What can I say, it’s been a busy year. Details upcoming (and by “upcoming” I don’t necessarily mean “soon”.
I pulled the plug on my attempted redesign. It was just gruesome. I thought I could make it work, but…well, you see what happened.
I’m going to try to restore things to more or less the way they were from (ahem) 2006-ish to last year. And yes, try to write more while we’re at it.
Stay tuned.
We’re all (*) familiar with the basic “logical fallacies” – flaws in reasoning that weaken or invalidate arguments. Things like the “ad hominen” (attacking the person rather than their argument), “appeal to authority” (comparing credentials rather than arguing the facts), “tu quoque” (comparing an argument with previous argument) and so on.
I’m here to submit a few new ones.
“Ad Foxinem” – claiming that someone’s argument is invalid because they supposedly “watch Fox News”. (And yes, the same applies to MSNow. Or would, if anyone watched it. That was an “Appeal to Ridicule” for those paying attention).
“The Epstein Fallacy” – claiming that someone’s argument on an unrelated matter is false because the Epstein Files haven’t been released.
“Argumentum ad Terminus” – believing that ending an argument by saying or typeing “Period” or “Full stop” makes an argument, whatever its merits, absolutely solid.
“Faux Possibilitus – starting a claim with “What if I told you that…” does not make the claim true”.
The Shifted Burden Fallacy: Ending a claim – solid or absurd – with “prove me wrong”.
And “Argumentum ad LOL” – Ending your response to an argument with “LOL” is absolutely factually dispositive”. This is closely relate to the “Argumentum tu Emoji” – attacking an argument with an emoticon (for instance, the passive-aggressive “Laugh” emoji).
Also – “Ad Omniciens” – responding to an argument with “Not EVERYONE believes that” (or its sibling, “Many people believe…”, also known as “the NPR Assertion”).
“Argumentum pro Tantrum” – regardless of the merits of the argument, if you don’t acquiesce without question, I will unfriend you and never talk with you again. 
Discusss.
(*) I’m feeling optimistic, so sue me.
Life has its seasons. Ups and downs, goods and bads, times when you can’t stop creating and time when you’re creatively blocked up so bad you’re borrowing energy from six months out.
And in 23 years of writing this blog, I’ve been through a lot of them.
But none quite like this year.
Job layoff in February, and five months on the beach. Then a turn around, and being pretty overcommitted, job-wise (a day job, a part-time thing, the show, Hot Air, and a couple of bands on the side). And of course the acceleration of my father’s decline and passing, which followed my mom’s three years ago.
Gotta admit, my brain feels a little numb. I’m covering ten pounds of demands with five pounds of energy. And for the first time since 2002, the blog finds itself getting squeezed out. Doesn’t help that the blog’s technical issues (it stopped letting me schedule posts in advance) have really harshed my mellow.
Which is actually unsettling. Getting up at 5AM and writing something every morning has been sort of an emotional home base for me for a very, very long time.
And like most seasons, there’ll be a change at some point. Into what, I don’t know.
I know that every time I look at moving the show show over to Substack, I…just…can’t. It feels like “moving to Facebook” was for blogging 15 years ago – giving the keys to the house to some stranger who promises he’s gonna take good care of things, yessirreebob. I didn’t buy it then and I don’t now.
Anyway, stay tuned.
Dad had the most amazing book collection. One bedroom of the house I grew up in was Dad’s office and study, and it had bookshelves from floor to ceiling.
And the variety was astounding. Not just the usual English teacher stuff, classics of western literature and all the major contemporary authors – although it had all of them.
It also had books that reflected pretty much any subject Dad had had even the most passing interest in.
For example: I learned at least the basics of how to navigate on the open sea using a sextant, compass and chronometer, from a book on celestial navigation he had amid a collection of books about boats, seafaring and the great ocean explorers, which I pretty much completely vacucmed up by the time I was 12.
From that same section, when I was nine or ten he gave me a copy of “Endurance”, the story of the Shackelton expedition – a group of of British Antarctic explorers whose ship had gotten crushed in the ice on the Ross Ice Shelf in 1916, and had to survive for two years on an ice floe before sailing lifeboats across the stormy South Atlantic (why, yes, life lessons were involved), but one of many books about people who conquered mountains, oceans, space, the unknown, the human condition, and every manner of art.
He was fascinated by stories of people stretching far beyond themselves and conquering the impossible – and passed that fascination on to me.
Dad also *hated* traveling, detested the cold, and was terrified of water. He taught me, and three generations of students, the infinite sprawl of the human mind – but was so terrified of “big city traffic” that he let my mom do all the “city driving”…
…when we went to Fargo or Bismark.
It was one of many conundrums about my dad.
——————
I’ve always chalked his hatred of cold up to the fact that he was born in the hottest summer in North Dakota history – July 5, 1936, deep in the heart of the dust bowl. It was 120 the day he was born; my grandmother once told me it was 108 degrees in the house when they brought Dad home. I used to marvel that he could play three sets of tennis on a 90 degree day, have a cup of iced tea and go shoot 18 holes of golf without breaking a sweat, while if the morning temperature was below 40 he started like a Fiat Spyder.
His parents, Oscar and Beatrice Berg, ran a little photography studio in Jamestown. They were an older couple – Grandpa was 47 and Grandma 32 when Dad was born – so dad wound up being an only child.
Grandpa Oscar had a cardiac arrest and died suddenly while shoveling snow at the studio when Dad was five, in March of 1942 – the darkest days of World War Two, when people genuinely worried about the country getting invaded. I can’t imagine what it was like, being five and having to absorb all that – but my siblings and I never had to imagine the after-effects. Grandma had to keep the studio afloat, sometimes working sixteen hour days; my Mom once said Dad had a lot in common with orphans, including a lot of anxiety; for his mother, and for things that were unknown and out of his control. With the exception of five years starting his teaching career in Rugby, North Dakota, and this past seven months in Billings, he never lived more than a mile from where he was born.
He graduated from Jamestown High School, then went to college in Jamestown, got a BA in English, and started his teaching career.
