It’s Saturday night as I write this, late, very late, with my Jack Russell Brewing Company clear glass mug filled with White Zinfandel. Sorry for the horrifying conflict but that’s my nature.

At this point I’ve backed up a good seven posts ahead of today with topics I can’t wait to address. Nevertheless, I write them early at the risk of their freshness being spoiled by the next day’s news. With a blog, if you’re like me, you certainly begin to appreciate the pressure created with your miniscule attempts to keep your bit piece of the Blogosphere current, relevant and timely. But, yea, here’s the rub that I expect you encounter along with me:

I actually have a job. I do my best to keep my blog timely. But with few exceptions I realize I’ll likely not be breaking any major news upon my site. I simply do not possess the time, what with the realities of work, Life, my wife, my family, various obligations and the variables that I cannot ever remotely anticipate.

Some bloggers make multiple posts daily. God bless them; perhaps that’s their only job. I myself am challenged to make a single post per day. At this point, I try to post my next day’s entry no later than 7 or 8 pm the previous day. I work on Pacific Daylight Time, because I live high in Fornicalia’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Recognizing this, and accounting for the three-hour difference in coasts, and knowing that some of my readers start their day three hours AHEAD of me, it’s tough to make my posts nationally relevant. It’s like I’m perenially fighting the time differential Power Curve.

And so it is with national news. If I, a little winky blogger, am struggling with the factor of relevancy, then all the various applicable news agencies are stuck (but much worse) in the same predicament.

Do you find yourself challenged to make daily posts?

And further (or perhaps you’ve not considered this), do you vet your bloglinks as I do? I must admit, I am finding myself continuously challenged with the vetting of my Usual Suspects list. Some of the persons I’ve included in The Usual Suspects have turned out to be infrequent posters. Do I eliminate them because they do not adhere to the schedule I’ve held for myself? What do my readers want? Daily or frequent updates? This is indeed a dilemma. A number of blogs on the U.S. list publish infrequently — or sometimes, now, once every couple of months. Can I afford this inactivity? Is it time to eradicate or clear my Usual Suspects list due to low posting? I am thinking so. With my hectic lifestyle I still manage to upload a daily post. Why should my intimate blogroll be any different?

I am thinking, these days: no. After three years of very slow development, a constant and steady pace, consistency, dependability, I am finally into the Marauding Marsupial and Large Mammal borders. I have guided and nurtured and attempted to portray to my readers that I am definitely in this game for the long run. Most creators, statistics show, abandon their blogs after no more than a month’s presence on the internet. And this, I am proud to say, DESPITE the fact that I am a complete HTML idiot; that is to say, I adopted a Blogger template and, with a few exceptions (thanks to Bush and TF!) it remains relatively unchanged to this day.

In terms of blogs, I am a Throwback. I am primeval, a Cretaceous kind of blog.

There are SO many things I’d like to do with my blog. I’d like to have a different header every week — a different photograph. I’d like to make my blog wider, so that it could accommodate more words per line, and photographs could likewise be wider and larger.

I’d like the portions to the left and to the right of the text of my blog be available for various blogrolls, ads, photos, information, etc.

I’d like my blog to, generally, look more professional and to be more fluctuous — that is to say, subject to frequent updates, physical changes, new looks, etc.

But, because I am in fact the ORIGINAL HTML idiot, that will likely not occur this year. I, however, hope to rectify those problems next year. Whereas BlogWorldExpo occurred in Las Vegas this year, I hope to locate its destination next year and actually attend.

I’d like to update the general look of my blog. And I’d like to make available a podcast of the former week’s news on my blog, narrated in stellar form by myself in my native dialect.

Ah yes. And I’d also like to win the lottery.

One thing I’d wish to point out: do all my readers realize that I live on a dial-up account? When various blogs post videos or podcasts or active GIFs, etc., do you realize that I cannot generally see your videos? I cannot generally even access your high-res posts?

Such is life in The High Mountains. On a good day my world = 54.6 kbps.

Bottom line: I am still literally amazed at the amount of readers I have for the primeval blog I portray to the world — I have 3,053 hits on my profile. But if you wonder: “Why is it that this guy’s blog is so visually boring?” — well, at least, now you know.

Maybe next year.

Or not.

I admittedly don’t understand Israel then.

And I don’t understand Israel now.

Why is it that Edud Olmert would say:

In unusually frank comments, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned in an interview published Thursday that “the state of Israel is finished” if a Palestinian state is not created, saying the alternative was a South African-style apartheid struggle.

The explosive reference to apartheid came as Olmert returned from a high profile peace conference in Annapolis, Md., hoping to prepare a skeptical nation for difficult negotiations with the Palestinians.

