160430 A note on the "Lost Shakespeare Plays"

Sorry about getting behind and squeezing everything into the last day. Still, 27 Shakespeare jokes for free is more than I managed all last year. If you want to read them in order from the beginning, they start here:

Lost Shakespeare Begins

With the election looming, I may do a spate of political humor, but for now, I'm going to assess my other dormant blogs. If you know an English major, forward this or the above link to them. It might make a boring graduation ceremony pass a little easier.

160423 No joke

According to today's customized Google logo, this day is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. His date of birth wasn't recorded, although his baptism was roughly at this time of year as well. Tomorrow, the Lost Shakespeare titles continue.

110530- 150th post

.....It's been fun getting back to joking around for the past two weeks, but between the heat, other commitments and the possibility of traveling this month I'm going to have to go on hiatus again. Sorry, but the quality would definitely suffer if I tried to do this while distracted and under duress. While I'm busy I'll try to jot down jokes as they occur and maybe later this year (or at this time next year) I can provide a few more weeks of daily posts. Frankly, after a year I'd have to go back and reread the first ones. For now, this is a nice round number to end with.

110522- Thanks and You're Welcome

.....Last week I began posting again exactly a year to the date after I had stopped. If you've read the new posts you may have noticed that they contain contemporary topics and news stories. That was on purpose, so that it will be obvious that they weren't merely leftovers or that they were written over the course of months. I actually had no plans to return to this blog, even late last year when I was exploring the logistics and ethics of possibly monetizing my other blogs. I was comparing their page view statistics to those for this blog, which I hadn't bothered check since I discontinued posting. There were two page views a week attributed to Japan, which I assumed were either mistakes or someone learning English looking for brief statements to translate as exercises. I expected that a blog that had no registered followers and had been inactive for months would provide a baseline reference for minimal activity. Occasional follow-ups showed the views settle into a regular pattern of one view every two days. I put off making a decision on monetizing and forgot about the stats for awhile.

.....About two months ago a tsunami hitting Japan caused shocked reactions in the rest of the world as we all watched massive amounts of water alter topography as easily as it did human lives. Many people were still in the planning stages of offering aid when the real bad news came in: the many buildings effected by the flooding included nuclear power plants and their contingency plans didn't cover impacts of that unprecedented magnitude. Boiling, radioactive water was pouring out of the plants and power outages were widespread and long lasting. I felt horrible at being helpless to do anything about it and wondered how much worse it would feel if I knew anyone in Japan, or had any connection to them.

.....And then I remembered that I did have one, tenuous connection.

.....When I sat down to work on my other blogs and signed in, before starting as planned I first checked the stats for this blog and there they were: two page views this week. I checked the audience: both were from Japan. I started checking every other day and the views continued for a few weeks, every other day and from nowhere else on Earth. Obviously whoever that blip represented was in the side of the country that didn't bear the brunt of the physical impact of the tsunami, but considering the scope and scale of the damage, I can't imagine that anyone in Japan didn't experience an adverse repercussion in some aspect of their lives. Yet during the worst of it they didn't break their routine of checking this blog. I started feeling guilty that I hadn't at least provided them some new material. Then after a few weeks, they stopped. Sometime later, they started up again, this time in the U.S. every forty-two hours, which led me to suspect it was something automated (try arranging a sleep schedule that would allow you to check a blog manually every forty-two hours and you'll see what I mean). After a recent health problem (behind me, I hope) I set out to return my other blogs to regular schedules. Since I was online every day again it seemed fitting to mark last week's "anniversary" with something-- anything-- new. It actually garnered a slight reaction. I wish I had the time/energy/creativity to return to daily jokes, but I only had one badly neglected blog when I started this and now I have three besides this. I can't maintain a daily schedule, but rather than abandon it completely I'm going to try to post weekly. If you're human, check in once a week, starting after next Sunday.

100517- Notice of inactivity

.....As much as I hate walking away from a task, this joke-a-day blog will have to be temporarily suspended so that (a) I can return to my original blog, the analysis of the comic book Doom Patrol, found under the name "LGC: Doom Patrol", also posted as pblfsda... and (b) the launch of a new blog-a-day, "So, What Kind Of Music Do You Listen To?". This new blog is, for the most part, written. Each day will be a description of a track on a sprawling mid-1990's mix tape project. Anyone feeling exceptionally ambitious would be able to track down the individual component parts and reconstruct the tapes,or customize them to their tastes.

.....Coming up with a joke every day was the effective disciplinary exercise I had hoped it would be. Even though I did not make it to the end of the year, 136 jokes in a row is nothing to sneeze at. More importantly, for the first two months at least, it got the Doom Patrol blog back on schedule. And when I needed to delay postings recently in anticipation of additional original materials becoming available, there were the jokes to keep readers coming back (maybe). Now that many (but not all) of those materials are here, the LGC: Doom Patrol blog will return to posting around June 1st. The music blog will begin May 25th. This blog may in fact continue in October, assuming that the music blog is completed on schedule (although November would be a safer bet). In the best case scenario, of course, I would be working full-time again and doing only the Doom Patrol blog, if anything.

.....If you're just stumbling across this blog long after it's become dormant, you're not necessarily wasting your time here. There's bound to be something suitable for public speaking, breaking the ice, etc. Some of it may feel familiar, some of it may feel bizarre, some of it sophomoric, some of it provocative. Remember, it's a strange and dangerous world out there... and you're welcome.