——————
And Dad was a *great* teacher. .One of the two best teachers I ever had. If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty decent chance you were a student of Dad’s – most everyone in Jamestown had Dad in school, or had kids, or parents, or in at least one case both, who took Dad’s classes – Writing, Literature, and his marquee class, Speech. I took all three classes from him – and they may have been the hardest “A”s I earned in high school. Dad was always worried (!) about being perceived as giving a kid of his favorable treatment, and I think he may have tried just a *tad* too hard, sometimes.
But he was the most amazing teacher. Even as a snotty adolescent, I was agog at how good he was at getting a room full of kids like me to pay attention, to learn, and to love it.
Dad had an amazing talent for saying preposterous things, and convincing people they were legitimate. I may have inherited the talent [1] but Dad was the master. He used that talent to play elaborate pranks on his classes. My favorite: one day when we walked into class, he gave each of us a piece of fanfold paper (kids, ask your parents) with a bunch of official looking mumbo-jumbo on it, and a number, circled in red ink. Mine was “68”.
As we took our seats, Dad explained that the government was starting a new program; since there weren’t enough resources for everyone to go to college, the government had been tracking our test scores, aptitude and IQ scores since kindergarten to gauge our suitability for different careers. And it all boiled down to a score, a number between 1 and 100.
If your score was over 90? You were going to university, going into management, becoming lawyers and engineers and doctors and officers in the military.
70-90? Trade school. Foreman on the job site; sergeants in the Army, produce manager at the grocery store.
Below 70? Well, society needed farm labor, hot tar roofers, shelf-stockers and Army privates, too.
Naturally, nearly everyone’s score was below 70 – I don’t think anyone had more than a 75. And kids took it seriously – kids who thought they were en route to law school or engineering or education suddenly were thinking they were going to be stocking shelves at Red Owl for the rest of their lives.
The goal, of course, wasn’t *just* to prank the kids (although he loved a well-crafted ruse, and played many on my siblings and I just for the pure love of the game). It was to teach kids about discrimination – having your life sandbagged because of something arbitrary that you djdn’t control. And it was effective.
Another thing he mastered that still boggles me; the first day of every class, every semester, he spent learning the name of every kid in every seat. He had some elaborate internal mnemonic that I still don’t understand, that allowed him to get the combination of period (he usually taught 4-5 classes a day), seat and name hammered into his long-term memory. It was a long, slow first day – but he he considered it a base level of respect, to actually know all the students name.
And at reunions well into the 2000s, he would meeting former students, even from the early 1960s, and remember where they sat. He taught for about forty years – five or so in Rugby, and the rest in Jamestown – and he remembered every kid and their seat.
I still can’t imagine.
—————0—
If was while living in Rugby, but visiting his mother in Jamestown, on a double date (with his lifelong best friend, Daniel “Buddy” Buchanan, whose daughter is a Facebook friend) that he met my mother, Janice Hall – who was out with Bud. Dad and Jan wound up talking, and going out, and in fairl8y short order getting married in July of 1961. I came along a couple years later, not long before we moved back to Jamestown (born during a blizzard; it was -25 with a howling wind when they took me home from the hospital. There’s some foreshadowing for you). There, there were more kids – Susan (who died at about ten days old), Barb and Jim.
—————
Another of Dad’s conundrums – for a guy who was so seriously enthralled by the adventures of others, he could never imagine living anyplace *but* Jamestown. But he also wanted to be a writer, a playwright, an impresario.
Seems like a hard plane to land in a town of 15,000. But not for Dad.
In the early ‘80s, with a couple of other teachers and staffers from the local college, he started “Jamestown Performing Arts”, a group dedicated to producing and promoting local theater. And then they set to work writing and producing plays – one-acts, full-length, whatever – and recruiting casts, and putting on the shows and, starting in about 1984, the “Last Annual Comedy Review”, a yearly comedy production featuring entire local talent, material and production. Dad produced and MCed it every year for something like 34 seasons – every one of them a different show.
If you think that sounds ambitious for a town of 15,000 – you’re right, It is. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in towns that size.
Dad’s attitude was, since I don’t wanna go to Broadway, I’m going to create my own.
So when I walked into a radio station in 2004 to ask them to give a bunch of bloggers some airtime every week, it may not have seemed *quite* as crazy to me as it did to everyone else. It runs in the family.
—————
Dad retired in 1995. The school bought out his contract so they could hire a cheaper teacher. And that was OK – he was ready to move on to the next chapter. He started writing books; his first, self-published in 1996, “Common Ground” was the story of Jamestown’s baseball stadium, which had been home to an amazing tradition of small town baseball that included many of the stars of the old Negro Leagues.
He always sold enough of each book to pay for publishing his next book – which kept him chugging along until a couple of years ago. He was also wrote columns for the Jamestown Sun, and recorded editorials for the public radio station in Fargo for 25 years or so. I used to joke that Dad had had a longer radio career than I did.
He stayed very active as long as he could; he played tennis into his sixties, and shot his first hole in one at 72. And he always loved having an audience.
—————
My parents split up in 1990 (although he was abidingly grateful to be able to stay close to his inlaws, my grandparents, aunts and uncles). My Dad was more than happy exploring the world in his mind, and creating his own right where he was. Mom wanted to actually see it – and she did. That’s another whole story – but Dad’s anxiety about things “being different* was a problem.
And it was for me, too.
Many sons, especially oldest sons, wrestle hard with getting out of their father’s shadows to have their own identity. I certainly did. As long as I can remember, Dad was a pillar of the community, one of the most admired people *in* that little world. He was a big, universally venerated fish in a small pond – and I was Bruce Berg’s Son. I’m pretty sure he wanted me to follow in his footsteps and “take ove the family business” as a high school teacher, preferably in Jamestown. Teaching is stable, and the benefits are good, and there’s a pension.
And I was simultaneously proud to *be* Bruce Betg’s son, and still couldn’t imagine spending my whole life in that shadow. I’ve told the story elsewhere – I left Jamestown and moved to Minneapolis; ostensibly to be a musician, but really just to get to someplace where I was Mitch Berg, full stop.
