Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Blaze away!

PS -- With some browsers you may have to "reload" the page in order to see your comment.

On the bright side, JS's younger (and according to JS himself, "much brighter") brother Owen Paine will be carrying on the proud Paine tradition in these pages.

A fond farewell, then, to good old JS, and a hearty welcome to young Owen.

Volunteer by writing direct to me: mjs [attt] smithbowen.net.

I've gotten as far from Pennsylvania as I could afford to go this week, so the site will be receiving somewhat intermittent attention at best.

Tried a little Latin on 'em. Comments seem to be back now. Sorry, but any posted since late last night seem to have been eaten.

I just finished a small-scale purge -- Stalin would have been ashamed -- of some comments.

Discourse has recently taken an entertaining turn here at SMBIVA, and I'm pleased, but I also worry that mere vituperation tends to take over. It's a lemma of Gresham's Law.

Feel free to be as disagreeable and impolite and unparliamentary as you like, but humor my humorlessness, and try to work something into a comment that relates to the subject matter.

Yo'-mama-ing is fun to watch, when you've got a real pro doing it (shown at left, the hilarious Don Rickles, patron saint of insult comedy).

But none of us has so far shown the true divine gift, and like a real Upper West Side merit baby, I despise mediocrity.

On a less contentious note... I hope...

Blogging is going to be the death of me. It's probably ungrateful to be annoyed at Movable Type, which has sustained this 'umble blog all these years, but I'm getting tired of it. And I don't think it scales very well.

Anybody have other suggestions?

I love a grudge match. I love gaudy rhetoric and unscrupulous personal abuse. It reminds me of Smectymnus, and Martin Marprelate, and old Johnny Milton in his unbuttoned polemical mode.

We're seeing a bit of this now, here at dear old SMBIVA, and I couldn't be more pleased.

But I don't love a purge.

This is just a blog. It's not a vanguard party. It's not the sword or shield of anything. It's a place where people can exchange their thoughts, valuable or not as the case may be.

I've never tried to stop anybody participating here, and please God I won't ever have to. And I take a very dim view of suggestions that so-and-so ought to be banished into outer darkness. Old faithful stalwart comrades, in particular, enjoy a halo of immunity.

I've heard suggestions lately that this person or that person ought to go. X is making a pest of himself; Y is turning off potential readers.

There are sites that operate this way. Daily Kos, for example. Ugh.

Let's not go there, as Oprah says. I can't tell you how repellent I find this line of thinking.

Do me a favor, folks: criticize as much as you like, but please, please! Don't tell me to get rid of somebody who rubs you the wrong way.

I'm off for a few days on the water. Hope I don't miss Israel attacking Iran.

I'm off tonight to sail to Maine. Wish me luck and pour a libation to Poseidon and Amphitrite.

Updates to this site, from me at least, will depend on where I drop the hook en route and whether there's a Starbucks or a public library near the shore. Owen and Al, I hope, will keep the home fires burning.

I've stopped off in Cap Cod en route to Maine. Still afloat, miraculously. Many thanks to Al and Owen for keeping the blog going in high style.

An indefatigable commenter here has recently constructed a very flattering image of me as a frivolous Manhattan playboy. One feels a certain obligation to live up to a compliment. So I hereby serve notice that Nora and I are heading off to warmer climes for an impulsive three-day holiday. (Asta will be staying here in New York, with Henry the butler -- Asta can't stand air travel these days. The noise! And the people!)

I have a serious backlog of un-edited posts piled up in the inbox. Profuse and sincere apologies to the stalwarts who have sent them. But now that the dear old boat is out of the water for the winter, I feel kinda lost without something really self-indulgent to do.

Henry just crept into the study here, coughed discreetly, and intimated, without quite saying it, that Nora is waiting in the billiard room with a pitcher of Martinis.

Now if I know Nora, she's wearing a slinky silk peignoir and she's already well into the Martinis. So if you will excuse me....

Owen suggested I might want to try a link post. I'm getting the feel of the thing and have a couple I think will do.

Splintered Sunrise will appeal to comrades who know or can guess what Norn Iron is without needing an explanation.

The Cedar Lounge Revolution has a bunch of sticks, and a whole lot more. An excellent place to visit for lefties too stubborn to quit.

Weee're baaack. Sorry that comments and posts were not do-able for a while there. No idea exactly what went wrong, but mySQL's "repair table" command works more often than not, fortunately.

Oh yeah: If you've been monitoring comments on some particular post and all of a sudden they've disappeared, let me know: stopmebeforeivoteagain (at-sign) yahoo.com. I may be able to recover them.