Duodecennial

Tempus fugit!  Twelve years ago today I published my first post on this spanking new blog.  A photo of me sitting on a haystack, contemplating the absurdity of life outside the Northwest Corner.  (Ironically, that haystack on which I perched was somewhere in central France.)

By the end of March, 2007, I had already published five more posts -- denouncing the Bush Administration; quoting with admiration the words of Bertrand Russell; contemplating the possibility of extraterrestrial life; questioning what it takes to make one happy; and praising the joys of procrastination.

Sometime before the end of that same month, I went skiing with family members at Lake Tahoe, and found the idea of my being a Blogster already the object of good natured ridicule.  I gather folks viewed it as they would a photo of William F. Buckley out hang-gliding.  It didn't seem in character.

Nothing much has changed in the dozen years since.  Same odd mix of odd topics.  Frequent movie and book reviews, a feature that became well established that first year. 

Each year on this anniversary, I feel compelled to mark the date as I'm doing today.  And, part of my custom is to comment on the prior year's accomplishments.

Let me just say that the calendar year 2018 set a new, all-time record -- a personal best -- for number of posts.  To wit, 110.  Beating the old record of 108 that I set just the year before.  Whether the quality of my blog also was an all-time best is a subjective judgment that I leave to you, my readers.

It's difficult to choose the most "popular" posts of the year, because readership seems fairly evenly divided among them. But combining raw numbers with my own judgments of quality, I would say that the top choice of the year was a review of a book few of us had ever heard of -- Report from a Parisian Paradise by Joseph Roth -- a Jewish journalist from Austria writing from France for a German newspaper during the years leading up to World War II. 

Other popular posts discussed (with photographic evidence) my Christmas in rural Idaho; my ten years of meetings for drinks with one-time fellow employees; a review of the Ingmar Bergman movie Winter Light; reviews of books I'd read about climbing in the Italian Alps and about British rule in India around 1800; and a review of a first novel by the Hollywood writer who later wrote The Princess Bride.

This winter, like last winter, saw a spate of reviews of Ingmar Bergman films, resulting from a continuing film series offered by the Seattle Art Museum. If SAM continues the series another year -- there remain another 25 or 30 films Bergman still to be shown -- you can expect more of the same next winter.

It's been a good year, and an enjoyable year.  I plan to still be writing a year from now, when I reach my thirteenth anniversary.