On 4 May, in my first post here, I wrote: “So, I now have my own blog after blogging on other sites for the past few years. I expect it’ll be rather liberating to stand outside the scope of incompetent, arbitrary moderation and petty control-freakery. I hope that some old friends and acquaintances from MyT, DnMyT and elsewhere will look in … and ‘new’ people too.”
One month on, I’ve enjoyed this blog and the people who visited. As I write, there have been 8,450 views (up to 739 on any given day … yesterday was the second-busiest) and 876 comments. Presumably quite a few people have visited without commenting; they are very welcome to comment if they wish.
My thanks go to everyone that has taken an interest in ‘The road to God knows where’ in the past month.
The road to God knows where ... Brendan O'Brien 
Congratulations Brendan
I am still with my family but will be back. Keep well and good luck.
Thanks very much, Ike. I hope all is going as well as can be expected for your family at this sad time.
Hello Ike (and Brendan)
My best wishes.
Hello Levent … good to see you.
Hello Brendan,
Good to see you too.
Hi Levent
Thanks, and the very best to you too. Thank you also Brendan.
A pleasant sunny Irish glade, away from the storm of conflict.I’m not much into poems but I enjoy reading what you have to say.
Keep it coming. I just got the order for the pergola by the way. 5500 euros.
Thanks, Richard. I enjoy what you have to say too, when you’re not bull-baiting. 🙂
Good for you re the pergola. The ‘Bloom’ event was very good yesterday … some nice model gardens. Our garden has massive potential but little actuality.
As you wish, Cymbeline, but I really hope you’ll comment on my blog again (sooner the better) … I’d be very sorry if you didn’t.
You are free to say anything you please here, of course, and so am I.
Have a good weekend.
Nice blog. See you are on the revamped Torygraph along with that scally Shanghai. Mr Broxted is about to be killed off by The Indy.
Cymbeline … all done.
Don’t forget that you’ll always be extremely welcome here.
Thank you, RB. I see that Kiska is over on MyT too.
Plus the enigmatic but compelling Broxted.
Has Cymbers flounced? That’s a pity.
Sipu … yes. And Claire and Jaime, who used to comment fairly prolifically, have also departed the scene.
The turbulent world of blogging.
Brendan
May I with your permission say: Hi, Sipu?
Thanks.
Ike, you may say anything you want.
Brendan
You have to be real careful when you invite someone with a Dutch background to say whatever he likes. I may not discuss all things that I like in public but though we managed to soften some Dutch expressions when we exposed the language of our ancestors to the African Sun and thus formulating Afrikaans some of them are still best not mentioned, but another Dutchman may revert to the original name for the things he likes. Be careful!
But thanks for your natural civility and also the honesty to call a spade a spade when it needs to be done.
It is my loss for which I accept full responsibility that I kept the wrong bad company once and thus not got to know you sooner but I intend to make up for it and enjoy your Posts I read them all though I am not commenting often from my rest area.
Thanks for that, Ike. 🙂
Hello Ike. Just got back from my motor cycle ride through Zambia and Zimbabwe. Had a terrific time. How are you? I surmise that there has been a family loss. My condolences.
Sipu
Thanks. I am keeping a low profile and having an extended rest with my son and his family up in Sodom but will be returning to Nineveh and civilization soon.
Brendan, I detected some friction between Cymbers and Claire. Its quite strange watching one woman bully another, though I thought Claire was made of sterner stuff. Maybe there were other reasons. I like them both.
Sipu, Claire has stopped blogging altogether for the moment, for reasons unconnected to Cymbeline.
I rather object to the accusation of bullying, Sipu. I have made far more pleasant comments to Claire than unpleasant comments. On this site, over the meaning of a comment I made in French, I disagreed with her complete misunderstanding of my words, and I deliberately used impersonal language so that she would not feel aggressed. I have also expressed the fact that I think her understanding of Voltaire is superficial. When I am talking about concepts and ideas, I do not dally around with trying to dress up my words in frothy niceties. Sometimes I use satirical shorthand, rather than writing lengthy posts full of nothing. Is that bullying?
I have no problem with being asked to tone it down, and people can call me any name they like under the sun, but I dislike the owner of the blog telling me that I drive people away from his blog, especially when he condemns control freakery elsewhere. It is called applying psychological pressure while pulling rank. I also truly hate the idea of driving people away, if that is what I do. That is why I shall lay off commenting. I control myslf, on my terms.
