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One of the things I enjoy most about blogging is it is virtually self-perpetuating.

It used to be pre-internet columnists for newspapers had to maintain a level of consistency or be banished.

“I could write the world’s greatest story today and then I’ll have to wake up tomorrow and write another one just as good or everyone will say I’m slipping.”

That’s what one of my old favorites, the late great Lewis Grizzard, once told me. Thrice married and divorced, he died of a congenital heart defect at just 47.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him the equivalent times he was married and I think one of our interviews exceeded the duration of one of his marriages.

The man was a doozy. And a great writer.

But I think about his point whenever I peek at my stats page and it tells me someone is reading a story I posted from maybe three years ago.

That’s the beauty of writing in the internet age.

To turn Grizzard’s phrase on its head, I could have written the greatest story three years ago, given up writing to sell insurance and today that story could make me famous.

Today our stories are eternal.

I’m reminded of this nearly daily when I see that people trolling the internet have found my blog and mined something I barely remember writing and, bless their hearts, have begun referring it to all their friends.

I thought I’d give you an example and show you the top 10 stories people are reading right now and my thoughts that some of these arbitrary deadbeats are actually starting to make me proud.

I’ll omit a couple of obvious high rankers from the last two weeks.

No. 1 party boy from America’s No. 1 party school, August 2 -- Reaction to this boozy love letter to my Ohio University alma mater has been very gratifying. It got a huge readership right out of the gate and continues to draw near daily readers from all over. I think I was just a bit hungover when I wrote it.

Turn the page: A Bob Seger salute, January 21 -- I could really be onto something if I just picked one cool celebrity and focused laser-like on the subject. Anytime someone googles the great Seger song, “Turn the Page,” or other Seger-related queries, this post pops up.

Even stink bugs need love, September 30, 2010 -- This one continues to plod along and doesn’t stink at all. I thought it had some nice subtle sweetness about how even the lowliest creatures deserve some tenderness. Favorite line: “How can dedicated entymologists be anything but bug-eyed?”

Talking to nudists about Casual Fridays, June 3, 2011 -- I enjoy the daily updates to the newly added “search term of the day” feature up there in the right hand corner of the blog. I thought it would be fun to include some of the oddball ways people find my site. Guaranteed, at least once a day someone finds my site by including some variation of the search term “nude.” There’s been “amish nude,” “casual nudes,” and “nude recreation week.” I did a story about National Nude Recreation Week back in July and had a lot of fun with the research. I expect this one will be evergreen.

Time on my hands & everywhere else, August 31, 2009 -- This surprised me when it landed with a thud. I sort of thought it was the kind of breakthrough post that would really drive some readers my way. Wrong! But it’s becoming a little engine that could. It turns up in the readership rosters all the time. It’s a good one if for no other reason than the opening premise: “I’m thinking of getting a $75 tattoo of an $18,000 Rolex on my left wrist.”

R.I.P Buster the 19-year-old cat, September 4, 2008 -- Well this is certainly a surprise. Someone’s trolling around in the back catalogue and stopped by on the birthday of this post I wrote exactly three years ago. So odd. It’s not bad, but it makes me wonder if I should go back and weed out some of the ones I don’t really like. I have over 500 blog posts now and the world would be none the wiser if I trimmed that in half. Heck, maybe I should just delete all by the top 25. I’d look like a genius.

A Brad Pitt-y Party, January 13, 2009 -- A fine selection. I feel like a snooty waiter complimenting someone on selecting a rare vintage. This is the kind of oldie but goodie I’d keep if I whittled down the stack. Bashing celebrities is so much fun I wonder why I don’t do it more often.

867-5309, February 15, 2011 -- I contend this is the last phone number we’ll all remember. Our numbers have become our names. We just dial the contacts. This doesn’t pop up too much and I’m always pleased when it does. “Jenny! Jenny! Who can I turn to?” So much digital nostalgia.

Boston Corbett: America’s Greatest Eunuch, April 26, 2010 -- What a fascinating and insane man. Corbett’s the man who killed the man who killed Lincoln. This gets a lot of traffic. I like to think bleary eyed and scholarly researchers stumble on this and are revived by a strong shot of historical irreverence.

My 2010 office party: Canceled!, December 22, 2010 -- Just what the hell this is doing here I can not explain. Just about every day of the year for the past nine months someone, somewhere clicks this on. It’s confounding. It’s okay, but what’s the big deal? If today’s like every other day, at least a dozen people from all over the world will tap into this story that was topical for about two days last winter. Amazing. Oh, well. What can I do except wish those readers a very Merry Christmas!

