Well Read

 I only bring this up because it gives me that warm smug feeling way down inside. This blog is now more than sixteen years old. In that time, it has been viewed almost half a million times. Not all at once, mind you. I average about sixty views a day. Some folks come here by Twitter. Others by Facebook. Still more because I send them a daily email reminding them that I may have written something clever for them to read. And, I would like to believe, there are those readers who drop by just because they needed that three to four minute diversion on their way to do something more important. 

Which is just fine with me, because no one has yet to insist that I stop. I've been carrying on this way for more than a decade and a half, pleased with the occasional thumbs up or "attaboy" and not stressing too awfully much about the intermittent disagreements I have sparked. It's my soapbox. This is not a discussion group. I have something that Donald "The J is for Jerrymandering" Trump does not: a home on Al Gore's Internet. 

After being kicked out of some of the best spots in cyberspace, he landed in this particular section of town called The Blogosphere. He quickly found that this form requires more than two hundred eighty characters. After a few months of living here in the multi-paragraph world of mildly extended commentary, he discovered that "no one" was listening. At its peak, his little corner of this sandbox attracted one hundred fifty thousand views. That would amount to the tiniest fraction of what he was able to pull in on Twitter and Facebook. 

Facebook just announced that the ban imposed on DonnyJay will stay in place for two years, and Twitter hasn't bothered to look back once they kicked him off back in January. For the record, nobody asked me how I felt about having to share my bandwidth with a guy who was impeached. Twice. Not that I'm guessing there is a lot of crossover in our demographics. I tend to pull in the four or five dozen folks who think a lot like me, and don't mind the occasional reference to Animal House. And though I refer to this blog as "short attention span theater," I do believe that followers of the ex-gameshow host/disgraced former "president" might be put off by the idea of having to read more than two hundred eighty characters. or reading at all, for that matter. 

Which is probably why I hear that the Big Orange Beast is headed back out on the road, taking his freak show to the masses who prefer their baseball caps like their politics: bright red. And yes, it will be hard not to comment on that ugly scene here, but I'll try to remember my place: Right here. Where I have been for one hundred seventy nine months longer than that other guy. 

Feeling smug.