As you know, I do not exchange emails with anyone within this blogging world, but I believe that you have a private correspondence with Claire, Brendano. Please tell her that I feel very sorry that she has been having a bad time.
Cymbeline most people can’t take the truth. I have discovered that the whole British nation is not willing to look at itself as others see it. What to do, best to conceal one’s thoughts, but some find that in conflict with their desire for integrity.
Hello Cymbeline … nice to see you. I don’t think I told you that you drive people away from my blog. What I said was:
‘Cymbeline, perhaps you could be a little less unfair to Claire? Jaime no longer visits my blog, and I wouldn’t like to lose Claire too.’
Given that you don’t have a problem with being asked to tone it down, I would have thought that this was pretty harmless. I’m sorry if I offended you in any way … I didn’t mean to. It can be hard to get the nuances of communication right online.
Yes, Claire sometimes emails me and vice versa … I’ll tell her what you said.
Please stick around! 🙂
Brendano. There is no need to apologize. I am not offended. I am talking about ideas.
Cymbeline … yes, as soon as I posted the comment I realized that ‘offended’ was wrong.
I understand the idea, but I didn’t see this as a matter of being proprietorial or controlling on ‘my’ blog … more a matter of trying a little oil on the cogs so that things might roll along freely.
And hey, things really did roll along freely. Quite funny really.
Bearsy, on his site, also thinks that he is trying to let things roll along freely.
I have no problem with Bearsy, and I greatly admire his professional savoir faire, but there is no way that I would put myself in a position of being bossed about by him and Boadicea. That is why I keep a healthy, but mostly courteous distance.
Yes Cymbeline … life is essentially funny.
Offcut from a novel … a story once told in a pub.
One time it so happened that Boaster Hughes, Tom Trott and Buddy Brady decided to go on a trip to Dublin. They wanted to do some shopping, and Tom Trott also wanted to have his spleen removed, so he thought he’d better go to a hospital. He could have gone to the local hospital, but Tom Trott had said to him ‘Don’t go there – I once went there to have my spleen removed and they took out the fucking left one instead of the right one.’ So Buddy decided he ought to go to a better hospital, and he assumed that there’d be a good one in Dublin.
They all met up early in the morning and set out for the railway station, and they all bought return tickets to Dublin from Kate Bush. Kate was taking a break from the music business at the time, and there she was behind the counter. Boaster Hughes said, ‘What are you doing here?’, but she just gave him a dirty look, which of course was very sexy.
The three lads walked towards the platform to wait for the train. Boaster Hughes said, ‘Lads, can you give me five minutes? I want to chat up Kate Bush.’ The lads looked back at the window, and they could see that Kate Bush was dancing around in a very provocative kind of way. But Buddy Brady said, ‘Time and trains wait for no man.’ The train arrived at that very moment, and Boaster Smith rushed onto the platform and Jesus didn’t he slip on the suds that Kate had left there from when she was washing it and had forgotten to rinse off, and he went shooting out onto the tracks in front of the train. So that was a bad start to the day, because his right leg was severed above the knee. And then, to make matters worse, he was hit by the train. So he was in bad shape.
Kate Bush came out and was very concerned – she felt a bit guilty on account of the suds. Boaster said, ‘See that, lads? I knew she fancied me.’ Kate said, ‘We’d better try and do something about that leg.’ She sent Tom Trott up the town to get ice from one of the bars, but of course Tom got chatting to a few people and had a few drinks, and by the time he got back the ice was just water. Kate was quite pissed off about it, because her gin and tonic was tepid, and there’s nothing worse than that.
Kate said, ‘There’s no time to lose. We’d better try and stop this bleeding.’ So she got some gauze and wrapped it round Boaster’s stump, while he made a few risqué and suggestive remarks, and some that were even lewd. Meanwhile the train driver was getting impatient, and so were all the people on the train. Tom Trott said, ‘Bring the leg along with you, Boaster, and you can come along to the hospital with me, and after they’ve removed my spleen they can try and sew your leg back on if it hasn’t gone rotten.’ But, as luck would have it, there was an old woman on the train, Bridie Comerford, who was very good at sewing. She sewed Boaster’s leg back on, and of course she made a far neater job of it than any surgeon ever would.
They waved goodbye to Kate Bush, who was quite emotional and was dancing round the platform and singing in a high-pitched voice. ‘I’d love to give her one,’ said Tom Trott as the train pulled away. ‘Oh shut up,’ said Bridie Comerford. ‘There’s no need for that kind of indecent talk.’
