From the editorial staff at jeffreytharp.com, a merry Christmas and totally excellent new year. Enjoy the time off and visits with friends and family. After the 2011 we’ve had, lord knows we’ve all earned it. Let’s see if we can prove the Myan calendar wrong, shall we?
Category Archives: blogging
Christmas Hiatus…
I’m thinking about taking a Christmas hiatus. Seriously. I mean it this year. I’m really considering just pulling the plug and letting this place gather dust for the next week or so. After all, it’s not like many sites put up a whole bunch of new content during the holidays when people are paying attention to other things. It really seems like a perfect time to take a little break without too many people noticing I’ve been gone. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before actually. It might be interesting to see how things play out when “how can I write a post about this” isn’t always pinging around the back of my head. Then again, maybe I’ll hate it and be right back to posting before the weekend even rolls around.
Right now it’s just an idea I’m kicking around, but if you don’t hear from me for a few days, it’s just because I’ve idled the engines for a few days not that I’m taking a permanent vacation. Or not. I think everything depends on how I feel and how interested I actually am in writing on a day by day basis. Just now I happen to think that a week off is just what the doctor ordered of course that could easily change the moment some shiny bauble catches my attention. How’s that for being indecisive and noncommittal?
Secret…
I confess. Sometimes I have blog posts written hours or even days in advance. Today was supposed to be one of those days. I had a nice 300-odd word post all worked out and was ready to go, except suddenly it doesn’t reflect at all what’s actually going on any more. That sometimes my ranting from around lunch time doesn’t translate to later in the evening isn’t is unfortunate but true, which means its going straight into the recycle file to be used at a later date. It’s bad for blogging, but good for just about everything else. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Stream of consciousness…
As much as I’d like to say I’ve been using the last five days to churn out my magnum opus, the real story is that I’ve mostly just been to lazy and disinterested to write much. Those are two attitudes that rarely lead to interesting posts. In fact I’m probably as bored writing this as you are reading it. Sure, there’s plenty enough going on. The Occupy people are mostly getting what they deserve. Europe is poised on the brink of catastrophe (when aren’t they). The Middle East is a tinderbox (as usual). The federal government could shut down later this week because Congress hasn’t gotten around to approving a budget and the Supercommittee on deficit reduction can’t seem to find their collective ass with their shriveled, tired, old hands and a flashlight. So basically the world is a hair’s breath away from spinning off into any number of possible nightmare scenarios. As much as I should be paying attention, I can’t seem to muster so much as a healthy give a damn. At this point I’ll consider it a victory if we just manage to keep the lights on and food on the table. How’s that for lowered expectations?
None of that really explains why I haven’t been writing. As far as any explanation is really possible, it’s mostly because I’ve momentarily run out of witty and sarcastic things to say. I’ve pretty much taken a stand on all the issues I feel strongly enough about to bother mentioning. Although it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, I’d really rather avoid beating the same tired horses over and over. When something interesting enough to catch my attention passes by, you can believe I’ll be back in spades telling you why it sucks. Since in all likelihood that will happen tomorrow or the next day, this entire post has served only as a placeholder until I can think of something more interesting to discuss.
Election 2011…
As you know from time to time I like to look at the searches and keywords that bring people to my humble home on the internet. OK, so technically I obsess over that kind of thing on a pretty much daily basis, but that’s beside the point. I was looking at my analytics this morning (yes, I check every morning before I go to work, now stop smirking). I think yesterday gave me my new all-time favorite search term: did jeffery tharp win the election-2011. For some reason, this blog returns to top two spots on Google for that group of words all crammed together in the search box. Other than that, there’s not much record of Jeffrey Tharp running for anything in 2011, except a dead link to a local news program in Indianapolis.
If I did run for election in 2011, there’s almost no chance that I would have won. Setting aside the whole telegenics issue for the moment, it’s way too likely that at some point during the campaign I would come unglued and tell some well-meaning, but stupid constituent that they were simply too dumb to vote. I’d have been overcome by compulsive honesty and told a group of concerned citizens that the worst possible thing the government could do for them was try to create jobs out of thin air and deficit spending. I wouldn’t have kissed babies or pandered to old people and I’d have walked off stage at the debate when someone tried to drag religion into the discussion, because believing in Jesus or Jehova or Vishnu or the Supreme Order of Jedi Knights makes you any better at administering the levers of government than the guy next to you who believes in something else.
I wouldn’t have made campaign promises I knew I couldn’t keep. Nope. I’m not going to lower your taxes. We have bills to pay. And no, I’m not going to increase your benefits, because guess what, we have bills to pay. We got twenty years of good times and now we’re getting the lean. That’s how the economy works, people. It’s a cycle. 10 years from now when we’re somewhere north of Dow 20,000 you’re going to forget all about The Great Recession. If four cable news networks weren’t cramming the economy down your throat and telling you how bad it is out there every night, would you know there was a problem? I sure wouldn’t judging only by the number of cars parked at the local shopping mall or the number of flat screen TVs rolling out the door at Best Buy.
That’s my long way of saying that I don’t think there’s much of a chance a guy named Jeffrey Tharp got elected in 2011… But if he did, I hope he’s got the guts to call it the way he sees it and not the way that’s going to make a great quote for the local newspaper.