Let me be blunt: Israel is the only Western civilization extant within hundreds and hundreds of miles of surrounded barbarism. Allowing a so-called “Palestinian” state to exist within any Israeli border guarantees Israeli deaths. Guarantees. Period. Small children. Infants. Young adults. Deaths. Many of them. Guaranteed.

Give up Gaza,

Give up the West Bank.

Give up portions of Jerusalem.

That will not be enough.

It will NEVER be enough.

Here is enough: when EVERY Jew is killed or removed or eliminated from any and all Middle Eastern territories.

Words to Isreal: you are about to sign your death warrant.

Please reconsider this.

Originally, from CBS News:

AP) Sudanese authorities on Tuesday questioned a British teacher who could face charges of insulting religion — a crime punishable by up to 40 lashes — after she allowed her young students to name a teddy bear Muhammad in a class project.

Gillian Gibbons was arrested Sunday after one of her pupils’ parents complained, accusing her of naming the bear after Islam’s prophet and founder. Muhammad is a common name among Muslim men, but giving the prophet’s name to an animal would be seen as insulting by many Muslims.

Gibbons was being questioned on suspicion of abuse of religion, a charge that is punishable by up to six months in prison, a fine or flogging of up to 40 lashes under Sudan’s Islamic law-based legal system.

Several Sudanese newspapers ran a statement Tuesday reportedly from Unity High School in Khartoum where Gibbons taught, saying the administration “offers an official apology to the students and their families and all Muslims for what came from an individual initiative.” It said Gibbons had been “removed from her work at the school.”

Incidentally, one thing you may not have read: in terms of the stuffed plush white Teddy Bear, Gibbons asked the class of mostly seven-year-olds to name it. The children came up with eight names, to include Abdullah, Hassan and Mohammad. Then she explained what it was to make a vote and asked them to choose a name. Twenty out of the 23 children chose the name Muhammad. But they were not responsible, she was. She is not Sudanese.

I’m sure Gibbons, as an individual, is a good person, but religious stupidity and cultural naivete is no excuse. Has she not heard of Theo van Gogh? The Mohammad Cartoons? Does she not open a newspaper? Listen to news on the television? Radio? Internet? Madrid bombings? London tube bombings? Hello? Anyone? Bueller?

For the hordes of overeducated white Western-origin people who think they can enter a country not their own and not be subject to that country’s laws and/or think they’ll be able to change literally hundreds or thousands of years of tradition, I say: tread carefully. And if you tread foolishly, be prepared and expect to be treated as an outsider.

Westerners, and again overeducated, Left-leaning and/or religious-based white Westerners, seem to have this overarching belief that every culture, every mote of land, every occupant of foreign territory can be “reasoned with” or “convinced” of the innate goodness of the Westerners’ “intent” — good though it may be.

That is absolutely not true.

People, get over it. THIS is the face is Islam in 2007. And you individually or collectively WILL NOT CHANGE IT.

The UK actually came a bit uncorked over the affair. That this even stirred the normally sloth-like, complacent and overtolerant Britons bespeaks volumes. “Londonistan” hasn’t acquired its name for nothing.

But this is the least egregious recent event involving the kindly, understanding, tolerant, peace-loving religion called Islam. What of the rape victim in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes:

A judge in Saudi Arabia has ordered a victim of gang rape to receive 200 lashes – more than double her original sentence for being alone with a man who was not a relative – after she appealed against the lenient sentences given to the men who attacked her. He also jailed her for six months.

The 21-year-old woman, who was 19 at the time of the attack and is known by the Saudi media as “the girl from Qatif”, was raped 14 times by a gang of seven. Although her attackers were found guilty and sentenced to between 10 months and five years last year, she was simultaneously sentenced to 90 lashes as punishment for riding in a car with a man who was not a relative.

To any Leftist who may have inadvertently stumbled across my blog: this is Islam in all its glory. This is what you get for embracing multiculturalism. This is what you get for equalizing cultures over this planet, bleating that no one culture is superior to another.

To which I state succinctly in one word: bullshit.

And finally: there is a price to pay for being empirically stupid. Individually, as a nation, as a series of Western cultures.

Islam is a religion that, like the worst, most pervasive of cancers, needs to be irradiated and then incised with the sharpest of knives, then cast into the gutter.

Because it may have been created with only goodness in mind?

No.

This just in: KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) – Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied Friday in a central square and demanded the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam for allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Muhammad.”
In response to the demonstration, teacher Gillian Gibbons was moved from the women’s prison near Khartoum to a secret location for her safety, her lawyer said.