I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
January 03, 2012 - 12:12 p.m.
I deliberately didn't do much yesterday. The only time I ventured outside was for bagels. Things went so smoothly there is nothing to write about it. So now I'll finally get to some more year in review type things. So what's left to review? My year in blogging. I spend more time doing this than any other activity. We are talking an hour a day almost every day. This is a big part of life. But how do I write about writing? One way is numbers. That is the number of you, My Gentle Readers. This is the year a long time pattern was broken. My readership has always varied on a monthly basis in a sinusoidal pattern, it peaked in July or August, depending on when I wrote up Falcon Ridge and hit its nadir in February. The amplitude would change and for a number of years was on a downward trajectory. I was discouraged two years ago. Starting in December of 2009, five of the next six months I averaged less than 20 readers a day, with a low of 15.7 in February. Then came my first NERFA in 2010 and things changed. Since then there's been nothing but growth. Here's the chart of my average readership per day by month in the two years I've been keeping records.
I more than doubled my readership from December to December. I know I shouldn't care about this but I do. I like knowing that you are out there and reading this. Thank you.
What I really wanted to do was give a link to my favorite entries of the past year but that is proving too daunting a task. I was thinking I could make a note of each edition I particularly like this year as I write them but that doesn't work. It takes the perspective of looking back to judge how good they are.
I could go and look back at my year of reading but I don't have a good record of what I read either. I will next year. I started keeping track of what I read on Goodreads and unlike We Read it records the date you finish a book. I'm afraid if I saw how few books I read I'd be embarrassed. Still it's better than reading no book. Since December I've read Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain and Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Lisa Randall. Is two books a month a good rate? I know many of you read multiple books a week but it isn't a competition. Maybe that will be my goal, 24 books in a year. I do tend to read my challenging books than most people. Let me see if I can figure out some more books that I read. I might be able to do it with We Read, I'll have to figure out how far back to go. I finished the Randall book this year so I won't include it on this year's list.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
- Hole in the Bottom of the Sea by Christine Lavin and Betsy Franco Feeney
- The Age of Diminished Expectations, Third Edition: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s by Paul Krugman
- Small Gods byTerry Pratchett
- Snuff by Terry Pratchett
- Hornblower and the Hotspur by Cecil Scott Forester
- How Can You NOT Laugh at a Time Like This?: Reclaim Your Health with Humor, Creativity, and Grit by Carla Ulbrich
- The Jungle by Upton Beall Sinclair
- Lust for Life by Irving Stone
- The Order of Odd-Fish by James Kennedy
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural James Randi's Decidedly Skeptical Definitions of Alternate Realities by James Randi
- In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd
That's only 15 books. I hope that I'm missing some. I knew I'd be embarrassed.
Today is J.R.R Tolkien's Birthday. Yesterday was Isaac Asimov's. Those were the two writers that were the biggest influence on me before college. Others have joined them but they still have a place at the top of my pantheon.
This is going to be a short edition of Wise Madness I'm not going to start writing about any of the things in my idea bin. I was going to write about writing and failed so I wrote about reading. At least there is a symmetry to it.
I forgot to take the chicken wings out for dinner! I better rush and do that now then make my brunch, bacon and eggs.
Hey I can write a year in review about food!
I won't but as I was thinking about this today I'll say this. I've been eating less bacon. I know that will disappoint many of you but it has to share breakfast meat space with Taylor ham, breakfast sausages, and recently black truffle sausage. And yes I feel bad for the bacon.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Horvendile January 03, 2012
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