“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”
That quote - often attributed to Mark Twain, by the way, instead of Clarence Darrow who was the actual speaker - is a pretty tidy summation of my reaction to the sad news that the official Donald J. Trump blog is deader'n Ashli Babbitt.
Word, Tubby; as the George Washington character says in Hamilton: Governing is easy. Blogging is harder.
I get it. The long-form blog is dead (he says, as he gazes out over the vast herds of Substack grazing on the lush green lucre of "voluntary contributor"). Nobody wants to read your stupid thoughts, random person.
Nobody wants to read MY thoughts, that's for sure; the traffic on this site has dropped to nothing even from the halcyon days of 2018, when a post would routinely get triple figures in views. Now I'm lucky if I can break 100 pageviews, and even that hasn't happened since the Bay of Pigs post back in April (all the "battles" posts garner looks more than anything else)...
...except for this one:
This is an obscure thing I tossed off in 2011 that included recounting this weird dream I had where my in-laws were Korean; the title is Internet-Hangul for "What dreams may come".
The only thing I can figure for that bizarre spike in January 2020 - it got over 2,000 looks between the end of 2019 and 1/31/20 - is that someone or someones in Korea Googled the phrase and came across that post instead. It looks like someone found it in October-November 2018, where the pageviews jump from a handful to several hundred and then rise steadily until November 2019. Suddenly they spike from there until the end of January 2020, and then drop back off.
So my guess is that for about a couple of months I was a meme in South Korea.
Who knew?
Whatever. The point is, that it's been almost 15 years, and over 2,000 posts, and I'm still here, still doing the old-school (seriously? Who would ever have thought in the Oughts that here in the Twenties we'd be calling blogs and blogging "old-school"? Jesus wept!) blogging thing, unlike Orange Foolius who couldn't hack it for a month.
Just to celebrate? Since I revere all Internet Traditions?
Here's some cat pictures.
That's the Small Cat, desperately hoping that a squirrel or bird will break the window and hurl itself into her mouth.
Dueling kitties, trying to figure out how to duck the early-summer heat (it was well up into the nineties in mid-week) whist wearing a fur coat you cannot remove.
Sometimes you just can't escape the heat, so you just conk out and accept that your furry ass is whipped.
Drachma in cooler times, loafing on the deck railing.
They're good cats, or, rather, they're good at being cats. And I supposed that's enough, when you're a cat.
I have more to say, but I've got to run and will be back later today to say it.
Point is...I'm still here. And there's something to be said for that.