My mom once told me that Dad admired me for doing it, but was also terrified that one of his kids had left the world he knew and jumped into the deep end of the social pool. I was well into my forties before he stopped reminding me I could still be high school teacher.
Dad remarried a few years later, by the way, to Rowena “Roni” Bye – who also loved being nestled into Jamestown life; they shared a lot of long walks and movies and Roni’s amazing cooking. They were both very lucky to find each other.
—————
Dad taught me a lot of things that are fundamental to my life – how to write, how to speak in public, how to debate fairly and logically but incisively.
He did *not* teach me how to fish, hunt, fix cars, build additions onto my house, track game, pack a bearing or any of the things other dads taught their sons. Growing up, I used to wish my siblings and I *could* have learned more of that at home (my mom taught me how to field-strip a toilet) – but growing up with a widowed single mom who was always working, he never learned any of those things, not to mention how to swim. Had Grandpa Oscar lived, that likely would have been different; Oscar was an outdoorsman, hunter, and we’re told kind of a hard guy; Dad may well have turned out *much* different had Oscar lived, and so might his kids.
I was thinking about that a few years ago; being a father myself was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But throughout my adventure of being a parent of two kids, I was able to ask myself “what would Dad have done?” It didn’t always help – what does? – but the example was out there when I needed it.
And it occurred to me; Dad raised three kids, and did a pretty decent job, *figuring it out on his own as he did it*, With no father’s example to fall back on.
And that? That amazes me.
—————
Dad passed away last night. He was 89. He died, pretty much, of what people used to call “old age”. Things just started falling apart, first slowly, and then very quickly. But he died last night, in his sleep, with my sister nearby, after a few days of visits from grandkids and great-grandkids, not really communicating but seeming to enjoy all he little kids giggling at how weird Mom and the uncles looked in the photo albums.
There are many worse endings to stories like this.
—————
The culminating moment of Bruce Springsteen‘s Broadway show was when he said he’d realized, well into his 50s, that all of the music he had written had been basically telling the story of his father , without really knowing it.
In some ways, I could say the same – as different as we are, we have both followed many of the same dreams, in very different ways .
And I guess we all can say the same thing, in our own way; we are all the most important stories any of our parents ever get to tell.
————
[1] I’m afraid I may have convinced a few people that Nicole DID frame OJ. I don’t know my own strength.
Yeah, I hate it too.
I’ll be changing the template again soon. I don’t like it.
Stay tuned.
So, it’s been quite a year.
Around inauguration time, I had a job that I really enjoyed, with a few side hustles – a band, my show, and this blog (not that I’ve made any money from it in a long time – partly by choice).
In February, I got laid off. As part of my scrambling to keep my bills covered, I signed on at Hot Air – where I write 3-5 posts a week, and make a little money.
Then came July. I started the month unemployed – and ended with a day job (details not needed) and another longer-term bet with a startup. Plus another band (more info to come later).
So I’m cranking out 12 hours a day – and generally loving it. But it’s taken time away from the time I’d normally spend tinkering with the blog (which hasn’t been much in a while).
“So Merg – why not go over to Substack?”
I might. There’s a part of me that can’t imagine anyone paying anything to read what I write, but who knows? It’d certainly cut down on the maintenance woes that are increasingly dogging WordPress.
A 23 year old habit, rapidly pushing 24, is hard to change. And let’s be honest, I’m kind of a stubborn guy.
But yeah, this fall when we get our first cold rainy non-outdoor weekend I may just pull the trigger.
I’ve been running this blog under its old design template for (checks watch) 16 years, now. Not just the visual design (more in a bit) but the code that runs the whole thing in the background. I’ve been patching it and updating it for literally a decade and a half – longer than most blogs last in any way shape or form – but the wheels were slowly coming off.
I couldn’t schedule posts, for starters – which in theory shouldn’t be a huge inconvenience now that I’m not carefully following traffic patterns, like I was in the 2000s.
But I’m very much driven by two diametrically competing forces – 23 years of habits (writing something just about every morning, and having the stuff appear when I want it to) and serendipity (wanting to write whenever and however I want to, and have it appear, again, exactly when I want to).
Anyway – I’m hoping that updating the template to something that was built after the George W Bush administation will fix some of the technical bugs.
As to the visual design bugs – oy. I’d forgotten how much of that is involved in spooling up a WordPress blog. I’ll be working on ’em as I go, here. Enjoy the incongruence while it lasts!
Back during blogging’s glory days between about 2004 and 2011, people new to the medium used to ask me what it took to write a successful blog.
I told them “stick to a schedule”. Didn’t matter if it was two pieces a day, or once a week, or twice a month – but pick a schedule and stick to it.
And I’ve largely done that for the past 23 years.
But you might have noticed – output’s been a little light this past few months.
Part of it has been priorities. I got laid off from my day job in February. Which, given that I approach job-hunting with maniacal intensity, meant rather less time for writing than normal; when I’m on the beach, I start grinding out resumes pretty much as soon as I have my coffee.
And then, as I noted last March, I fortuitously wound up getting picked up at HotAir.com, writing with my old friends Ed Morrissey and David Strom. I get paid for what I write there. Not a ton, and certainly not enough to pay my bills – and it’s a slightly different kind of blogging than what I do here. But it’s a nice side hustle.
To go with my other side hustles – the NARN and my band.
Which made for a spring and summer of cranking out stuff for Hot Air, band gigs, and above all cranking out resumes. 416 of them in 19 weeks.
Given a choice between feast and famine, I’ll take the feast. I landed a day job about a month back. A contracting job, limited to 40 hours a week. The bills are paid and then some.
And then I connected with a startup which eats up a chunk of my spare time during evenings and weekends.
So, commitment-wise I’ve been trying to stretch two pounds of sausage casing to cover five pounds of sausage.
Oh, yeah – and I’m coming down with a summer cold.
