House of Eratosthenes

And we haven’t gotten around up until now to mentioning it here because, well, WorkAndStuff. Also, like it says, this is The Blog That Nobody Reads, heh…also all my previous efforts sort of dissolved into a fruitless Google Image Search for things like “twentieth,” something that establishes a solid connection and has a nice-looking girl in a skimpy outfit. Nothing ever qualified. By now, we’ve reached the point where further silence from us would be ungracious.

The truth is, though, part of the reason we’ve been brought to this point is honest, old-fashioned humility. I’m looking at the ones in the Top 50 who aren’t in the Top 20, that would mean we managed to “beat” them in some way, and thinking…WTF? We beat that guy? Naming examples would be pointless, there are so many. But in the past few days or weeks, if you haven’t noticed, we haven’t even been doing much of anything at all here. How do you emerge North of truly great artisans, and linkers-and-thinkers, while not actually doing anything?

One of our Facebook friends was sufficiently kind, or flattering, to mention…

Actually, now that I’ve had time to look through some of the “blogs” listed ahead of Morgan, I think his actual ranking is much better than 20. A lot of 1-19 are just news feeds with little to no commentary or analysis. Morgan’s is among the first few listed that I would consider to actually be a blog.

Well, I can see some basis for that although I can’t get on board with the idea that we should be ranked even higher. It gets back to the linking-versus-thinking thing, again; yes some of the ones in the top nineteen are “feeds,” mostly, in fact some are that and almost nothing else. But, there’s a lot of value in that. It isn’t hard to establish a difference. For example, we just went six days without saying anything, can you reasonably infer from that “nothing must have happened for the last six days”? Surely not. That is not our goal. So we’d make a lousy news-feed. And we happen to like and admire news feeds, ourself. We have a coffee mug too, we have a hot plate on which it sits, too; sometime in the wee hours of the morning, the two make contact, and there we are, just like you, wondering which page we can hit to get the best impression of what’s going on in the world in the shortest amount of time.

Commentary & analysis does have some value too. In our case, and in the case of many others, that’s best thought-of as a chronicling of the evolution of one brain among many. The creation of some prejudices, the preservation of others, the destruction of still yet others. Learnin’s. The “howcum-whenevers” from which it seems someone is always forbidding you, in polite general conversation. “How come whenever they profile a ‘poor’ person, he’s always wearing nicer and newer clothes than what I wear and has a bigger teevee?” “How come whenever they interview a feminist college professor, she always has a hyphenated name?” “How come whenever they mess around with & throw money at a social problem for decades and decades, it never seems to get any better?” Maybe we’re not supposed to think such things or audibly comment on such things; but if you want to get a lot of people running in a circle endlessly, like a hamster in a little metal wheel, best way to do it is to forbid any sort of thinking like that. To get rid of the “howcome-whenevers” — which is precisely what the powers-that-be managed to do before blogs came along.

So all these types of blogs are valuable. Like it or not, it’s certainly a medium that is here to stay. Some of the stuff that’s coming out about Dads-n-Granddads’ “news” channels lately, ++cough++ DanRatherBrianWilliams ++cough++, has to make one wonder what sort of crap got swept under the rug in decades gone by before the blogs came along. We’re pleased and privileged to be a part of the phenomenon even if it’s a matter of debate how much, or in what way, we’re managing any sort of contribution to it.

Congrats, homie! But… “we”? Who is “we,” kemo sabe? You got a mouse in your pocket? 🙂
- Severian | 03/28/2015 @ 13:22
“…just like you, wondering which page we can hit to get the best impression of what’s going on in the world in the shortest amount of time.”
Sadly, some of those TOP “feeds” that rely on advertiser/data mining for operating capital lock up my
‘puter, suffer load times above my attention span, begging for “upgrades, lead to paywalls, and demand reboots so often…..
(SEE: Recent Dilbert)
- CaptDMO | 03/29/2015 @ 05:37
Congrats, Morgan.

Does this mean there’s more of “nobodies”?
- tim | 03/30/2015 @ 08:56

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Twentieth From the TopSaturday, March 28th, 2015

Twentieth From the Top
Saturday, March 28th, 2015