And Happy Labor Day to the rest of you!

Thanks for reading!

Happy Birthday to my Blog!

This blog turned 1 year old on Saturday and I gave it the weekend off. If that makes it seem like I’m a kind and nurturing blog boss then it’s misleading.

In fact, I’m a tyrant. I push the blog as hard as I can. I make ridiculous demands on its time and insist each and every one of its efforts be of a respectable quality equivalent to what any hungover Journalism 101 student could produce, the professional standard to which I’ve held myself since earning a gentleman’s C in Journalism 101 back in 1984.

I do this because I resent the blog for being everything I am not.

It’s punctual. It has produced 156 out of the past 356 days, or about three a week with at least 700 words per posting. I haven’t come close to matching that many words over the same time period and that includes word counts from things like grocery lists and scribbled “Be home in time for dinner . . .” lies I leave on the kitchen table.

It’s creative. The posts have ranged from industry-saving solutions like edible newspapers to why, for the good of humanity, Mt. Everest should be lowered by about 15,000 feet.

It has followers. Twenty-nine friendlies have signed up to testify that they keep up with the blog and will follow it wherever it leads. I look behind me and there’s no one there.

It earns money. Just yesterday, Google Adsense sent me a notification that it owes me chump change for people who’ve clicked on the ads that lean against the blog copy. One of my biggest scores from the past year involved the $9 I earned while serving eight hours of jury duty. Honest.

It gets scores of great comments from far-flung strangers who say they love the blog (not me). I can’t help but notice them on the end of many of the posts. The little brown noser shows me each and everyone of them.

But as much as I resent the blog, I grudgingly admit it’s been a smashing success. It’s gone from no readers to a feisty squad of loyal followers. Let’s be fair-minded and conservative -- something the liberal little blog would never dare be -- and confine the readership to the 29 followers.

If in one year the blog’s gone from zero to 29 readers, that’s a increase of -- correct me if I’m wrong (if I could do math, I wouldn’t be blogtending) -- 290 percent. If I exponentially increase 290 percent each and every year then in five years it will be this blog, and not Howard Stern, who can claim to be King of All Media.

The great thing is this zero to 29 leap took place in a year when nearly every other major media outlet -- NY Times, Esquire, Sports Illustrated -- all suffered substantial readership losses.

The trend is unmistakable. Many of the publications that routinely reject the words found on this blog are going under. The blog is not.

So here are some of my linked favorites from the past year. If you’re enjoying the blog and want to share it with friends, I thought this would be a handy way to catch them up on the last year. Most of the ones I picked were from the first part of the year when the blog readership was utter desolation.

Since then, I’m pleased to report that scores of new readers have climbed aboard through my friendly associations with www.redroom.com, Gumbo Writer and The Unbreakable Child.

If you enjoy it, I’d encourage you to sign up to be a follower. The more substantial the blog’s readership, the more likely someone influential is to sign me up to do work that might involve actual payment -- and wouldn’t that be something!

Thanks so much for reading. I’m thrilled to have each and every one of you as a reader. Really, it means a lot to me.

Just please don’t share that mushy sort of sentiment with the blog.

I wouldn’t want it to go to its head.


8Days2Amish -- A scattered sampler


• R.I.P. Buster the 19-Year-Old Cat: This is about the cat I stopped loving in 2002 and how I reacted when he finally died in 2008.

• Inaugural Oath Goof and the Right Wing Crazies: I have good friends who say they can’t stand it when the blog is political. I agree. There are far too many gasbags out there pontificating on politics. But the election of President Obama was too compelling to ignore. This one was my highest rated on www.redroom.com by a bunch.

• TV-holics Prepare for Bender: My tribute to John Lithgow, the world’s greatest over-actor.

• Worked to Death: I used this poor stranger’s death to justify my dissolute life. I think it worked . . . even if I rarely do.

• Vanity Zip Codes: Nothing baffles me more than coming up with a fresh, fun story like this and not being able to convert it into money. It strikes me as such an original idea done well, I contest. Yet it was roundly rejected by the pay publications.

• Good Music for the Needy & The Stupid: I’m very passionate about music. Here’s what happened when we sold our CD collection at a local flea market.

• Two Handsome Devils, The Stranger & Me: Most of these take about an hour to write and an hour to polish. This was done and filed 30 minutes after the burnouts made the inspirational remark.

