Drifting

I apologize, gang. This damn blog has been going nowhere for almost a month and - much as I hate to admit it - I've really don't have any notion where I want to go with it.

Every so often I've sat down at the computer and called up the big white Blogger posting screen and...sat and looked at it. I couldn't find anything to say worth hearing. I know. That's fucked up. But that's the truth.

I just can't stomach writing about politics or foreign affairs. It seems like the Stupidic Orogeny is taking place in human-scale time. Here the GOP is everywhere doubling-down on its lethal dose of crude venality and vicious rapacity; apparently the urge to ram the national dick into the Gilded Age meatgrinder is irresistible to the sort of Ayn-Rand-gobbling idiot capable of being elected in a safe Republican district, whilst the Democratic Party seems to be unwilling to defend the grand bargain that the New Deal secured after seventy years of class warfare hammered away on everyone not already members of the New Century Club.

And abroad? What the hell can you say when the only "democracy" in the Middle East does a 2004 and re-elects its little tinpot Duce, whose only answer to every political problem is force, might, and beatings? When I think of the utter fuckery that this brickheaded sonofabitch is going to lead my country into I could weep.

Sure, I could rip off some sort of incandescent rant about that fuckery, or the domestic fuckery of the domestic fuckers who want to return my country to the open kleptocracy of the fucking Cleveland or Harding Administrations. But why? You all know the problems, and you all know that nothing I can say here will solve them, or even get the addled 27% who long for the firm hand of Daddy Cheney on the wheel to agree that this nation would be more secure, more prosperous, and more promising if that vampire sonofabitch was buried at a crossroads with garlic in his lying fucking mouth and a stake through his shriveled secondhand heart.

I don't have a battle to write about until May when I'm planning on doing the 1422 Siege (and Fall) of Constantinople. I'm frankly having a difficult time dredging up anything interesting to tell you about the end of my active duty service and the beginning of my USAR time back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

And everything else is just home and family, or pastimes, and I don't find those - generally, unless there's something larger to be said within them or about them - any more interesting to write about than you would find to read about them.

So.

I'll try and come up with something here soon. I'm not sure what it will be. But it's either that or turn the lights out in the old place and shut the door for good.

Quantity over Quality

Just wanted to note that 2012 - as generally-sort-of-shitty a year as it was otherwise - was a tremendously productive year for Graphic Firing Table.

The 277 posts I hammered out between 1 JAN and 31 DEC 2012 were second only to my Big Year of 2008, when I managed almost a post a day. While for the "real" lefty blogs like Digby or LGM that's the base from which they presume to rise for a little hobby-blog like mine, well, let's just say that when I was looking at things in late summer I was more than a little discouraged. I was starting to think that I'd lost the whole blogging mojo and should take up cross-stitch or adult dodgeball or something.

But I have to brag that I think I finished off the year with a shout, and I'm looking forward to a productive and chattery January.

As always - feel free to bend my ear and suggest topics for discussion. Anything outside of a dog is my best friend and I will try and take a whack at it. Inside of a dog, as you know, it's too dark to read.

Thanks for coming along for the ride, and welcome to 2013.

Funny business, this blogging.

I opened the blog this evening - after getting my ass waxed twice at "Axis & Allies - War at Sea" by an eight-and-a-half-year-old (proving once again the lesson that Admiral Canaris learned the hard way - that pitting Nazi warships against Allied airpower is one of the Classic Blunders. The jeep carrier's Helldivers and Avengers were just too much for the Scharnhorst, great compartmentalization or no...) and took a brief glance at the comments sections, and I have to wonder - there appear to be some things that just beg to start conversations and some that don't, and I seem to have no clue which is which.

For example, I thought that the very odd little "I am Xiao Li" video would be a sure discussion-starter. Nope.

I thought the politico-military types would be all over "Eating Soup With a Sieve".

Nope.

The soccer, well, y'all have never really been that interested in discussing the joga bonita, so I didn't really expect much, and got about what I expected.

So at this point, I'm asking; is there something that you're interested in - or something that I've talked about previously or repeatedly - that you'd be curious about talking over? Topics burning a hole in your mental pocket? What would you like to talk over or shout about?

Consider the comments portion of this post a place to do that.