Reminder:
From the May 1st, 2004 WOL
A “blog” is a personal web page where you just write down whatever you damned well please and put in public for people to see.
If you have an idea, you can put it on the public record by putting it on your blog.
If you have an invention, you can put it on the public record by writing it on your blog.
If you are like me and your best ideas cannot be published, you put them on record in your blog.
A blog is usually a kind of public diary of your thoughts.
My blog is more like a diary than it is like a web page.
My blog is not written for the reader, but you are welcome to read it until you get so bored you can’t stand it.
DO NOT HOLD ME TO ANYTHING I SAY IN MY BLOG.
Do not expect the blog to be nearly as professional as my writing. I am talking to me, not to you.
You are listening to the meanderings of a person with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. That makes real writing hard work. My blog is not going to be hard work, so it is going to be a bit scatterbrained.
You are welcome to tell me anything my blog makes you think of.
I have been confidential advisor to everything from mercenary soldiers to alcoholics and drug addicts to the President. This list could go on a long, long way. I have learned to think like a host of people.
So my blog will be an exercise in writing from inside the skin of a lot of other people besides me.
I can try to think like a Klansman one day and like a Communist the next. I’ve known plenty of both, and I have given advice to both, free of charge. I respect and will give PERSONAL help to any honest person, wherever that honesty leads them.
That attitude is part of my own personal Bible Belt heritage, “Judge not that ye be not judged.” But it has repaid my efforts many, many times over, not the least because I can walk in a lot of people’s shoes.
If this doesn’t give you the warning you need, you need to go back to Kindergarten.
If you are the kind of person who permanently rejects someone because of one wrong thing he said, I don’t want you near me anyway.
I warn you, that kind of person is not worth knowing. Get away from him!
I realize my blog is public. So I won’t identify people in it or give information that would allow anybody to identify them. Trust me, I’ve had to do that all my life.
After I have said all this, if my blog infuriates somebody, that person is a fool.
And I am retired, I have all the money I want, and I have done enough in my life so that I need to impress nobody, so I don’t give a damn.
If that sort of person reads my blog, he will reject me forever. That would be a favor to me. If the blog gets rid of people like that, that alone would make it worthwhile.
A blog never ends, so if you want to take a look now, do so. But it will be there a long time, and it will get longer and longer. But remember, WhitakerOnline is written for you, Bob’s Blog is written for me.
#1 by Peter on 06/27/2005 - 1:19 am
I love your blog.
#2 by Peter on 06/27/2005 - 1:20 am
ADD people are great to have around. They always add life to any situation. I think it makes you more brilliant then you already are.
#3 by Mark on 06/30/2005 - 4:40 pm
You said: “My blog is not written for the reader, but you are welcome to read it until you get so bored you can’t stand it.”
Actually it is written for the reader, because if it wasn’t it would simply be a diary entry, which again is written for the reader — some reader — years to come perhaps, but someone other than the writer, as a historical account of the thrunderclouds taking shape between the writer’s ears. Putting a blog (or diary, or internet radio show) on the internet in a open (more or less) forumn is also evidence that a blog (yours or anyone else’s) is written for the reader. If it wasn’t, it would be locked up forever more, or never written in the first place.
Perhaps the issue is not that this blog isn’t written for the reader, but a case of your ego not being able to handle someone someone saying they are bored to tears at a particular series of ramblings. I’m sorry to have been the bearer of bad news, but to me religous prattle is the verbal equivelent of nytol. To someone else it is and amphetamine. That’s just the way it is.
Oh, and, commone sense tells me that If your blog was not meant for the reader you would not have allowed me to express my opinions on said blog.
#4 by Board Op on 06/30/2005 - 8:26 pm
Mark may not have noted that the above blog entry was reposted by the BoardOp for this blog.
#5 by Bob on 07/01/2005 - 12:22 am
Mark, yes my ego is very fragile and your personal remark naturally reduces me to tears.
A blog is whatever the writer wants it to be, and most of them ARE largely diaries. By definition, a blog is open to the public.
That is the DEFINITION of a blog, Mark.
If comments come in and the blogger wishes to have them, the blog has that, too. This is standard procedure.
In fact, my blog has been compromised from its original purpose by my team’s concern with my speaking too freely here. It is supposed to be wide-open give-and-take, but some readers, not me, can’t take that.
Isn’t it odd how someone with a weak ego would publish ALL your comments.
In fact, the arguments here have gone a long way toward convincing me that my belief that the Rabbi Joshuas ben-Joseph was actually the world savior I had seen him as. He was an extension of the strictly Jewish version of Savior so many faiths looked for, as commenters have been insisting.
So my fragile grip on Christianity has slipped. This was something I could not have discussed in any other forums — the “Christians” will not tolerate disagreement — and a less forgiving group of people I never met.
So the blog is doing what I wanted it to do, which, as repeated by the BoardOp, is its purpose.
#6 by Mark on 07/01/2005 - 10:37 am
My apologies for causing you to weep over my words, Bob. Actually, I did not say you had a weak ego, I merely proposed a theory that PERHAPS your ego was weak. It was not an adamant statement that your ego actually was weak, just a proposed (and now shot down) theory. Now that you have pointed out that a weak ego would never print my damning comments, I stand corrected and face your words, not with tears, but with a grin and newfound respect for you. Any man who could take my biting sarcasm without resorting to name-calling is a far better man than most in my eyes.
As far as mean spiritted, unforgiving, don’t-give-an-inch Christians (in the context of their views on religion) I totally agree. My family was Lutheran in the old country (Germany) and when they came to the N. Amer. Continent 200 hundred years ago they scurried about and through the various protestant denominations like fleas to a dog kennal. And mean spirited? God yes! My being agnostic has them all scratching their heads. But you’re right — they won’t budge one inch if you offer an argument that counters their beliefs — and they will most likely call you bad names in the process.
Oh, and this is a small matter — please don’t refer to me as Mike. That was my wife’s old boyfriend’s name and it does wonders for my monumentally weak ego.