Tales of 1001 Posts

In the dim and distant past a young woman, so the story goes, managed to persuade a drooling psychopath not to kill her by telling him stories.  She would break off the story at an interesting part and said nutjob would have to postpone her execution in order to hear the rest.  This went on for a thousand and one nights which indicates that he was a remarkably tolerant and patient psychopath or alternatively, deeply stupid.

Without any such literary critic hanging on my every word it has taken me considerably longer to produce my own little milestone.  Yet here it is, my thousand and first blog post and I've managed to achieve it without having to marry a sword waving maniac or, for that matter, create anything novel, exciting or imaginative.  Fortunately such things aren't necessary for fame nowadays.  Having said that fame still manages to elude me.  A colleague who has writes about nutrition actually gets paid to hawk various products on her blog, it is fair to say the likelihood of that happening to me is rather on the low side.

It must be admitted that this blog is, well "designed" isn't exactly the right word, for a rather niche audience.  Said niche audience consisting largely of those who share my sense of humour and are interested in my goings on.  That translates to the three surviving members of my immediate family.  In fact this isn't so much a niche audience as a cranny audience.  From time to time I try and hector, persuade, beg and emotionally blackmail my friends and colleagues into reading my blog.  Sadly most of them would rather perform dentistry on themselves than do so.  I feel pretty secure in slagging them off as they aren't going to read it.

There is no structure or guiding principle behind this blog, it literally is whatever my brain happens to vomit out at any given moment.  Nevertheless over the years certain themes have developed.

• Birthday greetings for historical figures (mainly various emperors).  These are easy to write as I simply cut and paste wikipedia and add my own commentary.
• Travel commentary.  Again dead easy, you just have to go somewhere even if its only a light rail station
• An intermittent series about the doings of a Tasmanian cow which ended with his sad demise
• After action reports from a war game that I play.  These are actually the most popular as I hawk them around various gaming sites and people click on to them before they realise what they're doing
• My interactions with a colleague in Tasmania who provides me with material so I don't have to think of anything original
• And recently taking advantage of the coronavirus outbreak to add to the level of disinformation surrounding the pandemic
  

The flesh on the above skeleton is provided by an adhoc collection of mind spittle that I toss in whenever I have spare time, could be bothered or really have nothing else to do.  There are one or two entries that I'm genuinely proud of (don't ask for examples) and a number I now find deeply embarrassing (too many examples to mention) but I've decided not to remove any of them as I feel that would somehow be dishonest.

Along the way I have learned a little more than I really wanted to about my fellow human beings.  I wrote a post entitled "Dinosaur Snuff Porn" which turned out to be one of the most popular I ever wrote.  Imagine what someone must have been googling to come across that by accident.  Another post on archaeology gained a reply from someone who had a disturbing intimacy with the minutiae of human burial.  I'm hoping he was a funeral director and not a serial killer.

The person most to blame for the preceding thousand posts is my father in law, Herry Lawford who suggested I start this blog in the first place and held up his own much more coherent and intelligent blog as an example.  Herry is now in much the same situation as Doctor Frankenstein when his monster started terrorising the local villagers.  Fortunately social distancing rules preclude the organisation of a torch wielding mob to storm his castle.

Thank you to everyone who has read this blog (Mum, Dad, Geoffrey) if there hasn't been anything to interest you yet there probably will be in the future.  Given the scattergun way my mind works I will almost certainly touch on a subject close to your heart eventually.  Then I will mock and misrepresent it for posterity. This is the great thing about the internet.  It may not teach you anything but it allows you to be ignorant on an almost infinite variety of subjects.