The three boys got to Dublin without further mishap, and walked up along the quays from Heuston Station. Boaster Hughes suddenly saw that his leg was on backwards, and was quite surprised that he hadn’t noticed this before. Luckily, the one that Bridie had sewed on was the right way round, which goes to show what a good job she did. Then they started arguing about life: Tom said that life is essentially funny; Boaster said that life is essentially tragic; Buddy said that life is meaningless. They backed up their arguments with quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Burke, Spinoza, Emily Brontë and Kate Bush. Then a Dublin gurrier came up and started teasing them about their country accents. Buddy pushed him over the wall and he fell in the Liffey. As they watched him drown, Tom laughed, Boaster cried and Buddy wore a neutral expression.
By the time they got to O’Connell Bridge they were being chased by a posse of the gurrier’s friends and relatives. They made their way to Nelson’s Pillar, which luckily hadn’t been blown up after all. They went up to the top of it and stayed there till the danger had passed. Then they made their way down from their lofty fastness and walked along the street, looking for a hospital.
Soon they came to the Rotunda and went inside. Tom accosted a nurse, who of course was very attractive – she looked a bit like Kate Bush and was wearing a short uniform with lots of buttons undone. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m up from the country and I want to have my spleen removed.’ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘This is a maternity hospital. The only thing we remove here is babies.’ Tom became quite indignant and started to splutter with rage; the nurse advised him to go and vent his spleen elsewhere. He threatened to take her literally and do it himself on the street, and said that if he died his blood would be on her hands.
‘Oh all right, then,’ she sighed, and she shouted up the corridor – ‘Doctor! Man here looking for a splenectomy!’ ‘Splendid!’ said the doctor, rubbing her hands. Boaster Hughes said hopefully to the nurse, ‘Excuse me; I’m up from the country and I’m dying for a ride.’ ‘Oh all right, then,’ she sighed, and she shouted up the corridor – ‘Doctor! Man here looking for a ride!’ ‘Splendid!’ said the doctor, rubbing his hands. Hilariously, this doctor was a big, strong, fat, ugly, bearded, horny homosexual man, who didn’t look like Kate Bush at all. In fact he wasn’t even a doctor – he was a convict who had escaped from Mountjoy (which, if you don’t know, is quite close to the Rotunda). He had just murdered a doctor and stolen his white coat. He led Boaster Hughes into an airing cupboard and gave him a right good buggering.
Meanwhile, no beds were available so the doctor had to operate on Tom on a trolley. A good few people in the supermarket complained, but of course they still wanted to buy the spleen because it was so fresh. But Tom decided to keep it as a memento of his big day in Dublin.
Later the three boys were drinking coffee in Bewley’s of Westmoreland Street, with the spleen in a plastic bag on the table, when Boaster started to have a go at Buddy. Boaster said, ‘I’ve had a lousy day. One of my legs was severed, I discovered that the other was on the wrong way, I became pessimistic about the human condition, I watched a man drown, and I was raped in a cupboard. But nothing bad’s happened to you. It’s not fair.’ Then Tom said to Boaster, ‘You think you’ve had a bad day? By the time I got to Superquinn, all the free samples had been eaten.’ And he started to laugh. Then Buddy joined in, and finally Boaster, and the three of them agreed that, all in all, it had been a highly memorable trip.
I started using Bearsy’s site because he had said I’d be welcome there. It was clear from an early stage that I wasn’t welcome as far as Boadicea was concerned, and Bearsy soon indulged in some unnecessary side-taking of his own.
As it transpired, he couldn’t stand to have people like Levent and me on his site. He is a smallminded reactionary with a nasty streak. His site is fit only for clods such as tocino and O Zangado, though plenty of good people use it too.
It is also very badly designed … the lines of text are too long for the type size.
Well Bearsy wil be crying in his beer because his sheila was easily beaten by the Italian girl Schiavone. Well done Italy, well done the EU, bad luck the AS. Aussies can’t cut it, maybe she’ll do better on the London sheep pastures in two weeks time.
Cymbeline, “I rather object to the accusation of bullying, Sipu. ” Mea Culpa, Cymbers. Perhaps teasing might have been a better expression, but maybe even that is wrong. I may even have been indulging in a Pythonesque sexual fantasy; two beautiful, intelligent women fighting naked on a big feather bed, arguing the merits of their favourite French philosophers.
