Wow, time doth fly when you’re having fun. And Professor Jacobson has written a very gracious post over at Legal Insurrection in honor of my fifth anniversary there.

If you’re unfamiliar with Legal Insurrection, it’s a very fine, very popular, and very highly-ranked conservative blog with Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson as founder, lead author, and head organizer of everything and everybody. I’m one of a group of contributing authors there. As you could guess from the blog’s name, the specialty of the blog is current legal issues and news, but it’s hardly limited to that. Two other topics LI has been especially active in reporting on are the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel, and all the anti-free-speech anti-liberty PC extremism on campuses.

One funny thing I’ve noticed sometimes in the comments to my posts at Legal Insurrection is that every so often someone assumes I’m a man and uses male pronouns for me. In Professor Jacobson’s post about me today, I see that he managed to dig up a number of old photos I had forgotten existed on the web. Don’t get excited; none of them show my face, but they certainly show enough of me to indicate that I’m not a man (hmmm, that sounds more risqué than I intended). It brought back memories of the reason I decided to put my photo on this blog in the first place, long long ago: everyone, and I mean everyone, who was coming to my blog back then had assumed I was a man.

It was a curious thing. It made me wonder—do I write like a man, whatever that means? Or did the moniker “neo-neocon” conjure up a masculine vibe? Would “neo-neocona” have been better? Or was it just that most conservative political bloggers (in those days, and probably now as well) were men?

I don’t have a clue what the actual reason was for the assumption that I was a man, but I figured that a photo would help disabuse people of that notion. But, since I was anonymous at the time, I didn’t want a full-face photo, and it was my son who came up with the idea of the apple. It immediately struck me as an appropriate visual reference, plus a solution to a knotty problem.

Now it’s become my trademark. A few years ago I asked people if I should do away with the apple, and the consensus was “no.” Someday I might, however. I also might update the photo, because the one I’ve been using on this blog is old, and I’ve gotten—well, let’s just say more mature—since it was taken.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]