Shot in the Dark isn’t going anywhere. That habit I told everyone to develop back in the first paragraph still barks at me every morning at 5AM, just as it did int 2003. It’s been a constant thing for me for what feels like a lifetime. It’s also my show prep – and God and Salem willing, the NARN isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. We’ve got a country to save.
Anyway – output’s not going to stay down. And I’ve got a project or two that might just rear their heads in the near future, after I’ve gotten over the whole “going from unemployed to overemployed” thing.
But pardon a brief slowdown while I take some zinc and maybe try to get six hours of sleep tonight.
My eyes groaned and squeaked open around 6:15 Saturday morning, after a little less than four hours of sleep. My band had been at a gig, and I hadn’t gotten home until after 2AM, and it took a while to get to sleep after that.
A dim little echo rattled around my sleep-fogged mind: “I’ve got four ‘stop the presses’ stories to figure out how to talk about on the show today”. Keith Ellison admitting he’d maybe talked with some Feeding Our Future defendants just a little; the “No Kings” group therapy sessions; the end of the special session; war between Israel and Iran.
But I figured I could get another couple hours of sleep.
But I made the mistake of checking Twitter, and saw “Minnesota Legislators shot” and, well, the day kicked off.
So I need to do more radio.
I’ve actually started doing some writing for HotAir.com.
Those who’ve been paying attention may remember that I actually did write for HotAir, between 2009-2012.
But this time I’m actually getting paid. Which is kinda cool.
This shouldn’t affect SITD.
Sometime after 1900, a recent graduate of what would become the university of Minnesota school of pharmacy, Sven Hendrickson, who as a 15-year-old young man had moved by himself from Steigen, Norway to Minnesota to work on a farm , moved from Minneapolis to Dunseith, North Dakota. He set up a pharmacy, and along with his wife, Jeanette, an immigrant from Quebec, had four children, including a daughter, born on March 17, 1912, and inevitably named Patricia . The Hendricksons  moved around a bit, and wound up in Jamestown, a scrappy little railroad town about halfway between Fargo and Bismarck
Sometime after that, in about 1922, Oscar Berg, the son of Swedish immigrants, who had worked as a farmer and a street car conductor in st paul, moved to that same little town, Jamestown, to start a photography studio. He did it with the help of a couple of women from Northern Minnesota, who had made quite a career of getting people started in the photography business. A few years later, when the studio was successful enough for him to need to look  for an assistant, he reached out to those two women, who recommended their niece, who was working at a studio in Bovey Minnesota.
The niece, Beatrice Gresley, the daughter of a couple of Norwegian immigrants, took the job and moved there in about 1928. Sometime after that, in about 1932, Oscar and Beatrice got married. 
Somewhere around the time that Oscar and Beatrice were working away at the studio, Sven and Jeanette’s daughter Patricia decided to attend the little college on the North Hill of Jamestown . There, she would major in English, become homecoming  royalty, and meet a strapping young all American four letter athlete and chemistry major, Donald Hall, from Starkweather, North Dakota. They  would marry not long before Oscar and Beatrice had a baby, at the new hospital just down the hill from the college . That baby would be about five years old when Oscar died of a heart attack, leaving Beatrice to run the photography studio for the next couple of decades.  This was about the time that Sven moved to Wahpeton North Dakota to start a new pharmacy. 
Pat and Don would go on to live in Devils Lake, Grand Forks, Aberdeen, and, finally, Bismarck. They had three kids, the oldest of which , Jan, would go back to Jamestown to go to college, and meet Oscar and Beatrice‘s only son. They got married, and not long after that I came along. The son, Bruce, was a high school teacher – maybe the best high school teacher in the history of high school teachers – for about 40 years. And their daughter and I both went to that little college on the North Hill before we and our little brother moved to bigger places with more opportunities.
My parents split up a few years later, and my mother moved to Turkey for five years, but came back to Minot, built a dream house with her second husband (another Jamestown native who’d joined the Navy but kept a foot in the state) and lived there until they both died, in 2020 and 2022, respectively.
Oscar died in 1942. Sven, in 1948. Don and Pat moved to Arizona in the ’70s. Beatrice passed away in 1980.
And last week, I moved my father from Jamestown to Billings, Montana, to be closer to my sister, her husband and her four kids, all of whom love doting on dad/grandpa. 
And so for the first time in about 120 years, there are no Bergs, or blood relatives of mine, in North Dakota. 
That’s a weird feeling. I lived there for 22 years, but they were the first 22, so my sense of place is still very rooted there. I’ve become more of a homer in the past 20 years or so, as I see some of the virtues of the place I left behind 2/3 of a lifetime ago.
Not sure what reminded me, but today is this blog’s 23rd birthday.
It’s kind of amazing how life evolves – too slowly to perceive, yet startling, even overwhelming over time.
On February 5, 2002, I was a fairly newly-single parent, working at a company that was visibly circling the drain faster and faster every day. My kids were 10 and 9 years old. I wasn’t adrift, per se – “overwhelmed” is probably a better word.
I was reading Time magazine at my desk over lunch hour, and I tripped into an article about the new generation of conservative intellectuals, focusing on Andrew Sullivan, who was probably the first big-name “conservative” “celebrity” blogger. A sidebar explained what a “blog” was, and gave a URL to “Blogger.com”.
Which I followed, that night, after the kids went to bed. I started writing that night, and 23 years later, I haven’t stopped.
The first two years of Shot in the Dark are long lost. The next two are a little tenuous. But I’ve been writing on this platform, WordPress, since 2006. I need a big of a technical facelift – I’m praying for a two day blizzard that’d justify me spending that kind of non-work time at my desk.
My kids are now a tad older than I was when they were born. My career – which seemed fragile and tenuous 23 years ago – has worked out pretty well. Better than that company did, anyway. The blog morphed into the Northern Alliance of Blogs, where I met King, Ed, Chad, Brian, Atomizer, JB, John HInderaker and Scott Johnson and, eventually, the first real-life social circle I’d had in a long, long time.
