August 15, 2007.  After starting an offsite blog at Blogspot (it's still there – click this link) and receiving a startling display of absolutely no interest, I've decided to reinstate the Mudgelog on my site.  Fortunately, all the previous entries are here because I never actually deleted it; I just hid it from public view.

My reason for going offsite to Blogspot was that its format allows comments.  I've had none (in more than a week) until today when one of the participants here on The Grammar Curmudgeon said that I would be better off running the Mudgelog here, even if it doesn't permit comments (and nobody is commenting at Blogspot anyway).  He also said that it's easier to read here than on Blogspot / Blogger.  Indeed, it's easier for me to make and edit entries here, if only because I'm more familiar with the format.

What the hell – I can have it both ways.  I've decided that the best idea is to keep up this onsite blog and use the offsite blog chiefly to promote The Grammar Curmudgeon.

I also did some research at Blogspot by perusing other blogs there.  I noticed that:  (1)  Most of the blogs garner very few comments anyway, and the process of posting comments on some of them is quite cumbersome; (2) Many of the blogs there are inactive and haven't had entries in years (some as long ago as 2004).  In that case, what's the point?

My understanding is that Blogger, which became Blogspot, which was eventially purchased by Google, is one of the oldest blog hosts on the Internet – dating back to the days before everyone knew what a "blog" was, before the word (an abbreviation for weblog) became commonplace (it isn't even in the 2000 edition of The American Heritage Dictionary, and neither is weblog).  I thought that this might mean that it is a popular venue.  However, it appears to be mostly a place where people talk to themselves.

That (talking to oneself) may be what this Mudgelog is.  Since response or comment requires going to the Message Board (and that's a bother), I have no way of knowing whether anything here gets read.  That hasn't stopped me from writing, however, so why should it now?  Very few of my essays and articles evoke any response – even when I go out of my way to be outrageous.  In fact, though my photos on Webshots (where I can view statistics) get thousands of views, and even a few downloads, I rarwly get any comments.  Come to think of it, I rarely react to what I read by sending a message to the author, and I download photos by the hundreds from Webshots without saying a word to the photographer.  I guess, respecting some things, we're all more "takers" than "givers."

Anyway, if you do want this Mudgelog to continue here, maybe you ought to think about giving me some feedback once in a while.  I may begin to doubt my sanity even more than I already do if I continue "talking" with no evidence that anybody is listening.

August 15, 2007 (#2).   We're getting ready to redo our family room – or, to be more precise, to have it redone for us, since I am an utter klutz at manual labor.  I have finally convinced my wife that we need a flat-screen, high-definition TV, but before we put it in, we feel that we should have the room painted and carpeted.

That means getting all the "small stuff" out of the way before the workers come.  This would not be too difficult if the small stuff did not consist of literally thousands of VCR tapes that I recorded before DVDs appeared.  We've had satellite TV for a very long time, and, when I realized that I could tape movies free (not counting, of course, the cost of the tape), I got carried away.  I did it for years, setting the timer on the VCR and sometimes recording two or three movies a day.

Of course, I have watched only a fraction of these tapes.  Well, I did always fast-forward through them to make sure that the recording was okay before I labeled and catalogued the tape.  In fact, I have probably watched more movies in fast-forward with no sound than any living human being.

To conserve tape, I began by recording at the slowest speed so that I could get three two-hour movies on a VHS tape.  The picture quality was poor, though – even by pre-digital standards – and I soon shifted to the faster speed, which yielded picture quality on a par with the original.  That meant more tapes – close to 1,500 of them (and therefore about 1,500 movies).  At one point, I estimated that I had enough movies to last me roughly the rest of my life expectancy if I watched two to three movies a day.  Even then, I didn't have the time to really watch what I had recorded because I was too busy fast-forwarding through the latest acquisitions.

This madness stopped when DVDs came around (just as my accumulation of "free" music on audiotape stopped – shortly after tape number 2,000) when compact discs appeared.  The quality was much better on DVD, and there was not at the outset any way to record DVDs (or CDs, for that matter).  Still, I kept all the VHS tapes, just as I've kept all the audiotapes, even though I almost never watch or lisyen to tape anymore.

That brings me back to cleaning out the family room.  Should we keep thousands of VHS tapes?  After all, the quality (at least on those recorded at the slower speed) is reasonably good, and now there are machines that permit dubbing tape to DVD.  (Indeed, I have dubbed a few audiotapes to CD with good results, though it's a time-consuming process.)  Of course, we've replaced some of the better movies already with store-bought DVD versions.

We decided to compromise.  All of the tapes recorded at the faster (low quality) speed are going in the trash (though we're still checking for any that might be impossible to replace in any format).  The thousand and some better-quality tapes will be packed away, pending dubbing to DVD, which will probably never happen because I won't live long enough to do it.  We'll probably never watch them, much less dub them.  The compromise consists of transforming utter insanity to a milder form of madness.

In a couple of months, the room will be renovated and will look more like a theater than a warehouse.  We'll be watching DVDs rented from Netflix on our new flat-screen, high-def TV, while the old videotapes sit neglected in boxes stashed away somewhere.  Yet, even though I know that this will happen, I feel uneasy about throwing out even the low-quality tapes that I haven't watched and realize I never will watch.  After all, I spent $2 apiece for those tapes, and I devoted a lot of time to recording, cataloguing, and fast-forwarding through them.  How can they be "trash"?

Being a pack rat (I use the euphemism "collector") is difficult, but it has its benefits:  as long as there is more "stuff" to be collected, one has good reason to want to live forever.

August 16, 2007.  The stock market has been plunging lately, and almost everyone seems surprised.  What surprises me most is that they're surprised.  Back in the '90s, investors sank millions or billions of dollars into "dotcom" startups that had few assets, no profits, and only a dream of an idea.  The odds were at least 25 to 1 against the survival, let alone success, of these endeavors.  Any fool could see that such investments were high-risk.  The bubble burst as large nimbers of these companies went belly-up.  Then, supposedly intelligent people – investors, brokers, some economists and bankers, consultants, financial advisers, and the entrepreneurs themselves – exclaimed, "How could that have happened?"

Despite that lesson, we've now had a new surprise that shouldn't have been a surprise at all.  The real estate business was flourishing extravagantly.  Home construction was thriving as people bought new houses.  Encouraged by the demand, home owners were taking out home equity loans, and the new "easy" cash was fueling the economy.  Banks were lending money to people at subprime rates, with little regard for the probability that, if the economy experienced evem a tremor, the borrowers would default on these loans.  Like the dotcom bubble, the housing bubble was bound to burst.  It has.  Along with it, easy credit had disappeared; some of the lenders (who hoped to reap huge profits from the demand for mortgage money and easy cash) are themselves in trouble.  Supposedly inelligent people are crying, "I didn't see that coming.  How could that have happened?"

This is scary.  People who are professionals at fiscal management have demonstrated once again that they are clueless – or that greed has clouded their common sense.  They apparently learned nothing from their experience less than a decade ago.  The supposedly less knowlegeable herd has followed these bumbling leaders once more, right toward the fiscal precipice.  It's enough to make normal people feel that the safest place for their money is a shoe box under the bed.  The odds that the money will go up in flames in a house fire are less formidable than the odds that it will disappear in the hands of the so-called investment experts.