Twentieth Anniversary Thoughts

 Tomorrow marks 20 years since I began this blog.  Some 45,000 posts and millions of words later, I am still at it.  I don't post as much as I did and mostly news briefs of note.  I kind of fell out of the blogging when Trump became president.  I decided to scale back because the news was so depressing.  Nowadays, I am working full time again, so that doesn't leave me with a lot of time to delve in depth about things.

Unless, of course, it has to do with deaths of certain people who I think might be worth commenting on.

I never gave this blog the time or had the following that so many bloggers did early on in the craze, so therefore I never had the hits and or was able to make a career out of it. I never intended to make a career out of it.  Furthermore, I wasn't part of the clique that got off the ground early on.

These days, Substack and similar "newsletter" platforms are being touted as "get rich quick" schemes.  The problem, of course, is few people are going to want to pay to read something on subjects can be had for far cheaper in a "niche" magazine.  Why would I want to pay to read somebody writing about photography, for example, if for far less money I can subscribe to a real magazine and keep the copies?  It is all a bunch of hype.  Only established writers can make anything off of newsletter-style platforms.  No "niche" is necessary if somebody is an established journalist or writer.  They aren't typically "niche" writers. This is the nasty little truth about these platforms.  In the end, it is no different than trying to make money off a blog or off of YouTube.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to do so.

I have always enjoyed writing and always will, but I have made very little at it.  One of my nephews tried to make a living freelance writing, and he found it next to impossible to do it.  Fortunately, he found a regular job as a staff writer, and he is doing well for himself financially.  Freelance is self-employment, with all that entails.  Unless you have an income stream already, it is impossible to make it.

Anyway, it has been 20 years since I started this blog.  I will likely continue with it until I drop dead or can't write at all anymore.

Changed Part of the URL on This Blog

I have been wanting to do it for years, but I finally got around to doing it yesterday.  I wasn't sure how it would impact visits and such.

It is now this:  http://rogueofthevalley.blogspot.com/

I can't believe I have had this blog for seventeen years.

I didn't want my name on the URL anymore.

What An Embarrassment for His Mother

to have raised such a screwed-up twerp as this "pick-up artist" who couldn't get a woman if his life depended on it.

Not only has he embarrassed his mother for raising such an idiot, but he has virtually guaranteed he will NEVER be able to find a regular job or will be forced to change his name.

However, his face is rather memorable.

He has to realize there is a limit to free speech. Many countries do not tolerate the bullshit that he spews on his woman-hating blog. He also needs to know what "satire" is and not claim it after he gets into trouble:

This is the man at the center of a worldwide storm after advocating legalizing rape on private property - in a sweat-stained T-shirt at the door of his mother's house.

Daryush 'Roosh' Valizadeh, 36, the self-proclaimed 'King of Masculinity' called police after receiving death threats from around the world and canceled a series of 'tribal meetings' in 45 countries set for this weekend.

Valizadeh, who is at the center of public protests at home and in Canada, Australia and the UK, is on record as advocating women be banned from voting, describing a woman's value as dependent on her 'fertility and beauty', and stating that women with eating disorders make the best girlfriends.

I am guessing he is likely a head case. However, what is more scary than him is that he has a following of thousands of screwed-up guys who think women exist for their own pleasure and use.

Guys, women are not objects whose only purposes are for screwing and having babies.

To Hell With That

I changed the URL back to what it was.

It was more trouble than it was worth.

If employers don't hire me on the basis of what I write, well, screw it.

I have only about three and a half years before I get early SS if Obama doesn't decide to do away with it.

Changed the Name for the URL

After 11 years with the old one, which had my real name in it, I decided to change the URL address for this blog:

ontheedgeblogger.blogspot.com


Given how employers these days like to check on your online presence, I decided to change things here.

Not that I am ashamed or embarrassed, but that will also reduce any kind of online harassment.

I am doing the same thing to my links blog.

Looks Like Sitemeter Has Bit the Dust

No warning, no nothing. I can no longer access my account; in fact, it just shows a webpage but there are no links to anything.

There were always issues with that service undercounting hits and visits; I know I had a lot more of them than it ever counted.

If it ever comes up again, it will be a miracle.

Blogger's stats tend to overcount visits and hits, but then again it counted things Sitemeter wouldn't count.

It appears Sitemeter's owners didn't renew the domain name registration, and some have said the site has come back.

It hasn't here.

Edit at 2 p.m.: The widget came up and Sitemeter is up, with no loss in stats. We will see how long that lasts.

Ten Years Ago Today

Yours truly joined the world of the bloggers and started this blog. It has resulted in 40,300 posts, millions of words, and several name changes to the blog's name, but I have enjoyed every minute of writing here and sharing my viewpoints, pictures, and links to reports and articles.

