NOVATOWNHALL

Just damn. (Content warning).

The rigorous, spartan ethical code of blogging demands regular updates to one’s site: but sometimes, dear friends, the flesh is weak … and at such times we shift into 100% derivative mode for a spin around the blogosphere!

The Other McCain: According to a U.S. Department of Labor report Americans aren’t losing jobs; illegal aliens are.

Loudoun Insider: It looks like the Loudoun County Republican Committee is growing stronger. (Good to hear, but just the thought of it makes me weary to the bones).

MonkeyWatch: Ed has an incisive observation on this nascent Web 3.0 thing. (Reminds me of one of my favorite, and highly prescient Web docs, Metacrap).

The Oath: Are we on track for America’s first Abortion President?

Donny Ferguson: Even Richard Nixon was more trusted than this Congress. (With Congress at 6%, I would say every single used car salesman is probably more trusted than this Congress).

Digital Camel: Resurrecting the greatest TV show of all time. Ah Croooow! - we hardly knew ye.

And as a follow up to our exuberant celebration of bipartisanship last week, Jeanne West now claims she was hoodwinked by the right wing media. Almost as though she had no idea Supervisor Delgaudio was the primary subject of the report until she saw it on TV. Funny, that.

Erica Garman spent the day wheeling around Sterling yesterday, read about it here.

Keep an eye on her blog and you will see what I mean.

More to come.

Another blogger passed on this weekend, as reported by Eric, longtime blog friend, virtual drinking buddy and Tom Waits brother in arms. This blogger, Winston Rand, I did not know, but if he was a friend of Eric’s I am sure he would have been a friend of mine.

It highlights the fact the blogosphere opens a new element of history and memorialization, that a public diary or collection of essays can stand as one’s monument, one’s epitaph or eulogy.

When the Acidman died a couple years ago, this fact really hit home with me. I read Rob Smith’s blog regularly, but not carefully enough to know he had any serious health issues, so his sudden death (in the midst of blogging, if I recall correctly) was a shock. Right up until the end he was writing cogent, biting, personal essays. He had done this for a long time, and, per his wishes, his blog has remained online as family members have been recycling his posts (because there are so many gosh darn good ones), so that his son will have a place to go to learn about his dad. Click here to follow his last week.

Acidman’s traffic is on average still higher than ours at NVTH, which says something, since we are roughly seven guys who are still generally alive and writing.

It evokes the question of what sort of legacy each of us is leaving on our respective blogs. If I fall dead on the keyboard tonight I would not be overly concerned with the NVTH sitemeter stats two years on, but I wonder if all this written material I’ve left would tell the accurate story for my kids and potential grandkids. They’d definitely be able to glean the fact that “Grampa was angry,” but what else?

As I approach 50, as the years pile up, dropping dead on the keyboard is no longer a distant possibility but a growing likelihood. I hope not soon, but certainly more likely with each passing year. Taking the long view I have to wonder if the legacy here is all I would want to leave.

Holy Hot Columnists, Batman, Michelle has done it for us again!

As a lower tier, C-grade blogger, I can tell you the one thing that makes it all worthwhile are those unexpected moments when you get a “spike” in traffic for absolutely no reason, and a whole bunch of people visit your site more or less accidentally. Ninety-nine percent of blog “marketing” consists of trying to pull various tricks that cause visitors to click on a link to your site. Whether through clever identification of popular google searches, or just trying to convince Glenn Reynolds you’ve written something worthwhile (tried many times and like the cycles of the planets it has ALWAYS proved beyond my control - if it ever works, I will know death is at hand), the basic idea is “Ha! Made you look!”

Once again, the driving force is my NRI photo of Michelle, because MSN has seen fit to make her their featured “popular search” of the day (click her photo then “See also: Images”). There she is, beginning of the second row.

(More form NRI, here and here.)

I know the vast majority of these folks will never visit here again, but occasional flood of gawkers is nice.

Thanks, Michelle! If you ever want me to return the favor, I’ll be happy to provide a head shot which you can publish with abandon.

UPDATE: Approaching 2500 visits. That’s a couple grand at least from Michelle, and counting.

Y’know what? When the Malkinator brings that kind of traffic, the lithesome one goes back on the front page again.

Hope you are ok, dude. It is always scary in this realm of obscured identities that someone could fall off the grid for one reason or another and no one would ever know.

I can think of a million reasons you would no longer be participating on this blog, and that is fine. But I am worried. You have my e-mail address; please let me know if you are still kicking butt in Ann Arbor, biatch (The General’s first post here - oh my how time flies).

Valuable service provided by RWN.

…Obama’s embracement of appeasement.
Obama has a huge anti-gun record.
Obama may not be a Muslim, but every association with religion he has made seems to be outrageously radical!

It’s a long list, go read it all.

The wife is in Baltimore where there is much cooler stuff going on than we typically get in the suburbs here. Hopefully some of the coolness will rub off on her and then by extension on me.

Looking through our referral logs last night I learned that approximately 33% of our traffic at NVTH Blog is because of people googling this photo I took of Michelle Malkin last year. (Here is a larger version for those of you with poor eyesight.) Now, is that really “googling” or should it be termed “g-ogling?”

Anyway, special thanks to Michelle for wearing that skirt and those boots at the NRI Summit. We’ll take the traffic any way we can get it.

UPDATE: On second thought it looks like there’s just something weird going on right now. That photo is a year and a half old and in the past 24 hours there has been a huge increase in the number of requests from images.google.com. Michelle’s birthday maybe? I’m stumped.