I’ve had a few blogs, now that I am considering the question. I kept a record of the first summer on my twenty foot outrigged wooden sailing boat, the Whimsey, and called it a logbook. Later I kept an account of traveling in South East Asia and then of the vicissitudes of building a cabin in the forest. My most recent blog went for a couple of years and perhaps is worthy of mention. I was lamenting the tendency online of those people whose critical faculties are so weakened by the plethora of information that is the internet that they invest even the thinness of nonsense with credence. Specifically, I was looking at photos of Mars in preparation for a course on how Mars has been storied over the last two centuries, and I found that there were entire groups of people poring over the latest NASA rover photos looking for evidence of life. You may remember the face on Mars controversy that so bruised the public attention that even NASA had to swing back over it for a second look. These armchair investigators has fastened on one picture and called it a woman waiting for a bus on Mars. I read their account, was entranced by the bland naiveté of the comments below the claim, and the idea was born to place a colonist on Mars. I set him up on BlogSpot, gave him a name, and watched as he dutifully wrote his daily, and by times weekly, blog entry from the red planet. Unfortunately, for my experiment, few were drawn to my bald-faced tomfoolery, and no one came to claim that NASA was hiding a colonist while a simple google search could prove them to be lying.
Those blogs are behind me now, and I am back online to say something about what I see in the world around me.
