Author: Dick

You may or may not notice the tiny site counter I have stuck in the right-hand sidebar. It is from StatCounter (click it and it will take you there but wait until you read what I’ve got to say first since I have you here).

If the statistics from StatCounter are to believed it could be a pretty useful three or four minutes of my time that I spent setting it up. If the data is faulty, who cares, right? The numbers listed on the blog are those page impressions made since I first signed up for StatCounter on July 8. The counter folks provide a personal site that goes into detail about visits to my blog. As of 1:40 p.m. CDT, according to StatCounter:

I’ve had 170 page loads since 7/8/05
I’ve had 56 unique visitors
I’ve had 24 first-time visitors
I’ve had 32 returning visitors.

What does this mean? Beats me. I’ve read how counters are notoriously unreliable and it really doesn’t mean a whole lot to me at this stage. After all, I’m just doing this blog to amuse myself, my friends and whomever wants to join in the fun. If I started getting serious numbers of visitors I probably would have to find a way to make money doing this and work is such an unattractive concept, at least while it is still summer. Just kidding. Sort of.

Statistics can be fun as long as they work for you and not against you. Counting how many page impressions I have on my blog is just something to do. Tomorrow the counter might be gone. Or tomorrow I might be in a witness relocation program. You just don’t know everything that might happen. What fun would it be if you did?

Money’s got my goat

Money magazine has published its list of top 100 cities in which to live in the United States. It isn’t surprising that Beaumont, Texas, where I live, is not on that list.

I say that not because Beaumont is a bad place to live. I voluntarily chose to live here — three times now — so obviously it has certain attributes that I find attractive — goats for instance.

Down the well-traveled Phelan Boulevard amid businesses and homes is a rather good-sized piece of shady pasture holding an undetermined (at least by me) number of goats. It seems so out of place and that is why I think it is pretty cool. For one thing, goats aren’t really big in this area. What farming goes on in the surrounding vicinity is largely restricted to cattle and rice. Plus, the area in which the little goat farm is located is a relatively busy area of commerce. So the goats wouldn’t seem like they belong there but they do belong as far as I am concerned.

I just like goats because they look comical. Goats appear most times like they stumbled into the marijuana patch and had to eat their way out.

No Texas cities were in the top 10 on Money’s list and only a few were in the top 100. The criteria for the rankings ranged from median household income (Money average $68,160 — Beaumont average $38,480 — eight feet deep average — a couple of bucks) to the number of restaurants within 15 miles (Money average 3,431, Beaumont average 702). If my math is right, which it certainly might not be, the national average for restaurants would mean a restaurant for a little more than 33 people each in Beaumont. Only a little waiting for a table and probably horrific tips.

One thing I found either encouraging or else the comparisons this list made were just totally out of whack was that Beaumont fared better than average on air pollution by quite a bit. Beaumont and surrounding cities are home to a large collection of petrochemical plants. And the pollution has certainly visibly decreased, at least, quite a lot since the first time I lived here 27 years ago. I also know it is better than when I last lived here seven years ago when the words “Ozone Action Day” were a regular part of the vocabulary. So I don’t know if the state (who regulates air emissions for the U.S. EPA) and the chemical industry have made some headway since this became a pollution non-attainment area or whether the weather has just been such that ozone hasn’t been a factor. I guess that’s something I will look into.

Meanwhile, we got goats.

(Disclosure: The goat photo comes courtesy of the U.S. Agriculture Research Center Image Gallery . The goat in the photo is not part of the herd I write about. I don’t want to have to fire myself for plagiarism.)

An Associated Press story has made the rounds recently about how blogging can have dire consequences on one’s personal and professional life. The article said blogs are resulting in:

” … a growing trend in which frank outpourings online are causing personal and public dramas, often taking on a life they wouldn’t have if the web had not come along and turned individuals into publishers.”

Noted in the story was how prospective employers might type your name into Google and find your deepest, darkest secrets and fantasies or rants or whatever. The article also quoted a study from Pew Research Center saying almost 80 percent of younger people said they need to be more careful in giving out personal information on the Web.

All of which is to say some important points are to be made. First of all, don’t put anything anywhere on the Web that you don’t want someone else to see. This includes mistakes. I remember a stupid mistake I made on a story I wrote a year or so ago. While its correction was in the paper the next day, it is nowhere to be found on the Web, so forever more that error is there for the duration.

And you have to be mindful of consequences that your writing might have on your future. If you are a 20-year-old prelaw student and you write that the First Amendment should be abolished, don’t think you are going to get a very easy time in confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court 30 years later. You also may be writing about your love interest at the time, or allude to certain amorous activity, only to have this cause you a limitless amount of bitching and nagging and whining from future wives or husbands down the road.