Big round numbers…
Even while I’m writing this, I find it a little hard to believe that somehow I’ve churned out 500 posts as we’ve hopped along from Blogger to WordPress and finally to our permanent home here at http://www.jeffreytharp.com. That total probably bumps up another hundred if you include the “lost posts” made on my original MySpace blog. I still have those saved somewhere and if I ever figure out how to post them as a group, I’ll republish them so the entire canon is here in one place. Still, 500 is a big number and worthy of a momentary pause.
It occurs to me that through the last seven years of changing jobs and changing geography the blog has been almost my only consistent touchstone. I’m sure a good quality head shrinker would say that says more about me than anything I’ve bothered to write down. Maybe that’s a fair point. Still, keeping this blog up and running and making almost no topics off limits has been a massive commitment of time and effort. It’s a labor of love.
Who knows, maybe I’ll give it up tomorrow to and go off looking for something else to keep my mind occupied. It seems more likely though that we’ll be back here 500 posts from now being suitably impressed by the next big round number.
Placeholder…
Jeff would love to write a real post tonight, but instead he’s busy upgrading his iPhone and iPad to iOS 5, playing around with a bunch of new features and apps, and trying to decide if he wants to set up an iCloud account. Rest assured, he is working hard to bring you the finest blog posts available and will be back tomorrow with his regularly scheduled edition of What Annoys Jeff This Week? Until then, bye-bye and buy bonds.
Disappearing act…
Reading blogs can give us a window into what someone half a world away is thinking about. It’s fascinating in its way. It’s not without its problems, though. One that’s been troubling me lately are the blogs that have been around for years that suddenly just disappear. It’s frustrating because you’re invested in the story the author is telling and when it goes away it’s like you’ve been cheated out of learning how the story ends. For some of them, the troubled ones, you wonder if they finally found peace in their writing or if the end of their blog means something more ominous. Because the can be such a transient place of broken links and bad URLs, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that some pages just up and vanish.
Still, it’s disturbing in its own way, because it represents years of work gone in some cases. I think the thing that bothers me most is the not knowing. Did the author just decide it was time to move on or did something horrendous happen? Maybe the only thing any of us are doing here on the internet is building a monument to our own electronic egos, but now that I’m closing in on 500 posts, I’d like to at least think that I’ve put together something permanent here – a record of what, at any moment in time, mattered to one person. If I decided to stop writing, I mean, geez, I’d at least leave a note or something.
Good intentions…
I always sit down to write with the best of intentions… like taking time to edit whatever it was I just dumped on the page or hitting some topic that’s caught my attention with a painful level of detail. More often than not what actually happens is I hit “publish” as soon as I’m done typing and then fix errors as I find them… sometimes days or weeks later. And detail? Yeah, let’s face it, most of the time I’m lucky to stop rambling long enough to draw out a salient point or two. I’ve noticed that it’s mostly a battle between putting together quality or putting together volume. For the last six months or so, I’ve come down pretty squarely into the volume camp and tried to post five days a week. The part of me that’s curious about such things wonders if I’d write better if I only posted half as often.
One of the aspects of Get Off My Lawn that I’ve always enjoyed is that is has a “as it happens” feel because the posts a function of whatever happens to be going on at that moment. Setting a schedule of posting on say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at least to me, seems to take away some of that flexibility. I don’t want to turn this into a set piece affair, writing on some formulaic “topic of the day,” but at the same time I’d like to bring a little more editorial and quality control to improve how things read and look when they come hot off the press.
I read a lot of blogs and know there are many out there who seem to effortlessly produce large volumes of quality posts. It’s not a contest, but I’m definitely interested in how much time they spend composing their posts and where they get their ideas. I like to think I’m a better writer now that I was when I started blogging. I know I’m certainly more introspective now. I might even be more technically accurate, but better? I’m not so sure. Sometimes it feels too mechanical, like I’m posting just to post.
The searchers…
Running a blog is a mixture of art and science. The art comes in the form of the actual words on the page. The science tells you who’s searching for what, why people are visiting, and where their coming from. It’s probably not a discussion to have with your friends who are worried that the government or big corporations are tracking your every move. The analytic tools that are available to me, a poor simple blogger, would be profoundly disturbing for them. Disturbing images of big brother aside, I’m always curious about what brings people here. And since it’s bad form to blatantly ask, I’m using some analytic tools to let me know what web searches lead people to me. So yes, I’m tracking you, but only a little bit. I’m sure there are ways to put names with hits, but that’s not something I’m interested in so your secret identities are safe. All I know is that you’ve been here. Sort of like knowing that people lived in your house before you did by finding a box of their crap pushed all the way to the back of the crawl space.
If you’re wondering what brings people here, there are some obvious answers. The top draw was apparently the DOD/Army hiring freeze. That one’s still bringing in hits although I haven’t written about it in three or four months. Electronic cigarettes is another big winner. Apparently there’s alot of interest out there. Of course my old favorite is still well into the top five: Teamwork Sucks. That’s been bringing in consistant visitors since I opened the doors here. None of those is surprising, really, once you remember the the town square of the modern world.
The ones that are really interesting are the one offs that land just one lone individual here on the site. Some of my personal favorite searches from the last year are:
– memphis storm drain backup
– how can i protect my grass from people driving over it?
– narcotics jeff tharp
– how to piss off apartment manager
– ocd mowing the lawn
– jeff tharp star wars oregon
– tactical retrograde
– glen beck institutionalized
Some of them I can understand. I did spend some time ranting about Glen and an inordinate amount of time worrying with my lawn. If any of you are updating my mother, though, can you please assure her that I have no idea where the narcotics part came from. Thanks for the solid.
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