200 Something-or-Others

This the 200th new post on this blog — that is, not counting earlier material reprinted from elsewhere. I wasn’t very assiduous for the first year of the blog’s existence, so most of it is relatively recent: and, I suppose, relatively trivial compared to previous efforts to Say It All. Future material is contingent on the uses people put the blog to (right now the art and music selections are popular, and people searching for Rothkos and pictures of Disco Stu are inflating the readership statistics a lot). Still, all in all these are exciting times to be demonstrating a basic grasp of discursive rationality, so I have few regrets about this stage of my Internet usage; perhaps I’ll celebrate with some of the excellent and Cuba-friendly Davidoff cigarettes, which are back in American tobacconists’ shops after years of being absent due to fears of liability lawsuits. Or do something entirely different.

Career Opportunities

On the topic of classical models: it sometimes occurs to me that if I were a Latin rapper, I ought to call myself “Montaigne”, for the purpose of putting together a “group” record called Montaigne’s Eses.

Happy Trails

Well, it’s a wrap; this is the last post on Fortunes of the Dialectic. I’ve been signed up for a pilot vocational project, and so we’ll see who wants to hire a mentally ill socialist backed by the full faith and credit of the US government; but part of that involves acting less like a mentally ill socialist, and so I don’t feel that it’s wise to continue with the established tenor of the blog.

I think it more or less accomplished its purposes of giving those with limited academic opportunities some pointers on various disciplines and of providing me a forum to tell my life story more completely and lucidly than I’d previously been able to manage; with that in mind, and because I’m at least a little vain, I might be leaving the blog up until the recent contents get on the Internet Archive.

I want to thank the handful of people who read regularly, and the intrepid souls who blogrolled me and posted comments. I’d also like to thank the “blogosphere” in general for not tearing me a new one; things are changing, and it’s good to see that people think someone who’s been treading water for quite a while might possibly be able to grasp some of his time in thought again.

The Roar of the Masses Could be Cumulonimbus

In the if-you-didn’t-already-know department, Weather Underground is a great way to stick it to the weatherman. Combining a mixture of National Weather Service information and data culled from personal weather stations, WU is a nice alternative to waiting through endless teasers for tomorrow’s weather on the local news. It’s not an ‘all-weather’ replacement: sometimes the NWS forecast requires a little critical analysis, as when they predicted 2-5 inches of snow accumulation for the Portland area one day in December, and information for places outside the US is thinner. But the site is fast and easy to use, and if you want to know just how damn cold it is outside right now there’s no better way.

Mr. 3000

As of about ten minutes ago, the 3000th pageview for this blog took place. Since it took roughly a year and a half to reach this point, and many among that number wanted me to have the skinny on how to best acquire prescription medications, I can’t really “celebrate” this as a “milestone”. I think that’s well enough, since I really don’t have any plans to have the blog grow beyond the (quite) modest stature it currently has; still, I would like to thank the people who do occasionally click through here and to say I hope they find something interesting once in a while.