With that said I think the article and others like it I have seen strikes a defensive tone with respect to blogs. Blogging is becoming a force in journalism and is getting no small amount of press. For instance the current Texas Monthly features Nathan Nance, with whom I worked at a certain newspaper we won’t name, and whose blog CommonSense is on my blogroll. Sorry, the link only gives a portion of the story. If you want to read the entire story you’ll just have to fork over the cash like I did.

But I think some in the news media are quite put out at blogging. I’m not saying the person who wrote the AP story had any particular bias but it does, to me at least, reflect the tone some in the news business have. Having recently come from working at a newspaper, I think I know in part why that is.

First, blogs have limited quality control. The readers are really it. At my last newspaper I had my copy go through as many as four editors before it got published. (And I can still see that stupid error on the Web today, yes I know.)Also the level of accountability is different between mainstream media and blogging. I mean, you really can say about anything you want to about anything on a blog. It may be wrong. It may be libelous. It may be incredibly stupid. And, with certain exceptions, there might just be nothing that anyone can do about it except stop reading it.

I think these same reasons also reflect a jealousy on the part of some in the media. I know I was jealous of bloggers being able to spew forth their opinions while I had to remain tight-lipped. I still have to watch my pees and kews because I don’t know who I might be freelancing for down the road.

But at the present time I am enjoying the freedom to pontificate, or be silly or weird or whatever I want to be. It is the ability to express yourself in many, many ways that attracted me to writing years ago and I feel fortunate to have made a living off it for almost two decades. Blogging is just another tool for self-expression. The only difference is practically anyone can see it.

So, yeah, watch out for the man. But say what you want to say and have fun.

Karl Rove explains dribbling

Here is another of life’s questions to ponder: “Where does Karl Rove?”

And another: “If Karl Rove fell in the forest would anyone hear it? Would anyone care?”

Okay, those are two questions. Sorry.

I’ve read a lot of stories today regarding this whole Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame-Matt Cooper-Judith Miller-Bob Novak-Karl Rove thing. What a mess! If I was a dog and the Plame affair was a bone, I would bury so far under the earth that it would take an oil drilling rig to find it. Don’t get me started.

On a brighter note, I saved a bundle on my car insurance. Not really! I mean, really not really. My coverage went up $20 a month when I moved to Beaumont from Waco. I checked around with all the companies and my present insurance company was still the cheapest. It stinks — to high heaven. Wow, can you imagine something stinking all the way to heaven? I can’t. You would think something would stink all the way to hell. Did I tell you I didn’t save a bundle on my car insurance? Oh, I guess I did.

Prattle. Prattle. Prattle. Since baseball is no longer going to be an Olympic sport, I wonder if prattling could replace it? Or perhaps babbling. Can you imagine getting a gold medal for babbling? I know some people who can both prattle and babble. I guess that makes them prabllers, huh? Or maybe prattlebabblers? Beware of psychoprattlebabble. That is prattling and babbling by a psycho. I really need — A 4-piece Cheerios Breakfast set.

My Honey Nut Cheerios box says that the breakfast set is “Only $9.99 plus s & h.” S & H? Does that stand for schnapps & hors d’oeuvres? Because I could really use a snack right now. A shot of schnapps wouldn’t be bad either.

The breakfast set comes with an “easy clean” cereal bowl, cereal spoon, juice cup and write-on/wipe-off placemat. “The two-sided placemat has fun games for every stage of your child’s development.” I guess that would include games such as “The Cross-Kitchen Cheerio Toss” or “Scream Your Head Off and Make Mommy Psycho.” Hmm, maybe those would be good new Olympic sports. Your kids too can be Olympic gold medalist. Send me $1 and I will tell you how.

“How.”

(Offer not good in any of the 50 states of the U.S., or in Canada or anywhere else for that matter.)

We leave W.C. Fields to welcome yet another dead person to adorn this blog’s movable motto. Do a good job Brautigan. You never know how long you will be here. Of course, Brautigan is not really here because he committed suicide in 1984.

The quote refers to the closing line of his short story “A Walden Pond for Winos” in the book “Trout Fishing in America.” He writes about drinking port wine with these two artists in the park. The artists are talking about starting a flea circus and they reasoned they could get smarter fleas if they came from a Siamese cat.

It isn’t just the bizarre story lines that I like about Brautigan’s writing but rather his use of language. He was somewhat of a literary minimalist. That works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t. But he worked it well.

I wonder what his work would have been like if he was still alive. It is one of those matters like fate, you just don’t know but that’s not going to deter you from speculating about it. What he would have made of the Internet and of the war on terror? Would his writing have improved with age like a fine wine? That’s not to say it needed any improvement although some critics during the 1980s thought so.

My speculation is that if Brautigan was alive and writing today he might never break out of his cult following. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you are not a successful writer. I have a friend who is a novelist who has never broke out past a cult following and I think he is doing quite well. As for whether Brautigan would improve, that is hard to speculate. Some writers get even better with time. Some do not.

But of course, none of that really matters. I like his writing and I think it stands well the test of time. I think if you say that about a particular writer, then that writer is already a success.