There are two things that a blogger needs. Bloggers need ideas and audiences. As a blogger, you always strive for that million-dollar idea that will send your readership soaring. A recent example of this was putting the idea of hookers in hard hats in a title. It was not that novel an idea, but it increased our audience. The line on the graph went north. Our readership has yet to move into the thousands but we have been pleased with the loyalty of hundreds of readers every month.
While we always put something fresh in the blog every day, we explain to readers that dropping by this site two or three times per month is more than enough to provide you would with fresh insights and something interesting to read. We can hardly be all things, to all people, all the time.
Nobody has given us an answer to our ongoing question as to whether we should run the occasional picture. Would it give the site a little more class? It might be fear that we will run our own picture. We can assure you, there is no danger of that.
To our chagrin, a reader has yet to suggest a topic for us. That is the writer’s struggle.
Mind you there is the occasional suggestion by a non-reader. We have some of those, believe it or not. One non-reader, whom we consider a friend, told us that he had absolutely no time to waste on reading useless things like blogs. And yet the same person, handed a printed copy of some 30,000 words we had written, called the other day to say he had read the piece and considered it most interesting. Go figure?
By the way, we have copies of The Babel Manifesto from the printer and a review copy is yours by mail if you promise to give the manifesto some thought and share those thoughts with us. How we are going to put the manifesto into broader circulation, has yet to be determined. We will, of course, promote it at times this summer when the news media are gushing about the silly royals being in Canada. The monarchy is just one of the many reasons why we must have an elected constitutional conference.
We know very well that there are people who yawn at the suggestion. W.A.C. Bennett, when he was Premier of British Columbia, was said to have made the comment that of the most important 100 things he could think of that needed doing in Canada, rewriting the constitution was item number 101.
One of the reasons, we are so polite about this is that there is a bit of a family tradition of tilting at windmills. Brother Edward and our father are and were ardent crusaders. Our late father was an expert on—of all things—trajectories. As an expert marksman, he knew how a bullet travelled in flight and the twists and turns that it might take. He applied this knowledge to the curved ball of baseball fame and felt that he was hard done by in trying to explain by the owners of organized baseball. What really annoyed him, we all knew, was that they did not care.
If the sports writers and broadcasters wanted to call a dropping fast ball, a ‘curved ball,’ that was their problem. Father knew damn well that the ball did not curve. That was an impossible feat.
Brother Edward tilts at more modern windmills. We should first explain that brother Edward is the smartest person we know. He is certified as a genius. He is a guy who had a career creating software languages. He does not write code. He writes the language for the code. Despite decades that both of us spent working with computers, he often talks of computer intricacies in terms that we have a hard time understanding.
Brother Edward knows that computer software that is produced today is just not up to snuff. He knows that it is based on concepts developed more than 30 years ago and is easily corrupted. He is most concerned that we let this corrupted software fly airplanes, control automobiles, produce cheques, run governments and do all sorts of things that might stop working because the software just collapses of its inadequacies. He worries about that and feels we should also worry about it.
Who can compete with that?
– 30 –
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]