‘Bred Crumbs

Previously on ’Bred Crumbs … the ol’ sea blog, nigh on five years old, had run aground.

Writing wasn’t happening. What to write about? Work was (is) off limits. Home life is happy and stable — good for me, not so interesting for you. The world’s disasters leave me speechless, and the state of the political nation sets my blood on a constant simmer, but does the web really need any more of that? (And a podcast was out of the question. Too many poor souls would surely be melted by my Vandrossian growl.)

When I had an urge to write something, it was usually about TV, maybe the occasional movie. But writing about entertainment seemed useless, a waste of bandwidth, trivial beyond consideration.

So, I give you the new ’Bred Crumbs, which is all about … entertainment.

It’s true: a nation, a world that diverts itself a little too easily does not, in many senses, need one more clown, one more weakly named domain, focusing on entertainment. Then again, like Yahtzee and booze, the value of entertainment has stood the test of time. Partly because we can filter a maddeningly nonsensical world through it, the better to get our feeble brains around it all.

Posterbation — C’mon, Everybody Does It

We like to pretend that blogs and online journals are there to enrich others, but not really. It’s great when a website does touch others, and it’s worth shooting for, but the first target is ourselves. They’re for us to vent, sort our thoughts, or just flex our creative urges. As it happens, enough of us do it that we enjoy seeing others do it, and a global connection builds from there. But, back at the keyboard, what we write comes from, and for, our own selves.

This self needs to focus, and write about something he has thoughts about, whatever the worth of those thoughts or that subject. One challenge is to eventually find a smaller, better niche. It would be nice to someday come up with something as beautiful and how-did-we-do-without-this as, say, The Comics Curmudgeon. But if that doesn’t happen, if the stats never become engorged with visitors, well, that means never needing ads, and that’s good too.

In lieu of a niche, I’ll have to go with my crotchety viewpoint, as briefly, sketchily expressed on the new About … page. Also, ’Bred Crumbs is trying an experiment in annotation, inspired by an occasional touch on my friend Dewayne’s site, and by the "The Word" segment of The Colbert Report. Watch this space. (Meaning, this space here, on the right.)

With that, the new ’Bred Crumbs is hereby officially launched, five years to the day after the first one was. Like its predecessor, it comes with a small backlog of pre-release content. And some features from the old site have been moved over. Lo and behold, the rankings of state quarters have even been updated. (Yes, the quarter rankings is a stretch of the site’s ostensible focus. That’ll happen.)

A Point for Counterpoint

’Bred Crumbs offers a manly curtsy to Bowler, who smartly snuck in before the grand opening to post the site’s first comment.

Another manly curtsy will be given to the first commenter to agree with me.