A Gilded Planet

Rather than strain anyone's patience with some high-minded Resolutions of the annual variety, I will engage in New Years Navel Gazing by taking a look back at the most popular posts I produced during this past year. I intended to post something new every day and succeeded just over one third of the time. And popularity is, of course, a very relative term considering that it's rather rather rare for me to get pageviews that number in the triple digits, and as you'll see, those pageviews don't always indicate anyone is actually reading the post that's been accessed. 10. Long Live Johansson Projects Though it barely made the cut, I am proud of this one since my brief little review was cited by its subject . I assume a fair number of its pageviews came through that link, alongside the links provided to more legitimate reviews by SFGate and the Daily Cal. Ah, the democracy of opinions that is the Internet. 9. Happy Birthday, José Martí! This post was just me...

As has become my custom (the very idea of resolutions may require it), I failed all of my March Resolutions . Under the most generous approximation possible, I wrote just under 10,000 words in all of March falling short of even accomplishing fifty percent of my stated goal of 20,000 words. I completely forgot to read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and I had to return Heart of Darkness  to the library before I finished reading it. Luckily, I found a very cheap copy of Heart of Darkness  at Half-price Books and purchased it with the intention of finally finishing. I have lined up the possibility of a rewarding, full-time job this summer, but I won't know for sure if I have an offer until sometime this week or thereafter and so I consider the job resolution a failure as well. For this month, I have decided to take serial failure as an indication that I need to set more goals for myself in order to increase the chance I may succeed at one or another of them. Here goes: Write ...

Of the few visitors to this betamax, a significant number have come in search of monster trucks. The top ten search terms that have directed individuals to my site include a total of four monster truck related phrases: monstertrucks, monster trucks, monster truck rally and monster truck show. Taken together, monster trucks account for a significant proportion of traffic to this betamax. All of this is due to a offhand joke I made about Harry Potter. I used a monster truck image to illustrate the joke. But given these analytic results, I have decided to give the people what they want: A Gilded Planet is a proud sponsor of the Demolition Derby. All rights reserved.

"He comes to a gateway in the brick wall," Allie said. She took a long drag lying about in every stage and in a vast a hole in the darkness. "Sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in axles, in wheels, been to Hell," Jacob said, wrenched into eccentric and perverse the smile in his voice. "And I suppose mountains of it broken up, and rusty in its age walked to the bed." Allie let out a small bubbling in her youth; bright fireworks of her pillows as if she'd claw her way into them: steam-hammer; red-hot iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron close to her ear. "This is a place to make a man's head ache too!" "And that's fine. But you don't do this very like me before I was set up. Because I'm the one honest man in this run in families. Your servant, sir." "Yours, we're married." PS - This prose poem (a literary style that is so hot right now) is a mash-up of Charles Dickens' Bleak House and Jacob's Shad...

I missed out on making New Years resolutions, so I have decided to make some resolutions for February. I will post here every day. I will read a poem every day.  (I have already failed this resolution.) I will read Heart of Darkness.  I never read it when it was assigned in AP Lit back in my senior year of High School. It was assigned in a class I was taking this semester, but I dropped the class. But I'm still going to read it, by reading 2-5 pages every day until I finish. It's short so I think this is my most manageable resolution. I'll check back in March to see how well I'm doing. How your face did grow, we'll never know...

After a self-imposed exile from political writing , as well as an accompanying partial news blackout, my growing addiction to movies metastisized to a nearly unfathomable degree. While I will continue to chronicle this addiction regularly, the recent events in my home state of Wisconsin have made it untenable for me to continue avoiding comment on politics, economics and the like. On these subjects, I plan to begin writing about how the radical right wing of this country has been using government to further enrich the rich while screwing the rest of us along with some discussion of how ordinary people can fight back.

My friend Ben Stanton has just started something that unfortunately bears a name that makes him want to vomit. It's the b-word. No, not those that Snoop Dogg has in the living room getting it on (and they won't leave 'til six in the moan-nin'). Still can't guess? Fine, I'll say write it. That doesn't mean I have to like it. Blog. The word is blog. Ben is right: it's quite repugnant. It sounds like the kind of thing you should flush down a dark hole or bury in the sand so no one will ever have to see it. I have always found this particular b-word loathsome, as has Maddox , and he's always right. I'm glad Ben has added his two cents to the matter, since it made realize something. We are not passive spectators in this world of b-words that we call an i-word. There's no good reason that putting words on a screen so that other people with other screens can read those very same words should have to be referred to as the b-word. Or at least ...