When prepping to write this entry I happened to glance at the site stats and noticed this is the six hundredth post I’ve written for this blog. At least it’s not the six hundredth and sixty-sixth post, one to which I seriously doubt I’ll call much attention. Although I probably should make it one singing the praises of that demon rock’n'roll. Maybe see if someone has the video for “Number Of The Beast” by Iron Maiden online I can link to. Always the bratchild, am I.
Numbers can be deceiving little suckers. I remember lo those many years ago calculating how old I’d be when the year 2000 would roll along, marveling at how foreign and ancient the number seemed. Wouldn’t I always remain about the same age? Oh, I’d still have birthdays. Loved when those would roll around. But the actual age? No great movement there. Hmm. Hasn’t quite worked out that way. I wouldn’t say the years have flown by, but they have steadily moved ahead. No, no years flying by. Hair flying away? Now that’s a different story, told with many sighs. Ah well.
But enough stream of consciousness/train of thought mumblings when it’s apparent the stream has run out of steam and the train has pretty much derailed. I had my most popular single day on the NASCAR blog ever today, much of it courtesy of properly plugging the post. While it’s always good to have your work hailed by others, this being far preferable to people praying for a hailstorm to come obliterate whatever you put out there, never shy away from shameless self-promotion so long as you don’t get carried away with yourself… er, it. A boss decades ago summed it up nicely when after I prefaced some no doubt brilliant piece of insight and witticism with “all false modesty aside” intoned “from you, any modesty would be false.” Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but the suckers still sting.
Trundling along the path of peculiarity I’m on tonight (hey, I’m tired, okay?), thought I’d call attention to someone who obviously works way harder on at least some of his blog posts than I do, namely Rusty Shackleford from My Pet Jawa who does an excellent job exposing disingenuousness, duplicity, and flat out damn lies being “independently” spread about Sarah Palin… by professional PR people with an extremely close relationship to the Obama campaign. Read the whole story here; it’s fascinating and disgusting all at once. Of a far more benign but still fascinating nature are a couple of stories in the Weekly Standard about the form and role of faith in the politics of Obama and Palin. Some thoughts on this tomorrow… provided the train doesn’t completely derail before then.
Finally, some book news: making a lot of progress on the final artist chapter before completion, it being for Nancyjo Mann of Barnabas. I realized the other day a huge stumbling block slowing me down in getting the chapter written was entirely self-induced: a way below par introduction. Tossed it and wrote more far more germane to Mann’s life story. Way better, and makes the rest of the story far easier to write. I hope — hope hope hope — to have the first draft completed by this week or at the latest next. A huge thank you to everyone for the prayers over the book, and please keep ‘em coming!
