of my head that someday I might do this. A week ago last Sunday, apropos of nothing, I loaded blogger.com into my browser, just to see what was involved, and to my surprise, 10 minutes later, I had a blog!

My goal is to highlight items that are either brilliantly written or argued, cast a new light on older topics, give important news that’s probably never going to make it to our trusty Main Stream Media (MSM), or are cleverly humorous. Occasionally I’ll write pieces of my own, for whatever they’re worth.

My hope is that out of the many new readers who have come across the site one way or another, at least a few will find value in what I’m doing, and will be return visitors. So please browse the site, and I hope you like what you see!