Life moves slow – usually. Starting this blog 23 years ago today kicked off one of the bigger, better evolutions in mine. And for that – and all of you – I’m thankful.
I’ve been doing this blog for a long time – 23 years in February.
It’s still a part of my day every morning – I’m usually up doing some kind of writing or another, before 6AM every weekday. And it’s the bulk of my radio show prep. And it’s also kind of a quick reference for the past 23 years of my various goings-on.
That makes me sound like a creature of habit. I guess it is a habit of mine – the gnawing urge to get something down, profound or pathetic, wakes up with me every day.
But notwithstanding that, I’m a fundamentally restless person. I’d like to keep doing what I do – only better.
Now, this old WordPress site is getting a little long in the tooth. The “template” on which it runs is almost 15 years old. Things are breaking – and I have a hunch, given WordPress’s fundamentally chaotic nature (like I should talk) that upgrading would be…sporty.
And I have some new ideas for content in mind – blog writing, yes, but there’s at least one other book project, maybe two, in mind (not to mention an update and print edition of Trulbert). And I have some other content ideas rattling around in my head that could finally come to fruition over the winter.
And I’m starting to think a different platform might be useful – one with a little more flexibility, and the ability to make a little money off these ventures baked in.
Not that I’m going to charge for the blog – what’d be the point? But some of the other ideas might have the opportunity to put a little money in the pot.
I don’t qualify for OnlyFans, and I’d rather gargle razor blades than use Medium.
So I’m pondering moving the blog to Substack.
I’m leery of the idea, of course – I remember all the bloggers who moved to Facebook and Twitter, and regretted it shortly. I’d keep shotinthedark.info for…something. Special projects?
But Substack is arguably a better, better-connected platform for both exposure and money, even if I don’t make the blog pay-per-view. Which I won’t.
It’s winter. A time for huge projects, after all!
Among the things I’m thankful for is that life has evolved.
I was looking at some past Thansgiving pieces on this blog, and I found this one, written in 2002 – when this blog was nine months old.
And it took me back.
I moved from North Dakota to Minneapolis in October of 1985. It was a spur of the moment thing – in fact, it started with a drunken statement to a bunch of classmates at a college homecoming party two weeks earlier. It was five months after graduation, and they’d all come back to Jamestown (my hometown and college) with stories of their fun careers, fun cities, fun lives…
I was doing roofing and siding, wondering what the hell one did with an English degree. But after five or six gin and tonics, I found myself dancing with Monica Costello, and telling her “Yeah – I’m still here in Jamestown”. Really, she asked? “Yeah, but I’m moving”. Where, she asked. I thought about it for a second. “Minneapolis” seemed to be a place I could afford to get to. When, she asked. “Two weeks”, I blurted out without really thinking.
Damned if everyone didn’t remember that promise when we all sobered up. So – two weeks later, I loaded two duffel bags and a guitar into my ’73 Malibu, and I was off.
Six weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects – and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.
And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me – the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so – for me anyway – than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.
I remember each Thanksgiving in the last 17 years – the giddiness of feeling like I was on the edge of something big in 1986, confident in my ability to pull it all together in ’87, shell-shocked and depressed and contemplating the implosion of my radio career in ’88, crazy in love in ’89, a harried but happy but broke newlywed in ’90, a new dad digging out of deep snowdrifts in ’91, broke and on the brink of eviction with two kids and another on the way in ’92, in a new house in ’93…wondering how long my marriage would last in ’98, being able to answer the question “not long at all” in ’99…
…and today. I sat for a while by the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking down Summit over downtown Saint Paul. The giddy, heady uncertainty of the thanksgivings of my first years as an adult, the throat-clutching terror of my divorce-era holidays, and the weary relief of my first thanksgivings as a divorced dad…well, little bits of all of them are still there. But there’s the emerging sense that my life really is mine, and that I’d better get on with it.
There’ve been so many good lists of things to be thankful for, from people as diverse as Michelle Malkin and Ted Nugent and Andrew Sullivan – and my own for that matter.
But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.
Holy cow. 2002. I can practialy feel the stomach acid from the most stressful part of my life. I was about a year out of one of the ugliest times in my personal life, about a month away from the most grueling year of my vocational life. Everything in life was a maelstrom of uncertainty, of finding a very uncertain way in a world where I felt like a passenger in a car driven by a drunk guy on the verge of blacking out.
Back then, in those days when blogging was something I did from 5AM until my kids woke up, this little project was my “me” time, yes – but also a little stake of sanity, where the things I wanted to happen, happened, and where a little part of my mind that’d been shut off for fifteen years, the wannabe pundit, got to come out and play for a bit.
And for that, and everything since – two kids who grew up pretty good, two granddaughters who are the lights of more lives than they know, a talk show that pays me a lot more than money, a day job I genuinely enjoy working on every day, and more blessings than I’ve ever deserved – I’m grateful.
And the 2002 piece reminds me – it’s been a few years since I’ve done my Thanksgiving ritual of driving down to the Cathedral and looking out over the city. I think I’ll do that today.
Back in college, I did a little acting.
The highlight? I played Henry II i “The Lion in Winter”. And I had a blast.
One part of the role involved using makeup to turn 20 year old Mitch into 55 year old Hank Deuce. And since this was a small college theater, at a school that didn’t even offer a drama degre, there weren’t a whole lot of extra people playing “Makeup Girl”.
More than that, the professor, the late Patricia Lavin, was a formidable woman – she’d been the first female theatrical producer in LA back in the fifties and sixties, and had a long list of theatrical and film credits (she had done makeup work on the original “Planet of the Apes”, for one example) – who made sure that we learned how to do the nuts and bolts of theater.
Including makeup.
Which meant I, the very adolescent-macho Mitch, had to learn how to do his own makeup.
And looking at the photos of 20 year old Mitch playing 55 year old Hank II, I actually looked a fair bit like I do today (albeit with a lot more hair).
I thought about that when I saw this “comedian” talking about the Rep. McBride crisis:
So that’s what a woman is! Someone who can do makeup!
By that definition…
…well, do I even need to finish the sentence?
