The Friday Five!

1. Explain why you started to journal/blog.

I've always been a blogger. They didn't call it that, of course, when I started in 1988 but I've been a daily writer and participant on Usenet and other fora. Spewing my guts out in front of the whole world always seemed like a good idea. Joining LiveJournal seemed like a natural extension of that since someone was kind enough to buy me a membership, and since I'm an Emacs user the interface is so convenient it feels like a natural extension of what I'd always been doing.

2. Do people you interact with day to day or family members know about your journal/blog? Why or why not?

My wife and friends know about my blog, but my parental units do not. Of course, they're not even on the Internet. My dad is a proud luddite with no desire to get "anywhere near that Internet thing"; my Mom, on the other hand, is going to be getting an ISP account soon. Any recommendations? I've been hearing bad juju about Earthlink recently.

3. Do you have a theme for your journal/blog?

"Feed My Ego. Please!"

4. What direction would you like to have your journal/blog go in over the next year?

I would like the blog to record personal victories more than anything else. My progress on the stories on which I'm currently working and mention of any drawings I've completed or lessons I've learned along the way. I'd also like to record the simple joys of being human, being a husband and father, and so on.

Above all else, this is not going to be a whinefest. I'm human; there are days when I'll complain about the injustices heaped upon me, but above all else I know the universe simply isn't fair and isn't likely to be fair any time soon.

5. Pimp five of your favorite journals/blogs.

hitandrun
The Scene: Virginia Postrel
omahas
Arts And Letters Daily
Science and Technology Daily

Where did THAT come from?

Yes, I changed the smilies to silly cats. Live with it.

But damn, it's a fun little day. And you know why? Because Virginia mentioned me in her blog. Not only does she mention me, but conservative columnist Charles Murtaugh followed up with the following, utterly delightful comment:

But here's what stopped me, and suggests that the apocalypse may be closer at hand than even Derb thinks: what the hell is Elf Sternberg doing reading John Derbyshire columns?

The answer, Charles, is simpler than you think: I'm just keeping up with what's going on in the world. You can blame it all on Ron Bailey and Virginia, who by their own comments and links led me into the wonderfully wacky world of people like Derbyshire and the rest of the sometimes sensible, sometimes completely bizarre universe of the folks over an NRO.

I mean, every once in a while Dennis Dutton at Arts & Letters Daily (a daily read which is down today, grr...) would send me over there, but it wasn't until I had started to really read Bailey and company over at Reason that I began to see what they were saying. If you're an Honor Harrington fan, Victor Hanson over at NRO is great reading-- as long as you avoid him when he thinks he's being funny.

Psst. Hey, Charles. Guess what? I'm also a big fan of First Things, that " interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society," which is always, overwhemlingly, happy about the Christian viewpoint and dismissive of anything else. Not because I necessarily agree with what is said there-- when the author starts wandering into metaphysics my baloney detector goes off full force, often side-by-side with the irony meter-- but because the subjects wrestled with there are the ones I enjoy wrestling with in those "creations" you mentioned.

(As an aside, perhaps the most absurd mention I've ever seen of my own name was an appearance on World Net Daily, which is frothing-at-the-mouth, Christian American manifest destiny as you can get without venturing into Christian Reconstructionism. (The frightening thing about Reconstructionism is that they are not kidding.))

I'm paying attention, Charles. John lost it that day. Someone needed to call bullshit on him, and Virginia is the perfect person to do so. Scientists tell us that someday all of the heat and light in the universe will dissipate and it will become uniform, cold, dark and boring. John's editorial is proof that this has already happened inside some neocon skulls.