Last week I celebrated my own anniversary of solar orbits completed, and this week I am celebrating the seventh anniversary of this here blog. SEVEN YEARS. Seems sort of crazy, but there you are. The title refers to the total number of posts that I’ve made over that time. Again, sort of crazy. It has…
In a scene of the film A River Runs Through It young Norman writes an essay for his father. His father reads it, marks it up some, and then says, `Now make it half as long.’ Deflated, Norman leaves but later returns with a new essay. The father reads it, marks it again, and says,…
Okay, I admit it. I look sometimes. That’s right. I will – on occasion — click over to my “site stats” page to see how many views a certain post might have received. Is that really so bad? Do I need to change my name to BlogVanity? I hope not. Anyway, I like to think…
During last year’s BlogFestivus, one of the best bloggers I found was RewindRevise, who lives and writes in New York City. Lindsey’s thoughtful and funny, about to get married, and as I can see it, her largest defect as a person is her continuing support for the New York Football Giants. No one’s perfect. This…
As a scientist, I’ve done lots of experiments. Some of them go on for a long time. But today, it’s time to think back on an experiment that I started six years ago: this blog. I started during a time when a lot of people were getting on the blogging bandwagon. I joined the now-defunct…
According to my WordPress dashboard widget, this is my 1001st post. Yowser. Hooray for me, I suppose. Though really I should be saying hooray for you, too – the folks that stop by, read, leave comments and share yourselves here, because I am hardly Scheherazade. I’d probably still write this blog for myself as a…
As I was scanning my facebook feed this morning, I found an unexpected and sad announcement that a former vox-neighbor and blogger-friend, Paolo Presta, had died. Paolo was an Italian who lived near Toronto and wrote the blog “How We Eat”. He was a vibrant advocate of slow food and healthy eating. Though most of…
If last weekend was my birthday, this past weekend also marked another significant milestone at The Aerie: this blog turned five. Wow, I guess now it’s getting ready to go to blog-kindergarten. I always like to take this time to review the State of the Blog. In general, I think the State of the Blog…
I’ve been feeling in a little bit of a blogging slump recently and there might not be anything to break me out of it than: a) a good meme or b) writing about books. Well, Ross came to the rescue last week with a great combo of the two: 30 Days of Books, in which…
Well, more like “Thanks Ten Thousand” but that sounds sort of weird. One of the nice things about the move to wordpress is being able to get a quick snapshot of your page-stats on the “dashboard”. Yesterday, I noticed that the number of comments here was about to do an odometer “rollover” to 10,000. …
Stevil 