I saw the Reagan biopic last week.
The movie was…good.
Not the great movie the subject or the time of history deserves; Philip Klein points out some of the problems I couldn’t quite articulate, while Jim Geraghty echoed the reasons I left the show so excited anyway:
Reagan is ultimately deeply satisfying for those of us who have fond memories of the 40th president, and packs a lot into its two hours and 15 minutes. The movie gains some focus from its framing device — Jon Voight is a geriatric KGB spymaster, explaining to a young and ambitious Russian leader why the Soviet Union really collapsed. (I started wondering if this was meant to be a secular The Screwtape Letters. I also wondered if the film was attempting to draw a parallel between the Soviet threat of the last century and the coalition of hostile powers facing us today.) It is the best depiction of Reagan in pop culture since the video game Call of Duty.
The movie was clearly a conservative effort – I think most of the “out” Republican actors and entertainers in the business play some part or another (the fall of the Berlin Wall is framed by seminal opening guitar figure from “Sweet Child of Mine” – covered by Christian guitarist Phil Keaggy). And but for that conservative effort, the movie – or an honest movie – about the era would never get made.
As Klein points out, it’s far from perfect; the movie tries to jam a lot of story into two hours, and doesn’t always do it elegantly. Sometimes the shortcuts are intentionally hilarious – the film jams the rapid-fire deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko into sixty seconds via one of the more hilarious little segments I’ve seen since Terry Gilliam worked for Monty Python. Sometimes – like the meet cute between Reagan and Nancy Davis, his future wife – they feel like plot devices that I hoped were homages to Reagan’s B-movie background.
So the movie was…good. It’s clearly low-ish budget, and feels like it.
But the story is one that direly needs telling to a whole new generation. Probably two generations.
Is Reagan the movie to do it? Maybe not.
If it prompts those of us who were there to tell the story to those benighted generations?
Now there, we’re onto something.
Because the story is heavily-laden with nods to our current environment. At the beginning, Jon Voight’s KGB agent – the narrator for the movie – reminds the viewer that communism always sought to conquer both by force of arms and, more insidiously, from within.
And Reagan saw that clearly when he was with the Screen Actors Guild, long before he even became a Republican, thirty years before he became president.
The movie hits the high points – some of them hard (the Brandenburg Gate speech, Rejkjavik, the clarifying moment that was the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II), some much too quickly (the economic comeback from the ’82 recession and the ’84 debate with Mondale); the story really deserves a trilogy – perhaps separate stories for his genesis as an anti-communist, the domestic story, and the part they said couldn’t be done, his leadership in pressing the fall of the USSR.
But this’ll do for now.
For those who remember them, seeing the renditions and backstory of the Brandenburg Gate speech was a misty bit of nostalgia that resonates all too hard as we see tyranny resurging, around the world and at home.
But perhaps the most redolent moment was one I was too young to remember live – the Time for Choosing speech, one of the most magnificent bits of oratory in this nation’s history.
Since my old friend Michael Brodkorb chose to misappropriate it in his Strib op ed endorsing Kamala Harris, I think the real thing needs a lot of airing.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.
Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then, when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
The speech deserves better than to be hijacked in support of a couple of actual communists. This record will be set straight.
Pass it along.
Tonight’s the anniversary of my first. night ever “soloing” on the radio. I’d been at KEYJ, learning the job a couple of weeks; I’d worked a couple of shifts with DIck Ingstad over my shoulder making sure I knew what I was doing.
And tonight, I was on my own, working the evening shift.
The following Saturday, I’d switch to my regular shift – Saturday mornings from sign on (in the studio at 5AM, start broadcasting at 5:55AM, on the air to 3PM).
But I needed to get through this evening first.
KEYJ’s control board.
And for whatever reason, I remember the first three records I played.
First up – this pretty obscure Art Garfunkel solo effort.
I guarantee you, the only reason I remember this song at all is the fact that it was the first song I ever played on the air.
Then? Cliff Richard’s last Top 40 single:
Which, I”ll be honest, I still kinda enjoy.
And then came Dan Peek – former member of America, who’d turned into a solo, Christian artist:
It occurs to me, I may be the only person who remembers any of them.
Minnesota’s gross domestic product growth – which has long run far ahead of national averages – isn’t anymore:
I’ve been observing this for a while now – when I decided to move to Minnesota, the state was simultaneously a mecca of opportunity in the Midwest, a place that Fodor Travel Guides called “The Athens of the 20th Century” in a fit of not-excessive hyperbole – that was nonetheless modestly affordable for a 22 year old guy with a BA in English, as opposed to an MBA or a software engineering degree.
And that is just not true anymore.
And it might seem rote and predictable to follow that with “and it’s the DFL’s fault”.
But, honestly, who else has been driving the ship for the past 16 years?
It was six months ago today that I got tired of presiding over a junior high locker room in my comments section.
I shut down comments for two weeks. Some ‘problem’ commenters went away. So, unfortunately, did some memorably good ones.
The vibe is different. I think I’m OK with that.
Thoughts in the comments.
In one sense, this blog hasn’t changed much in the 22 years I’ve been running it. I get up early, I write stuff. For the past 20 years, it’s doubled as show prep for the Saturday NARN.
But one thing that has changed is the pace. I used to shoot for four posts a day, and frequently posted much, much more. These days, I stay consistent at 2/day – 6AM and 11AM. That’s actually a habit I picked up during blogging’s heyday – about 2/3 of the visits for the day came before 9AM, with another surge around lunch. I wanted to give people a reason to come back at lunch, so there was (and is) always a post at 11AM Central.
It’s probably a sign of how under-challenged I was back then. I sort of put career in the back seat between 2000 and probably 2012-ish; I had kids to raise. Which meant I had jobs where I really wasn’t that challenged. I had dribs and drabs of time during a not-overly-challenging workday to throw together rough drafts and story links to get to during my usual writing time, 5-6:30 AM – my “Me” time during my decade-plus with a couple of kids.
The career is back on my front burner, and going very well, thanks (knock wood); it’s been a blessing. I’ll go into more details some other time.
