For the first time since 20 December 2020, musician, actor, and writer Frederick Ingram has posted to his niche blog, Corporate History International (with the great, if somewhat cumbersome, URL of https://corporatehistory.international). It’s a short piece about the KitKat Bar, that delicious, wafery little delight with the memorable jingle:
It’s been another crazy week, but the rhythms of the school year are beginning to fall into their familiar patterns. That said, I’ve put in more hours working this week than any in a long time.
Regular readers know what that means: another edition of Phone it in Friday, now reaching its fifteenth installment.
It’s been a week for shout-outs to other commentators and platforms, so I figured I’d continue with that theme and recommend some of my blogger buddies to you. I have to give a big hat tip for this idea to one of my best blogger buddies, photog, over at Orion’s Cold Fire. He wrote a post—“A Word of Thanks to Our Boosters“—highlighting some of those blogs that routinely link to his page or reference his writing, and yours portly made the list. Thanks, photog!
So on this rainy, overcast Friday, here are some excellent blogs for your consideration:
I’ve been blogging daily for over a year-and-a-half now, with a smattering of posts going back to 2009 (on the old Blogger version of the site, which I call TPP 1.0). While I think I have some decent posts—my buddy fridrix of Corporate History International once told me my material was in the top ten percent in terms of quality on the Internet—I’ve written a lot of garbage, too, including placeholder posts for times I can’t really get something fresh posted.
Of course, I’ve written essays that I think are excellent—or, at the very least, very important—that get virtually no hits. Then I’ll write throwaway posts, like “Tom Steyer’s Belt,” that blow up the view counter. That one at least made sense—I was one of the first sources to write about his goofy belt, and his ads were so ubiquitous in late 2019, people searching for his belt got my blog.
What’s interesting to me is that I forget some of the things I’ve written. It’s another reason we shouldn’t be so fast to crucify television personalities who posted something incendiary on their blog fifteen years ago. Views change, although I think sometimes folks in the hot seat exaggerate how much they’ve “evolved” on an issue. Then again, we’re responsible for what we put out there.
That’s all a long way of saying that I’m doing some deep dives for an indeterminate number of Sundays into some forgotten posts. These are posts that don’t immediately spring to my mind when I’m referencing my own work. These posts may or may not have had high or low hit counts; they are just posts that don’t linger strongly in my memory. They’re the red-headed stepchildren of my churning mind.
To find these posts, I just looked back at months in 2018 and 2019 to see what didn’t leap out to me as familiar. You’ll notice that February 2019 is heavily-represented here, as that was early in the process of what became my goal of one year of daily posts.
With that, here are some forgotten posts of yesteryear:
Well, that’s it for this Sunday. I’m looking forward into further deep dives over the coming weeks.
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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Today’s post marks the 365th day of consecutive posts. On December 31, 2018, I wrote “2018’s Top Ten Posts” to look back at the year (I downsized a bit this year, only looking at “2019’s Top Five Posts“).
At the time, I was enjoying—as I am presently—the glory of Christmas Break. The blog had largely been dormant following a blitz of posting during the Summer of 2018, with only occasional posts here and there, such as transcriptions of my various “Historical Moments” mini-talks. Over the Christmas season, I was trying to get back into writing. I wasn’t in the custom of churning out 600+ words on a daily basis, so it took a bit more effort to sit down and write a post.
I never intended to keep a 365-day streak going. At first, I didn’t even realize WordPress tracked such activity. But I noticed (probably with this moderately popular post) that I had a three-day “steak,” as WordPress calls it.
So I decided to try to write something everyday for the month of January 2019. January tends to be a slow month in the school year, with everyone groggily easing back into intellectual activity during the grayest month of the year. I also find the cold intellectually stimulating—the bracing bite of mid-winter always seems to get the creative juices flowing.
Before diving into today’s post, I’d like to give a YUGE “thank you” to Nebraska Energy Observer for reblogging yesterday’s post. His commentary on my post and Leslie Alexander’s moving personal essay adds greatly to the discussion of modern alienation, and gives me some encouragement in these dark days.
Everything awesome goes to crap. That’s the thought I had yesterday when reading fridrix’s brief post lamenting the new electronic Ford Mustang, the Ford Mustang Mach-E.
Electric cars are fine, although environuts shouldn’t delude themselves that driving these battery-powered vehicles are saving the environment (it’s pedantic to point out, but batteries require a great deal of mining to get the metals necessary to build them, and the electricity to charge them comes from coal-, oil-, and nuclear-power, so it’s not like you’re truly making an end-run around fossil fuels). But a Ford Mustang shouldn’t be an electric car; at least, it shouldn’t be one that looks like this iteration.
Last week’s posts had me diving into the blogs of some good friends. Friday’s post featured blogger and musician friend fridrix’s Corporate History International. Wednesday’s post looked at the writings of another blogger friend, Bette Cox. And I daily read the blogs of photog (Orion’s Cold Fire) and Nebraska Energy Observer. Indeed, one of the joys of blogging is discovering other bloggers’ work (I almost forgot Gordon Scheaffer‘s excellent history blog, Practically Historical).
In the spirit of these intrepid citizen journalists and commentators—and the cheeky fun and intellectual grit of their blogs—I thought I should pay homage to the posts that, when I’m struggling with writer’s block, helped me slap together some daily content.
I’ll be presenting these posts in chronological order in which I initially reblogged them, so if you don’t show up these week, Internet Friends, don’t worry; you’ll make it up here eventually!
That situation leads to frustration among society’s straight-man. Why do rule followers get the brunt of the state’s terrible force, but criminals blatantly break the rules, and get off scot-free? It’s a recipe for an awakening.
That’s it for this week. Enjoy the waning hours of your glorious weekend!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
It’s been a golden week for reblogging, as some of my blogosphere buddies continue to generate some amazing content. It looks like I may have to do another Dissident Write feature soon (here are I and II). Armistice Day always brings out the best material, too.
As we head into the weekend—mercifully free of professional obligations—I’m pleased to note the revival of my buddy fridrix’s blog, Corporate History International.
The Portly Politico 