Has it been 5 years?

I need to find myself another hobby because I used to just watch a little TV or read a good book whenever I had a sleepless night. Last night when I found myself wide awake at 2:00 A.M., I switched on the iPad to see what was going on at the local forum. A poster who calls himself, rollingstone, cut and pasted the definition of progressive and liberalism. I wasn't that sleepy, the word “hijacked" and “socialism" stood out, so I went to the free Wikipedia and found his definition in the discussion area. It was a difficult two step process, but I copied the two correct references from Wikipedia and pasted them as comments to my blog. Then like our Persian cat after a full meal, I drifted back to sleep.

I can't really remember the exact date, when I first became interested in our one line forum, but I remember we only had about five bloggers back then. I remember enjoying the Grey-Beard loon and Pilot's blog, Toni Anne was the other blogger I remember. I do remember the first discussions, on was a topic on abortion and maryann was supplying references as fast as her opponents could make a comment. On another thread, Kenneth Schustrereit was holding court about the water issue, and the posters agreed with his point of view. I decided to make my first comment about Halliburton's favorable treatment where Suzy and a poster with many aliases. Roy Mark was already going at it. Just as soon as I mentioned that Halliburton was engaging in war profiteering, Roy Mark, use the rest of the afternoon trying to shoot down my argument. We became bitter online enemies and remained that way until his final banishment. We used to have a confidence booster added to our blog. It was a counter for all time hits but when a new system came in, that feature went away. I believe, I was up to 13,000 hits but Pilot had about 25,000 or more. I don't remember all the details all the details of those two numbers stuck with me.

Joe Patrick Bean was the editor back then. Mr. Bean ran a tight ship by not allowing complete cut and pastes for comments. A small cut and paste was allowed but posters had to credit the reference. Most of the comments were vetted for accuracy and deleted if it didn't meet the test. If that rule was in place today, a lot of comments would never see the light of day. I don't know what holly 1 would do. He continues to hide behind the actual truth when he says "JIM CROW, Slavery, if I remember my history correctly these were supported by southern DEMOCRATS not republicans so before you spout off about how evil conservative republicans are research the history of the democratic party and see how it compares to the "we're for the poor. We want social justice" front it hides behind today."..... Oh yes, the state laws known as "Jim Crow Laws" were enacted and enforced by the southern Christian conservative democrats from 1876-1965, but they later became republicans when the civil rights legislation was passed. That just goes to prove that party labels are interchangeable.

I used to write five blogs a week, consuming about 7 to 8 hours of research and answering my critics. On a scale of 1 to 10, I usually have about 9 in the negative and maybe 1 in the positive. Considering the environment of Victoria, I should be lucky I have that 1. About six months ago, I asked myself “is it really worth it?" I enjoyed writing the blogs for the on line forum, even with the daily confrontations, but it started to become an endless recycle of old arguments. After one of those days, I let out all my frustration in an old BlogSpot blog I started and abandoned a year ago, because I thought no one would notice. The next day, I joined Twitter and a poster reminded me that I was leaving an online trial. Pretty soon the hometown paper found me and became a follower on my Twitter account. Since then, I am proud to say that I have six followers on my blog. I will continue submitting a weekly blog on the Vic Ad, but I'm going to devote more time to this personal blog where we might extend our discussions and just be ourselves.