At any rate, two posts a day, sometimes more, is not a bad goal.
But one habit that’s not changed is the sheer volume of stories that I’d like to write about. I open them up in tabs, intending to blog about them, leaving them open until I do, and making a point of closing the tabs out when the story is done.
Which means every few weeks I have a browser with 40 open tabs, with stories I’ll never get to, largely out of date.
So what the heck – insteads of just nuking the browser full of tabs from orbit, let’s just bang out a bunch of them in one post, Instapundit style:
Given the way the MSM obsesses over the “happiness” of countries like Finland and Denmark, I have to confess I’m a little surprised that the US was in the Top 20 for happiness in the first place. Serves me right for believing any MSM narrative, really.
My bad. I’m working on it.
But this is the news today:
So after teaching an entire generation that:
I’m even more amazed.
And remembering the effect Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech had on me, I have to think that either:
Not sure which is true – maybe both?
But that question is the basis of a project I’ve been mulling for a bit.
I’ve probably written this before. And that’s OK.
I make a point of being – in modern parlance – “radically joyful” during the Christmas season.
Let me explain.
As I pointed out in memorializing my mom last year, her and my father gave us what I now know to be a priceless gift; a boring, mostly drama-less childhood. Christmases were always low-key, but – crazy as this may seem – they were *happy*.
I get it – there are people with all manner of trauma in their lives. Not everyone has great associations with the season. But there’s also a cynicism to modern life; a crowd that seems to think that whizzing on the idea of a *happy Christmas* is the thing to do.
I went through a stage in my life where I was around people whose primary emotion around Christmas was stress. The names, and for that matter the stages, aren’t that important, and I’m not judging, or even discussing, the motivations – the point being, Christmases exuded stress, panic, misery and tension.
I hated it.
And I had little kids at the time. And for what it was worth, I figured I was going to try to pass on some of the joy I still held onto.
And so, on some dark, tense, difficult Christmas long ago, I resolved that I was going to be happy, whatever it took. To “crap sunshine”, as one of my more charming mentors put it.
There was some psychology to it. I’d read a biography of photographer Robert Capa, which had included an old Hungarian saying – “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”. And while I didn’t know it at the time, that’s true in a lot of things in life – “fake it til you make it” can be a very helpful principle. For everyone, in every situation? Of course not.
But it worked for me. The less counsel I took of the stress and tension, and the more I pushed “joy”, the less I needed to push, and the further into the back that stress and tension faded.
The best way to become happy is to act as if you already are.
Anyway – whatever Christmas is to you, and yours, I hope you have a happy and blessed one!
The comments have been off for, if I’m counting right, two weeks.
I’ve missed them. Well, most things about them.
I’m going to bring them back.
But there will be some changes.
Call Me “Pollyanna”. Once. As I pointed out last week, the goals of the comment section, like the blog itself if you think about it, are:
If I want a barroom brawl, I’ll go to a bar. And since I got more than my fill of that kind of bar in my 20s, and of online universes that act the same way without the fun of girls and booze, it’s safe to say my cup has long since run over in that department.
Debate. Argue. But treat each other with basic respect, which means if you don’t respect someone, and feel the need to express it especially directly…
…don’t.
Take it elsewhere.
Maybe take it to Twitter, and have your ire swallowed up in the frothing sea of it. Or try your luck with Facebook’s censorship. Come up with things worth discussing. Perhaps start a blog, or other online outlet of your own, and build yourself an audience. Let them debate in your comment section any way you want to. See how it goes.
It’s a free-ish country.
Stick. Otherwise?
If you make a habit of threadjacking, or especially obnoxious dick-measuring, I’ll mark your comments as “spam”.
Which means your future comments will go into the spam queue until I get a chance to look ’em over. All of them. .
Which means a couple of things:
Unreasonable? Nah. Not for grownups.
So – if you’ve got it in your head that you want to try to change the subject in the comments, and make a practice of it (you know who you are)? You can’t. So don’t.
If your go-to is volume? Volume is for guitars and cars. Not arguments.
Carrot? I”ll be re-opening comments on Monday.
No, not today. The “rules” aren’t really open for debate.
It’s Thanksgiving.
I’ve written before about what Thanksgiving means to me, personally – on this blog’s first Thanksgiving (checks notes) twenty-one years ago. It’s still true in every respect.
I was on the road, driving somewhere the other day when the notion of listing the things for which I’m grateful popped up. I started trying to list them all – and the list only really came to an end when the car stopped, far too soon, at my destination.
So what the heck – I’m just going to start a stream of consciousness list of things for which I’m grateful on this, our country’s festival of thanksgiving.
I’m thankful for my family, and my family in law. Looking back over the past twenty years since I’ve been writing about all of us, there are so many ways things could have turned out differently, and much worse – but yet here we all are, and things are all right.
And I’m thankful for the family I grew up in – my sister and my brother, of course, and my father, who is blessedly still with us. And for my mother, who we’re spending our second Thanksgiving without, this year. And as I noted back last spring, I’m profoundly grateful for one of the greatest gifts my mother and father gave us all – boring, non-remarkable childhoods, free of the sort of pointless, mindless drama that has always afflicted less fortunate families, and that a certain segment of society has taken to celebrating these days.
The more families I get to know, the luckier I know we all were, and are.
So for Bun, Zam, Syd, Watermelon, and of course Barb, Jim and Dad, I’m happily thankful.
Oh yeah – and Pickle, the cat. I lost him last summer – one of those cancers that hits cats like tornados out of the blue. I’m thankful to have had eight years with the best cat ever.
Beyond just family, I’ve had some people who affected my life pretty immensely, mostly positively. I wrote about a bunch of them last month – and the more I wrote, the more people and events and priceless gifts of influence I thought of.
So for them, all of them, I’m grateful.
I’m thankful for the career I have. I blundered into it 25. years ago, more out of boredom with my short career writing instruction manuals – and yet after all this time, I still look forward to going into the office every day, literally or virtually.