Brendano, I liked your story.
Thank you Sipu. Feel free to express your fantasies here (within reason) :-).
There was a kind of “bullshitters’ club” in a local pub when I was a teenager; the story is meant as the kind of thing that might be told there. A tall tale.
A Gaelic football club near me is holding a ‘bullshitting competition’ today. I won’t be entering. 🙂
Glad you are enjoying having a page here Brendan.
You certainly get a lot of traffic!
Thank you, Isobel.
Yes, I get a fair bit … it took a big leap at one point, for some unknown reason.
Also, getting thrown off Bearsy’s site may have given me ‘publicity’ of a sort. 🙂
Brendan
I could not help noticing this and maybe I should not do what I am about to do but your modesty though it is a rare quality is more than you deserve in this instance.
Very few people on that site will make it on their own; it is a hard nut to crack. Jamie MacNab has “taken off” ten times faster than I have seen anyone in more than two years of WordPress. You have done well not because Mister B [or maybe it was Missus B …. smile] kicked you off. Like Jamie you have a following whether others will grant you that or not.
As an example [they were discussing examples there today …. smile again] have a look at the Blog of “our mutual friend” who always demands proof [except when he is the one who must provide it] and have a good “chuckle” on him. Even “double postings” at Mister/Missus B and WP are not bringing readers to his WP site. Have a look at how many comments he gets; you will find it is zilch.
I have now been a bad boy. But please allow me one final little remark about when your reader count took off “without any reason” as you say. You may recall that I remarked on the same aspect in one of our other Posts. Now watch this one and let me know how it goes.
The credit belongs to you. And you deserve it!
That’s very gracious of you, Ike. 🙂
Yes, I remember that you made some enigmatic remark about the number of views of my blog. Let the mystery remain. 🙂
Thanks Ike for your discreet wisdom and kindness 🙂
There is that of course. Made you infamous in the annals of WordPress no doubt; the rebel blogger. Or should that be the blogger rebel? 🙂
My own page is a much quieter backwater, but I like that.
i know you have talked about hosting a multiple authored page. If you go that route, I do hope you will keep a separate page for yourself, as I think the multi-authored have a different, more frenetic energy, and I can’t always deal with them.
Thanks, Isobel. It’s true that the energy is different … yours has a nice calm energy (as opposed to Bearsy’s, which is deadeningly dull imho).
I probably enjoy something a little livelier, which is why I’d be happy to have certain other people posting blogs here if they wished. That would include you, but I don’t suppose you’d be bothered considering that you have a well-developed blog of your own.
Brendan
Your “reply to my reply” above does not provide for a further reply and I am therefore, submitting this as a new comment to say that I agree with you to let the mystery remain.
Will you please however, if you can and if you agree, insert one of those “smiling smiley thingies” at the end of this effort?
Keep well. 🙂
Ike. Love your great wisdom and thought, and love the way that you have totally freed yourself from self-importance and spitefulness.
I hope that I will be as wise as you, one day.
Great, true sincerity 🙂
Keep on a-teaching me, Sir!
I am trying to learn how to fit in here 🙂
No problem, Ike. 🙂
‘Bothered’ isn’t really how I’d put it!
But I like the way individuals’ blogs have their own voice and pace.
I visit mostlyfunctional.wordpress.com quite a lot and I love it. It’s not a blog I can see on a shared space.
More that I have quite enough excitement in my life. We all have our different reasons for blogging.
Also, I am probably setting up a community blog for where I live, and a friend and are co-responsible for a work-blog. That’s enough for one person I think!
PS I particularly enjoy it when you post poetry that you have written or that you enjoy, or bits of local lore and history.
x
Re your 39, Isobel … thank you; I’ll bear that in mind. 🙂
Re your 38 … it sounds like you have a lot on your plate … good luck with the community blog. I’m involved in quite a lot of community activities, but not blogging as yet.
🙂
Just posted a de la Mare poem on my page.
I read your post earlier about Thackeray’s comments on Browning.
V good.
Browning was a Peckham lad in the days when Peckham was renowned for its educational establishments.
Isobel is definitely the blogger template for this blog. Perfect, Isobel 🙂
I shall try to follow in her catsteps 🙂
Off topic : v interesting about Browning and Peckham. Thank you.
Thanks, Isobel. The Pre-Raphaelites were fans of Browning, and Rossetti also called to see him in Paris.
