Tag: Worst of 2019

TBT: The Worst of 2019

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Well, 2020 is, after today, in the books, and we can breathe a collective sigh of relief.  Of course, all the problems of 31 December 2020 will still be there tomorrow when we wake up to 1 January 2021, but there is some optimism that an arbitrary flip of the calendar based on the Earth’s rotation around the Sun will set us up for a better calendar year.  With Biden the Usurper assuming the throne in twenty-one days, I don’t share in that optimism, but I’m looking forward to a music- and art-filled 2021 nonetheless.

At the end of 2019, I painstakingly went through the stats to find all the posts I’d written with just one view in 2019—the ultimate reminder to be humble, and to not expect huge pageviews right away.  I imagine that some of these were read in e-mails sent to followers, so I don’t get pageview counts for those, but that means the number of eyeballs reading these posts was depressingly low.

Of course, it being a Thursday, I pretty much have to give myself the easy way out and feature a TBT, so why not look back at the failures of a prior year?  And, in the spirit of yuletide wealth redistribution, maybe we can show these posts some holiday love.

Here is 31 December 2019’s “The Worst of 2019“:

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The Worst of 2019

The Portly Politico2 Comments

On Sunday I looked at “2019’s Top Five Posts.”  I’ve enjoyed some solid traffic for 2019, especially here in the last quarter (December has been unusually good to me—must be all the Christmas spirit).  Thanks to you, dear readers, for making 2019 a great year.

As I was looking through the most trafficked posts of 2019, I found at least a couple of dozen posts with only a single view.  In the spirit of giving these pieces a hand-up (and not a handout), I thought I’d feature the worst pieces of 2019.

Note that “worst” here does not imply low-quality (although that may very well apply—you be the judge).  I don’t like the idea of affixing value in terms of raw numbers, but these are blog posts, not people, so I’m taking a dispassionately quantitative approach to defining “worst.”

This list is long—a bit discouragingly so—but with slightly over 365 posts, there are bound to be some duds, traffic-wise.  Also, some of these were posts written in 2018, but there’s no way to parse that conveniently in WordPress, so some of these pieces were once successful, but have now faded into obscurity or irrelevance.

So let’s show these loners some love and get them the clicks they (probably) deserve (in no particular order):

  1. “Deluge” – All about my old apartment flooding!
  2. “Surf’s Up” – About a review Steve Sailer wrote; it’s worth reading!
  3. “SubscribeStar Saturday: End-of-Decade Reflections; Age and Class” – I just wrote this piece a few days ago!  Subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more to read it yourself!
  4. “#MAGAWeek2018 – Limited Government” – Yep, looks like Americans’ passion for limited government is on the rocks.  Yikes!
  5. “TBT: American Values, American Nationalism” – One of the most popular posts on the old TPP Blogger page, now fallen into obscurity.
  6. “North Korea Reflections” – We still haven’t had L’il Kimmy to America, but I’m convinced it would blow his mind profoundly.
  7. “Soccer Sucks” – Self-explanatory.
  8. “SubscribeStar Saturday: Kabuki Theatre” – About impeachment. Don’t be afraid of the paywall.  Subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more to read it yourself!
  9. “A Discourse on Disclaimers” – I get tired of qualifying myself all the time.  I vowed to stop, but I can’t!
  10. “Memorial Day 2019” – Show some respect for our veterans and read this post!
  11. “Breaking: Justice Anthony Kennedy Retires” – Momentous news that set the Brett Kavanaugh hearings into motion.  Makes you wonder if Ruth Bader Ginsburg is still alive.
  12. “TBT: Music is for Everyone” – Remember when Trump walked out at the RNC in 2016 to “We are the Champions”?  It was amazing.
  13. “Democrats Favor Socialism” – This used to be a novel insight, now it’s an acknowledged fact.
  14. “TBT: There is No General Will” – This post remains one of my least popular, both on this site and the old Blogger one.  I guess no one cares about Rousseau.
  15. “Pizza Paving Potholes” – A great piece about Domino’s Pizza’s pothole-paving program.  Very cool.
  16. “Hump Day Hodgepodge: Testing Reflections” – Some reflections on standardized testing.  No wonder nobody read it.
  17. “Reality Breeds Conservatism” – If you live in the real world and not a fantasy realm of Leftist abstractions, you’ll be conservative!
  18. “Slammed Holy Saturday: Captain Marvel” – Brie Larson gives privileged bitties a bad name.
  19. “TBT: Back to School with Richard Weaver” – I reread the introduction to Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences about once a year, usually right before school starts back.
  20. “Vindication – Ben Shapiro Agrees with TPP” – I had a hot take about something; Ben Shapiro then had the same hot take.  I can only assume he was reading the blog.
  21. “Rationing and Abundance” – Save your money and cultivate abundance!
  22. “Gig Day II” – More reflections from the Pee Dee’s favorite singing pianist.
  23. “Hard Rock Reviews on Orion’s Cold Fire” – An aggregate of reviews, mostly about Dokken.
  24. “SubscribeStar Saturday: Controlling Spending” – Like liberty and limited government, Americans (sadly) don’t seem to care much about controlling spending.
  25. “Judge Troll” – A Republican judge loses reelection, so he enacts the policies of catch-and-release Democrats and puts a bunch of hoodlums back on the street.  Reckless, but hilarious.
  26. “An Open Letter to Papa John’s Pizza” – Stop persecuting people for saying a magic word in an innocent context.

Well, that’s it!  You can help these little posts grow up to be big and successful.  Or you can callously neglect them, allowing them to persist in their current state of irrelevance.  If there’s one thing blogging has taught me, words mean nothing if nobody reads them—so get to reading!

Happy New Year!

—TPP