I’m grateful in particular for the job I have with the company I’m at. Not naming names – but it’s a place I genuinely enjoy being, with people I genuinely enjoy working with. There aren’t many places where a UX designer with a BA in English could land on two engineering patents. For that story alone, I’m exceedingly thankful.
I’m grateful for the path I took to get there – all its myriad chicanes and hairpin turns. Starting in radio at 15, burning out on it when I was 21, getting back at 22, out again at 25, nightclub DJing, technical writing, and the various twists and turns that got me here.
At the very least, there are a lot of stories to bore my kids stiff with.
On the other hand, every once in a while I can offer someone a perspective they don’t have. And that is a great feeling. For both of us, I think.
I’ve become keenly aware in recent years that there are people who’ve been very important at one time or another, that I will likely never see again. The time for chance serendipity random encounters gets shorter every year. So one thing I didn’t expect, but for which I’m intensely grateful – my show and blog and, to an extent, social media have led me back into contact with a lot of people I likely wouldn’t have via the normal course of random encounters – high school and college classmates who tune in, and occasionally shout out on my show’s various social media feeds. In three particular cases – my college friend Ray Zentz, and my high school and colleg4e classmates Eric DeMar and Pennie Werth – they passed away, very unexpectedly, and (gulp) way too young. And in this past couple of course, I’ve been blessed to have had at least some contact with each of them, while I still could.
And for my many friends who are still with us, and who I do get to see and hang out with? Yes, I’m even more thankful for each and every one of you!
It’s easy enough to say “I’m thankful to be healthy”, and it’s true. But in the five years since my crash weight loss I’ve become humbly aware that most guys who spend as many years sedentary and overweight as I did, aren’t nearly as lucky as I am, to be as relatively healthy, after all that, as I am. I got another warning last spring – I’d found a little under half the weight I lost in 2018, and had to get back on the program – and it worked, again. I’m very aware I’m as lucky as can be. “I’m healthy” is, in this case, delivered with a bit of “whew – close call” as a happy nod. And for that, I’m thankful.
Back to a bit of nostalgia – I’m thankful for my entire high school class. I can’t say I’m friends with everyone in the Jamestown High School Class of 1981 – but this past couple of reunions have blessed me with a deeper appreciation of quite a few people who, between cliques and crowds and circumstances I barely knew in the day, with whom I’ve spent more time over a few drinks at reunions than we ever did in high school, and intensely glad for the opportunity.
I’m glad I got the education I did. It’s become the fashion these days among a certain crowd of conservatives to dunk on the modern college education – and from what I see among 20-and-30-somethings today, there’s something to it – but my BA in English has served me far better than I’d ever thought it could when I graduated from college. It taught me how to think, reason, look for the question behind the question, for the additional questions that every answer launches.
And of course, “education” is more than just curriculum and schooling. I’m thankful the many unintentional lessons I learned from some of the amazing people I met, and the collateral effects of the things I learned, in class and out.
I’m grateful that this version of the RIchard Thompson Band released this version of this day-appropriate song:
Perhaps a bit less ethereally? I’m so happy to have a band again. Oh, it’s just a classic rock cover band – it’s not the flaming-hot passionate “mission in life” vibe the twenty-some me wore back in the 1980s, when I took my swing at being a rock star, or at least a songwriter, producer and whatever else came my way. But I get to play guitar in front of rooms full of people who seem to enjoy it. And even if it’s a slow night at an out of the way bar, my Fitbit says I burn 6-7000 calories and rack up a zillion steps, so even then it’s a win-win.
Anyway – for that, I’m thankful.
Given the sturm und drang of this state and nation’s political scene, I’m deliriously grateful for the voice this blog, and the NARN, have given me over the years. On the one hand, social media have given everyone a voice, of sorts – and what people have done with that voice is another entire subject. But being able to do this on my own terms (within FCC and Salem Communications rules, natch) for all this time? To the extent I’m still sane, that’s probably why.
Of course, I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made during all these years of writing – Professor Reynolds, Gary Gross, Joshua Sharf, Sheila O’Malley, and the group of local bloggers that, about this time 19 years ago, started coalescing into that radio show: Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker, Brian Ward, Chad the Elder, Atomizer, Michael Brodkorb, and of course Ed Morrissey, King Banaian, Brad Carlson and Jack Tomczak. And of course, for the many friends I made in the “Minnesota Organization of Bloggers” days – including the three whose contributions still bless this blog, Mr. D, Jeff Kouba and First Ringer.
Why, yes – even Paddyboy! I’m thankful that Pad – someone I’ve considered a friend for over three decades, and to whom I owe an odd little debt of gratitude from back before the word “blog” meant anything but something that happened about an hour after you ate a gas station burrito – drops by, pique and all. I owe you a drink or two. Have your people call my people.
And I’m thankful for this little ephemeral bit of internet I’ve been wrangling this past 20.75 years. It’s been a sporty year – as I write this, the comment section is still shut down. And since you mention it, yes – I’m thankful I shut it down. It’ll be back. Yep – also grateful.
As I noted elsewhere around the time of the 20th anniversary, writing this every weekday morning has been sort of a Zen-like lesson – come rain or shine, feast or famine, writer’s block or fit of logorrhea, the exercise of sitting down and writing, five mornings a week, has been a way of centering myself for this past two decades. For better or worse – I have to think it’s better – one of the great takeaways from doing this has been, I think, one of the great lessons of life; keep plugging away, and things eventually explain themselves.
Of course, I’m profoundly and humbly thankful that people still choose to read it, after all this time. Thank you all!
I could keep at this for hours more. And perhaps one day I should. But cooking calls, same as last year.
And so to borrow a line from that first Thanksgiving post on this blog, way back when:
But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.
Thanks to all of you. I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving and a blessed holiday season.
This post is an update of a post I wrote last year. Not much has changed – for which I’m also grateful.
We’ll start with this thread on Twitter. I urge you to read the whole thing; it distills the response I have to the modernes attempt to cheapen and undercut everything Western Civilization stands for into a hot red crystal of truth:
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