Anyone who knows me probably knows that I’m easily distracted and don’t always finish the things I start. (I’m also a bit wordy, so get ready.)
So it stands to reason that when I started keeping a blog, few people (including myself) thought I’d keep it going for very long.
But here it is, one year later, and Martin’s Musings is still going strong, with posts almost daily.
Happy Blogiversary to me! Continue reading
All week I’ve been counting down the top five most memorable moments of my first year of blogging. Here’s number two.
From September 1: “Better Late Than Never“
How could I do a countdown and not include the one that started it all? I had wanted to keep a blog for a year or so before I started. Actually, I wanted to do a lot of things. But this is the one goal I actually accomplished. And I’d say it’s worked out quite well. I don’t have much more to say about this post, other than its obvious significance in my blogging history. Of course, it begs the question, if my first blog entry is only the second most memorable one, what is first on the list? For that, you’ll have to come back tomorrow. For now, you can read my very first posting here.
Yesterday: number 3
Tuesday: number 4
Monday: number 5
Here at Martin’s Musings, I only like to ponder the really important issues of the day. Here’s a quick question that’s on my mind at this present time: When and why did pita bread become the standard bread to hand out with food at take-out places? At most places, no matter what you order, you get pita with your meal. For example, today I got a chicken parmigiana “dinner” (i.e.: it included pasta) from Taste of the Town, and instead of, say, Italian bread, I got pita. When I used to go to the Kingston Deli, they would give you pita. And various other take-out places give it to you as well. I can understand it if you’re getting a kebob or salad or something you might make into a sandwich. But where is the logical connection between chicken parm and pita? I just don’t get it.
It’s the third day in my weeklong look back at the top five most memorable moments in Martin’s Musings history. So without further ado, number three.
From May 28: “What a Waste“
This posting has the distinction of being the most read of any I’ve written so far. (Yes, I can track such things.) Who knew so many people cared so much about cupcakes — or Johnny Cupcakes, for that matter. Thanks to a link on Universal Hub, people have been coming for months now to read and find out why I called a new Newbury Street store such a let-down and a disappointment. Every week I still get a couple hits on this particular post. I even posted an update a few weeks later. So here you go: you can read the most-read of my postings here.
Yesterday: number 4
Monday: number 5
Continuing my look back at the top five most memorable moments from my first year of blogging, here’s number four.
From September 30: “People Are Stupid“
It’s a classic commuting irony — you leave for work early, but it doesn’t make any difference because of a stupid T mishap. That’s what happened this day. But this posting wasn’t significant simply because of my commute. Rather, it was because the day I posted it, my traffic shot up and I gained a whole new audience, largely thanks to Adam Gaffin and his Universal Hub web site. Adam provided a link to my post and people were clicking on it in droves — or at least what felt like droves considering the minimal audience I was getting up till then. But what was more exciting than that was that Adam included this post in one of his “Blog Log” columns for the Sunday Boston Globe. It was the first time of many that my blog was quoted in the Globe over the course of the year. You can read my posting here.
Yesterday: number 5
How does it feel to have the entire city give up on you and leave you for dead? Just ask the Red Sox. They’ve apparently quit on us, and it’s not just Bostonians who have noticed. (And by the way, the image below is from Boston Dirt Dogs.com.)
Believe it or not, Friday marks my one year anniversary of keeping a blog, so I thought I’d celebrate by counting down the top five most memorable posts so far. Today, number 5 …
From June 11: “At Least I Got an Umbrella“
I wasn’t particularly excited about my 10-year college reunion, but I went anyway because I really had no good reason not to and, well, I needed a new umbrella. Needless to say, the event lived up to my expectations. But it wasn’t until I posted about it on my blog that the real fun began. You can read the post — and the comments, which are the real reason why this was such a memorable entry on the blog — right here.
Winner: The Office, for winning the Emmy for Best Comedy Series, and My Name Is Earl, for winning awards for writing and directing
Loser: The rest of the show. Aside from Conan’s opening, it was a snooze.
Loser: Ari Gold
Winner: Jeremy Piven
Loser: The Red Sox. Still. They should just stop playing. I mean actually stop playing. It was painful last weekend, but now it’s just an agonizingly slow crawl to October.
Winner: Me, because I didn’t watch any of it
Winner: Saturday’s weather
Loser: Sunday’s weather
Winner: My eyes. I had an opthamologist appointment on Saturday and got some new glasses.
Loser: Rims. My new glasses have none.
Loser: Snakes on a Plane. Why isn’t anyone seeing this movie??
Winner: Everyone who did see Snakes on a Plane. I still say I’d pay to see it again.
Winner: The weekend. It was relaxing and good.
Loser: The weekend. Too short, as always.
Number 27: Having to flip through pages and pages and pages and pages of ads before I get to the Table of Contents in a magazine, as I do this month for the new issue of GQ. I get it that ads keep the cost of the magazine down, and I’d rather have the ads up front so they’re not interrupting the features, and yes I do work in the magazine world, and blah blah blah all that stuff, but you know that there’s a problem when the TOC doesn’t appear until page 86 and magazine feels the need to tell you on each of the three pages where you’ll find each successive page of the TOC because they’re practically buried. I say move half the ads to the back of the book. No one really looks at that many ads in a row anyway. At least I don’t.
Number 28: Buying tickets for things. I used to go to a lot of concerts, but for about a year I didn’t go to a single one, partly because it was so damned annoying and frustrating to get tickets. Even if you were a member of a fan club (which I was) and got to take advantage of a presale (which I did), the tickets available in that presale weren’t always the better ones. And on the public onsale date, even if you kept hitting “refresh” on your web browser on the Ticketmaster web site, at the minute the tickets went on sale, somehow they were either already nearly sold out or you couldn’t buy very good seats. And don’t get me started on buying on the phone. I didn’t even try to buy Red Sox tickets this year. So it made me more frustrated to see that my two recent experiences with Ticketmaster — buying tickets for Jamie Cullum and The Killers — weren’t any more pleasant. Thankfully, I got tickets to both events. But I didn’t enjoy it.
Number 29: The people who work in my building on the lower floor and can’t walk down one flight of stairs to get there. We only have one elevator working, and it’s a slow-moving one. There’s one floor below the ground floor, and it’s easily accessible, and it’s beyond me why the people who work there wait and wait for the elevator to descend when they could more easily just take the stairs. While I’m on the building subject, I also hate the people who go out for a smoke and stand right in front of the door so I have to walk through their smoke to get anywhere. Yuck.
(Alright, fine. So the list is a lot longer at this point than 29. Didn’t want you to think I was that irritable. These are just the things that are annoying me today, right now.)
Best news story I heard today:
Rattlers Freed in Snakes on a Plane Theater Prank
PHOENIX (Reuters) — Life imitating art is all very well. Unless, that is, it’s a movie about deadly snakes on the rampage.
Movie chain AMC Entertainment Inc. said pranksters at one of its Phoenix theaters released two live diamondback rattlesnakes during a showing of the film Snakes on a Plane last Friday. No one was injured…. (read the rest here)
A local video report on the story is here.
This is perhaps the only thing that could have made the movie more enjoyable for me. I love this story!
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