I enjoy finding blogs (sort of) similar to mine. It’s taken me awhile to find my niche; a peculiar blend of personal experience, spiritual advice, philosophical explorations, poetry, gardening, food and general inspiration. Yesterday someone named Titus-Armand commented on my site, so I checked out his blog, Project Armannd. I was pleasantly surprised to fine a quality blog, one which isn’t prepackaged to a particular audience as so many are these days. He explores a variety of subjects toward living a better life; “about today’s society, issues of today’s world, tips on self-improvement, spiritual advices, inner peace, general psychology, happiness, and some other things…” The topics he chooses are intriguing and unique, like the psychological meaning of certain eye movements. But he doesn’t just report. He interprets. I like that. Welcome Titus-Armand (TA?). I like your style.

What a great blog name: The Green Atheist. I popped over there after a search for posts tagged “humanism” and found a clean, clear and well written blog. The head article today is a bullet list of the Principals of Humanism. Thank goodness humanism is catching on again. The founding fathers of the USA would be proud!

I’ve been puttering along with this blog for months now. I don’t read many other blogs and don’t post very often here. Yesterday I fixed a bug in my comment box code which prevented entering text in IE. Later that day I got over a dozen comments. Elated, I commented back, eager to re-kindle blog relationships. Then I happened to check my traffic, and WOW, found I went from 300 to 3000 hits in one day. Fixing a comment box couldn’t have done that!! I traced the cause to two simultaneous and lucky links by others. One is from a site called BloggerFodder, a simply delicious array of links to hot posts for other bloggers or readers to peruse and use, if desired. The bulk of traffic, however, came from StumbleUpon, where my recent post was added to their spirituality page. I am now fans of both, and I hope you will show MY appreciation for them by visiting them!

Fairy tales – by Anthony Steyning novelist, essayist, playwright, critic.

It’s funny what you find when you let your mind run wild. I just set up an iGoogle home page, which, like IE or Netscape, offers a variety of widgets to enhance the personality and useability of our homepage.

You can set up a theme for the home page, along with a huge variety of little boxes filled with useful or useless toys, links to blogs, news, weather, quotes, art, etc.

You can also set up other pages in tabs. So I set up a news page, a blog page, a literary page and a philosophy page. Each time I set up the page, the ubiquitous “Google” search box inquired if I felt “lucky”, meaning if I would let it set up a series of widgets in that particular category for me. What the heck. I let it. And it came up with some fun sites. One was called “Literary Eruption”, certainly an intriguing title.

Apparently it is linked to the site (at least today) of a Spanish philosopher and novelist named Anthony Steyning.

This fellow seems to have a grip on both the relevance of history and the playful spontenaeity of the Internet. If I were you, I’d check him out. I already did, but since I’m not you, I can’t do it for you, too.

Here’s a quote from his essay, Fairy Tales: A Narrow Escape!.

Antonin Artaud said it allwhen he wrote Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, asking us to stopthis nonsense with our imaginary friend. For if man needed to createmyth to step out beyond himself so he could look down upon himself andheal himself or give himself that extra bit of courage and strength inthe face of mostly cruel and often endless setbacks, then for a timethis was fine. But by beginning to believe his own inventions, imposingthem as if they were the truth, he created the beginning of his owndegradation. Because myth is a series of pretty fibs and an elaboratelie however well meant, however well told, represents the seed ofdestruction that every grand falsehood carries within itself.”

Beautiful1 alerted me that the Urban Monk has started a consciousness and fund raising meme. Check it out at Blog Apocalypse. His meme challenge is to post what advice you’d give as your last “blog word” on the Internet. For every link he gets he contributes a dollar to a charity. And you get to express yourself philosophically! Everyone wins, or whines, depending on their mood.

Were the blogosphere about to blow up, or perhaps spurt its last fizzle, I’d encourage my readers to quickly Google the word library before their “only” source of information dries up. If they manage to catch its meaning before they’re cut off from the outer world, there’s a chance they might also be able to locate one of those antiquated knowledge warehouses in their neighborhood.
Continue reading →