I had thought of doing a "best of" here, but it is simply too much work.

I intend to keep up this blog for another ten years if I am still around that long.

Post 40,000

It'll be ten years in December that I started this blog back in 2002. A lot of words have been written, a lot of article excerpts have been copied and pasted, and a lot has happened outside of the internet in those ten years.

In 2002, I was 47 years old, living in Nevada, and gainfully employed as a public school teacher. Today I am 57 years old, living with my brother and sleeping on a couch in my hometown of Medford, Oregon, and I am totally destitute while trying to get my career back on track. I am now resorting to begging online and trying to sell possessions, and neither has been successful.

In 2002 I was an ardent Democrat, but ten years later, I have been VERY jaded because I don't feel people in my situation have any voice and there is literally NO ONE to vote FOR. I have toyed with third-party politics thanks to that faker of a Democrat in the White House who would sell his mother to reach across the aisle to support policies that are ruinous for the American people.

If I am still alive in ten years, no sure thing, I will still toil on this blog. I hope I am in better financial shape then than I am now.

An Anniversary to Note

Today marks the ninth anniversary of this blog. This longevity can be attributed to either sheer perseverance or from sheer boredom of somebody who has refused to get a life.

The stats are impressive: the total post count is nearly 39,000 posts and millions of words including my own words and copy-and-paste. The readership level is much less impressive, seldom rising above a couple of hundred hits a day if one believes in Site Meter stats, which I don't because it undercounts and even deletes unique visitors or page views. I gave up on it a long, long time ago. That's why my readership stats are no longer publicly available. Because I wasn't a traditional liberal asskisser and wouldn't link to the big blogs and such in the early days when blogging started to catch fire, my readership never went up to the level it probably deserved, and therefore I couldn't make a living at blogging like ol' Kos and a few of the others.

That's the way it is. I never was an asskisser, and I have paid for it in a variety of ways.

This blog will likely make it to next December 15, if I make it that long.

Note: The archives show my first post was on December 17, 2002, but I know that the archives had screwed up some time back. My very first post was about Trent Lott and why I thought he should stay in the Senate.

Blog Stats

Since I have had so much on my mind lately, I didn't notice Blogger put in a stats link similar to what WordPress has. As I have figured out, these stats show there are a LOT more hits on this site than SiteMeter shows. SiteMeter's is VERY inaccurate; in fact, I found as I was changing the icon and making the stats private that my visits are roughly DOUBLE what it shows, to almost a half-million unique visits since 2002. I also found there are times when SiteMeter would roll back my blog's visits, so there has NEVER been a truly accurate count, at least one that would show.

It's really frustrating. I know I don't get megahits here like the big blogs, but it is discouraging that SiteMeter would always understate how many people visit here.

I welcome the new hit count system for Blogger.

More about the new Blogger stats is here.

One Has to Take Anything Written on Blogs with a Grain of Salt

because they have a slant, but there is some kind of responsibility owed to the readers.

Case in point is this concern by a reader of the Schools Matter blog regarding a post there about Kansas City, Missouri, schools:

They posted the other day that the KC supt is closing schools so they can be reopened as corporate charters. So I left a comment after that item, saying I teach in KC and we have never heard this, where did you get this information? My comment wasn't published.

Yesterday I emailed the person who wrote that blog item. Haven't heard back yet.

I have talked to union officials, school district admins and local reporters. No one here has any idea what this blog item is referring to.

I really like this blog and have forwarded it to friends and colleagues many times since I began reading it. But unless they are willing to back up this claim about corporate charters in KC I can't trust them now.

Here is the item I am referring to:

link

After repeated requests, this person has had no answer but has had her comments tagged as spam.

Dishonesty isn't allowed in teaching and shouldn't be tolerated on blogs. In the referenced Schools Matter post, there are NO stories from reputable sources backing their claims.

It's time to come clean, Schools Matter.

Personal Stuff

I missed this hilarious blog post by my nephew which notes his brother's 40th birthday back in 2007. It is funny.


The Cheese Stands Alone

A snip:

In the latter half of 1966 and for two-thirds of the following year, I’d had a fine existence. I was doted on by new parents eager to give their young son a good life—or so I must have thought. In retrospect, it is clear those seemingly loving parents were plotting against me from the beginning. Undoubtedly I needed something from them that November night when I was barely 3 months old. My cries, however—for food, comfort, or a clean diaper—went cruelly unheeded as they traipsed off to begin production of my nemesis. This was the beginning of a long list of resentments I would harbor against them but lying there in my crib—hungry, shivering, and packing a full diaper—I was hardly in a position to stop them. He was born just nine days after my first birthday. My idyllic childhood had come to an end.

My nephew is majoring in writing at Southern Oregon University. He also has this blog.