Browning didn’t like Rossetti’s poetry. Rossetti, in later drug-induced paranoia, came to believe that Browning’s poems were attacking him.
Then there’s the Ruskin connection. He was at Denmark Hill. The Brownings used to call on him when there were in London. Ruskin was friendly with just about all the Pre-Raphaelites, though after Effie left him for Millais, i think we can cross Millais off that list…
G’night!
I once knew a great deal about the Effie-Ruskin-Millais triangle, as I wrote a screenplay (never sold) in which it featured prominently. I may post some extracts here.
Ruskin preferred Lizzie Siddal’s drawings to Rossetti’s.
Goodnight, Isobel.
The feeling of being attacked is pretty general, Brendano. When do feelings of attack turn into paralysing anxiety or paranoia? All part of a human scale, like autism.
Sorry, Cymbeline, I’m not sure what you mean.
Think about it then.
Nobody has beaten Cervantes on that subject.
And there are no answers. Only questions.
It’s a few years since I read Don Quixote, Cymbeline. Loved it then.
Sorry 🙂 I have been forgetting myself, as usual.
Time to serve the curry 🙂
And perhaps chimera IS truth.
Who knows?
And what is chimera, and what is ‘reality’? Are either the truth?
Nobody knows really.
True, Cymbeline. Being human is strange. We didn’t ask for it, but we got it.
Were Millais et al to go through SE5 & SE15 they’d be mugged. Chimera? I think a genetic chimera is different to what you are discussing so I will absent myself.
I find that Shakespeare says the same things over and over again, within all his different plays. Same universal characters, rehashed. I tend to forget the plots because they are all quite boring. How many Elizabethan dances at the end do we really need?
Cervantes said it all in ‘Don Quijote’. Unforgettable compression.
It can be either a kind of bizarre hybrid creature or a product of the imagination, RB.
I have all the Shakespeare plays on DVD now … must start watching some of them.
Allingham says of Troilus and Cressida: ‘Shakespeare’s hand in it, but not his play: poor in some parts, loaded in others: a re-cooking of familiar matter, with Shakespeare sauce.’
Much the same as Cymbeline said.
When I was a student, I was sent to La Mancha for a year. I also had to write a dissertation on ‘El papel de Dulcinea en la Segunda Parte’. I was more interested in living than in literature.
One day, I went to the village of El Toboso, home of real? literary? Dulcinea del Toboso, and I missed the last bus back to Ciudad Real. I knocked on doors, asking if anyone would take me in, and said that I would pay. ‘Go away’ they cried, and so I slept beneath a cart of grapes in the village of El Toboso.
Or perhaps it was really a feather bed.
Sipu. Thank you for your reply.
Did you go to Ndola?
I see that you liked Brendano’s story at comment 27. I am incapable of reading that sort of thing. Just can’t do it. Bored before I even start.
Good El Toboso story, Cymbeline.
No Cymbers, I did not go to Ndola. I was only there once before in 2003. The city itself has little to offer and I would have only revisited had I friends to see. I went as far as Mkushi which is where many of my Zimbabwean farmer friends have moved to, and very well they have done too in the 10 years since Mugabe threw them off their own land. There is a book, called ‘Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight’ by Alexandra Fuller. She was a child in Rhodesia during the bush war and her family moved to Zambia, Mkushi in fact, in about 1980. It is very well written and very evocative of an African childhood from a girl’s perspective. I think you would enjoy it. Other books of that genre are, ‘Scribbling the cat’, also by Fuller and ‘Mukiwa’ and ‘When the crocodile eats the sun’, both by Peter Godwin, who incidentally was at school with me.
As for the story, I am afraid that I have an affinity for the ridiculous. Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (Derek and Clive) and even the brilliantly puerile Viz Comic. Though of course, Viz is nothing like as funny as it was 20 years ago. http://www.viz.co.uk/index.html
But I can be serious and mature as well.
Hello Sipu. I used to read Viz in Plymouth in 1988. Very funny and clever, and even then joking about not being as funny as it used to be.
Brendan
I am getting ready to fly back to Nineveh in the morning and should be back in my own hollow by Thursday early afternoon your time.
Have a good journey, Ike.
Thanks Brendan
I sat looking at your words not quite sure whether I should react but I needed to; in the end your use of the word journey made up my mind for me.