• A Brad Pitt-y Party: If for no other reason, this one will forever endear itself to me because it allowed me to post these fantastic pictures of a shirtless Jack Nicholson eating a hoagie. It’s priceless.


• Surviving the Survivalists: These are dark days. I have a rule to always cast some sunshine against the darkness as I tried to do here.

• Horsin’ Around in the ol’ Breed Barn: This was from just a couple of weeks ago so I probably shouldn’t include it. But one woman posted a comment that said it was the funniest thing she’s ever read. I was deeply flattered, but can only conclude she's either a constitutional lawyer or just got the hang of reading. Ah, heck, parts of cracked me up, too.

A Brad Pitt-y Party

Brad Pitt is immersed in a fresh round of interviews complaining about how difficult it is being Brad Pitt.

This strikes me like carpenters complaining about nails or florists becoming disgruntled over the sight of yet another bloomin’ rose.

I just don’t get it. He makes movies and that may involve hidden tedium unseen by me, but essentially movie producers pay him millions to be Brad Pitt. They want him to look dashing, be charming and strike poses that make women swoon. If he’s not up to it then perhaps Pitt should quit being Pitt. Really, I can’t imagine the acting side of it’s all that tough.

In every grinding interview he goes to great pains to assert how important it is to spend time with his enormous family and I don’t doubt him. Tribe time’s important to me, too. But I have so few occupational burdens our oldest daughter often gets exasperated enough to beg me to go out with my buddies so I didn’t intrude on her girlie games with Mommy.

I pretend I’m wounded and grimly shuffle out the door like a repentant killer being dragged down Death Row for a court-ordered doom date with Ol’ Sparky (see, Pitt’s not the only one who can act).

He just released a well-received movie that clocks in at nearly three hours. I’m not familiar with movie production, but I can imagine filming took more than a few months away from Angelina, those eight or so kids and the hypo-allergenic squads of hand sanitizer-wielding nannies and other associated house help.

Maybe he should stop making movies. We could all do without him. There are hundreds of pretty young boys waiting tables in Hollywood who could, guaranteed, do what he does just as well without all the whining.

His biggest problem, it seems, are the paparazzi. He doesn’t want people taking his picture. Or pictures of his family. Or his now-oppressive wife who just a few years ago was so outrageously exhibitionist she made Madonna seem demure. (Billy Bob Thornton probably cracks open a beer and giggles with relief every time Angelina and Brad adopt another orphan).

But he knew when he was striving to be famous and when he chose to date and marry equally famous and whiny women that the ticket-buying public would want to see pictures of him smiling, digging around in his nose and tripping on his way out of limousines. The rules haven’t changed.

Him complaining about paparazzi is like me complaining about commas. I don’t like commas. I wish we could get rid of them. I ruthlessly delete them every chance I get.

Sometimes I secretly play childish cat-and-mouse games with commas by using ridiculously long and structurally untenable run-on sentences that go on and on but in the end the winking little punctuation points usually assert themselves and bring order to grammatical chaos by doing their nimble if annoying little jobs, by golly.

I bring this all up because over the weekend Valerie and I dropped the kids off with grandma and enjoyed some sweetheart time. We considered Pitt’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” but at three hours it was too much time away from the kids so we chose Clint Eastwood and “Gran Torino.” It was outstanding. Go see it.

“That man can do no wrong,” Val said. “We’re so lucky he’s still around, still looking great and still making these wonderful movies.”

She’s right. Eastwood’s a bigger and more enduring star than Pitt could ever hope to be, but he’s never complained about the burdens of being famous. He, like Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, and the late and much-missed Paul Newman all gave us fantastic and relevant work that’ll be enjoyed forever. And none of them has ever made the job description “movie star” seem equivalent to ones like “bus driver” or “trash hauler.”

On the contrary, they seem to enjoy it for the pleasure the rest of us suspect it must be. Eastwood’s never been reclusive, hosts a PGA golf tournament and once served as Carmel’s mayor. Redford does important environmental work and unselfishly nurtures generations of aspiring filmmakers, and Newman’s warmth and philanthropy are as monumental as his movies.

Nicholson? Well, his dissolute personal life is as audaciously entertaining as anything he’s ever filmed so no one cares that he’s never devoted even a second to adopting underprivileged orphans or making charity salad dressings.

I remember a few years ago when Nicholson got into some petty open-container trouble for inviting paparazzi into a NYC liquor store where he was hooch shopping and offering them a swig with a make-peace toast to the good life.

Maybe I should try that with commas.