The Cause of PUMA

While bloggers from sites like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos whine about PUMA, in truth they helped cause this anti-Obama movement.

And if Obama is nominated and goes down to almost certain defeat in November, the nutroots need share a large part of the blame for it. Not that they will, of course, but they should.

More Campaign Whatever.

The so-called "left" became the mirror image of the radical right when it embraced the filth and smears directed at the Clintons this campaign season.

The word "scandal," whether singular or plural, should be in quotes when writing about the Clintons. There were no real scandals during the Clinton years.

Part two is here.
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Alberto Gonzales giving candidates advice on how to win the Hispanic vote is like Karl Rove lecturing on election reform.
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I Have

tried to add a few blogs on the blogs list, but Blogger isn't saving a lot of them. I will be adding more as time goes on.

On my links blog, I have dozens of blogs on the list.

Miscellaneous News [Updated].

Michelle Marshall, aka Taylor Marsh, is profiled in a Washington Post article.

She's pandering a bit too much to Obama supporters now in trying to broaden her audience, so I find her much less interesting to read or listen to. Not only that, but sometimes her opinions are downright dumb or silly.

It appears they have her age wrong:

She's 47, and said she still has the practicality of a childhood in Missouri and the thirst for fame from years in New York and Los Angeles. She moved to Las Vegas a little more than five years ago hoping she would succeed on the radio in a smaller market, but it didn't pan out.

I had read she was Miss Missouri in 1974 and had just turned 20 around the time of the Miss America pageant. No way was she 13 or 14 when she entered the beauty pageants. Miss America's rules state contestants must be between the ages of 17 and 24.

Wikipedia has an article about the Miss Missouri contest winners. Marshall is listed as winning the contest in 1974. You can find her name here as well. This site has her down as a "delegate" to the Miss America pageant for 1975. Marshall is either 53 (or possibly 52) or 54 now, not 47. She hasn't seen 47 for quite some time, regardless.

By the way, a Google search wasn't even necessary. Her "about" section in her blog reveals the truth for all the world to see.

Next to a picture of her as Miss Missouri of 1974 she writes:

Okay, this one is pretty obvious. Miss America Pageant, circa September 1974, one of the last years Bert Parks did the pageant. This is the parade down the Atlantic City boardwalk. One very vivid memory I have was walking outside the Chalfonte-Hadden Hotel, now long gone, and seeing N.O.W. outside, picketing us beauty pageant babes. One gal came up to me, in front of a throng of press (who called me "Mizzou"), and asked me how I could humiliate myself by parading on stage in a bathing suit. A 19-year old chickadee, with more attitude than pageant law allowed, I simply said, "You want to pay for my college tuition?" Then off I went in my limo.

And underneath some more pageant pictures from the "talent section" of the Miss Missouri and Miss America contests:

These pictures are from rehearsals at the Miss Missouri Pageant, as well as me performing on talent night at the Miss America Pageant, the day I turned 20. I did a song and dance to "If They Could See Me Now," from "Sweet Charity." By the way, I was one of a handful of girls that showed up with short hair at the pageant. Back then, big hair was king. I bucked that trend and many others.

She was born in either 1954 or 1955, not six or seven years later.

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Campaign Notes.

Our dictator deliberately confuses Obama's message of transformative politics by claiming he's soft on terraism rather than soft on our own homegrown fascists.
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As somebody who has participated on message boards for many years, I agree with blogger Joseph Cannon when he says the level of discourse on the so-called progressive blogs and boards like Daily Kos and Democratic Underground has degenerated to freeper levels or even worse. This is extremely true this year in the cultlike zeal of the Obamabots who not only try to drown out dissent, but they shit all over other Democratic opponents. Of course Hillary Clinton is the last opponent standing, but the trashing was true when there was a whole field of candidates.

It's disgusting beyond belief.
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The Case

has certainly brought the visits here. I have had two days in a row where this blog reached over 1,000 visits, a lot for this place considering I don't publicize it much at all.

I am getting visits from Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, the Netherlands, China, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Canada, and of course all over the United States. I have always had visits from all over the globe, but this case has accelerated the visits.

If You

are truly bored with this blog, there are many other blogs to relieve the boredom. Some of them are in the right-wing blogosphere, as this piece notes.

I don't mean they are necessarily good blogs, but at least they are entertaining enough to either get you laughing out loud or getting your blood pressure up.

So

have the Obamabot blogs taken a nosedive in readership because of their incessant trashing of Hillary Clinton? There apparently is evidence of something like that happening.

Kos, Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post, and several other of the major blogs/message boards have turned into shitholes as a result of their Obamabattery. It was never like this in 2004, even with the seeming cultishness of the Mouthzilla supporters. They were never this far gone, and never were they that gullible to the GOP/media spin with Obama.

More "analysis" is here.