Maybe is the wrong time to refer to my site but I feel the need for that too. Don’t reply to this one though. When I get back at my place I want to spend some time and look at your Post about “the truth or something beautiful” and ponder something. The headline caught my attention at the time and the meaning [or I should rather say the meaning that I am trying to attach to life] and the words have stayed with me.
Life is a journey; where does one find that which is true as well as beautiful? Does such a combination exist? Let me get out of here before melancholy gets the better of me. Please just read:
Don’t let me bother you any further, but thanks for the company.
Sipu. We have already spoken about the Alexandra Fuller book. I believe that I brought it up first, in fact. Hardly a great oeuvre. She is a friend of my cousins – Malawi connection.
Hi Brendan
Have you seen this?
http://bearsy.wordpress.com/2010/06/18/this-blog-site-is-not-closing/
I am more than just a little amused.
Puppy Bear, he poor guy, never understood WordPress and allowed his initial “success” to go to his head not realising that nobody can build success on the misfortune of others, the latter in this case being MyT.
MyT is up and running again and the “young ones” will soon start to return to the fold. I started peeking in about a week ago and they have made great strides in recent days. MyT is back big.
Something tells me this means the end of the Bear dynasty. It won’t be long but the aftermath will drag on while everyone will blame the other one for what was an exercise in folly right from the start.
There will almost certainly be a big dogfight for the “vacant ownership” of the remnants left behind by “founding Bear family” but I doubt whether the Site will see the year out.
Let’s not dwell on that though. I have started to comment in MyT and notice that you have done so too. Good for you! But I intend to keep my WordPress Site and hope you do the same. You have done well here and I would sure like to see you around with me and some others.
Thanks, Ike. Yes, I intend to keep running this blog.
No doubt I’ll see you on MyT.
Just popped by, and the fact that was a new comment or two here caught my eye.
I much prefer the new MyT to the old, but it is still a place where the culture tends towards argument and confrontation, rather than reflection and reasoned, calm debate.
For that reason, I think i’ll probably be an infrequent visitor there.
I don’t know about you, but this place far more meets my needs and desires for an online journal.
I don’t like the new MyT, Isobel. It is now very difficult to talk to all sorts of people about all sorts of things.
Hello Isobel and Cymbeline. Just looking in briefly; will reply tomorrow.
I think the new MyT has an ephemeral feel … there are few posts on the homepage, and it’s unlikely that one will find more than one or two of them interesting. Once they drop off, they tend to be gone for good, as no-one will see them to comment on them (there being no ‘comments’ page). I would say that there are far fewer comments on MyT blogs under the new syetem.
Kate said something about integrating MyT more with the main DT blogs … I do think more MyTers are commenting on those blogs. I find myself commenting on quite a few. But there is not the same sense of ‘knowing’ people there.
Hi Brendan
I noticed your presence with Araminta vs. Larry and Bubbles in Badger’s Post the night before last night on MyT but I only glanced in and dropped a few short comments in a few others to test my registration. When you next enter the hallowed grounds and see Merricoon, that’s me. I am having that attended to.
In my view the problems at MyT never had anything to do with MyT, the system or the moderators; the type of people [not all please] that are drawn to a free Site was the problem and that has obviously not changed.
What your trained mind sees as ephemeral is however, very real to that crowd. Those people cannot operate in a “free speech” environment hence they need moderators but that makes it possible to live out their real lives. Deleting Posts and Comments becomes the purpose and they need moderators to do that for them so they can display their innocence. For them politics, religion and social affairs [to some even sport] are not what it is for you.
For them MyT is back big.
What interests me is what the good bloggers are going to do [as you say many have gone elsewhere] and the inevitable affect on MDNMyT. Bearsy tried to create a “controlled freedom” situation in a medium like WordPress that is essentially not made for it but it attracted those who needed a home when MyT closed down. A few good guys went there too. And of course, people like Bravo ended up there because he doesn’t fit in anywhere. They will need another home again soon. MDNMyT is finished but for the reading of the dying rites.
Overall, to me in any event, it provides opportunities to observe human nature in its “natural habitat” and that is what it is to some. If they didn’t have MyT they would probably be killing each other with stones or crude home-made weapons.
You know what? One of the few people who really know how to handle that crowd is American Cheech. He is there just for the fun and to needle some when they need it most.
You mustn’t mind cheech too much. His heart is in the right place; a good guy, cheech.
There I have taken too much of your time again; that’s me.
Thanks, Ike … interesting comments.