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Solo no more — 42 Comments

  1. April fool!

    The Daily Brief, AKA Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief also started as a lone blogger, but the original Stryker took on co-bloggers after barely a year. I think that I am the only one left of the first crew still blogging, at a rather reduced Daily Brief. (Which I keep on, mostly for the 20 years of archives.)

  2. It will simplify record keeping to put Tom on the payroll on the first day of April.

  3. Well, I guess I am a little slow this morning (PDT), because until I read the comments I was thinking; ‘I don’t know that I want to read someone who annotates reasons for not owning cats’. I am a militant (sic) ‘Felineophile’.

  4. Your cat may or may not want the turtle soup. It’s apposite to allow them to investigate and to put a spoonful on a saucer for them to enjoy.

  5. I will reserve judgement until “Tom” actually appears..On the other hand I would look forward to a lengthy post on diagramming sentences as I’ve been having some difficulty getting to sleep lately.

  6. I should have caught it at “Tom,” but fer shure the Apple was the giveaway.

  7. I, for one, look forward to our new Gen Z poster of AI-generated listicles; there’s just not enough of that kind of thing online. I will be so disappointed if this is an April Fool’s joke.

  8. There are no good bagels in New York, either. There are no good bagels. A properly toasted egg bagel with cream cheese can be a satisfactory bagel. It will be more pleasant if you add lox, but if you’ve got lox, you have to share some with the cat.

  9. I was disappointed at first to see you were taking on a co-blogger, but then I was relieved when I saw his writing sample and realized you were kidding. And then I remembered the date.
    I love reading your blog just the way it is. (Ok, I could do without trolls and without personal attacks from commenters.) Thank you for providing this space to share your thoughts and to encourage your commenters to share theirs.

  10. Good one – you have such good commentators here that you don’t need to add anyone.

    But, it would be nice to schedule an open post Sunday. I know a lot of people post on Sunday, but you have to check every prior post for the new stuff.

  11. Sigh….

    And I had thought, maybe, neo had mustered the courage and forethought to take on a non-carbon-based intelligence as her co-blogger.

    Grok 3 would have been great.

    What might have been.

  12. @hxuley: had thought, maybe, neo had mustered the courage and forethought to take on a non-carbon-based intelligence as her co-blogger.

    Grok 3 would have been great.

    What might have been.

    She’s too far behind Althouse. But why don’t you ask Grok to create that blog written by neo + Grok for you to read? You don’t need neo to do it for you.

    That is, if it is the content you want, as opposed to a convert. Grok away, no one is stopping you.

  13. I’ve now got twenty years of this sort of thing under my belt. But my most successful effort by far was this one from fifteen years ago. I say “successful” because it not only fooled a lot of people, but it also got a lot of links and about 50K visitors or so – almost all of whom took it seriously, and many of whom got quite angry at me. It got so out of hand that I had to issue a disclaimer the next day, which you can see at the link as an addendum to the post. Plus, I also posted this the next day; here are the first few paragraphs:

    I feel like I have a bit of a hangover from yesterday, even though I’m not a drinking woman. As I wrote in an addendum I just added to yesterday’s “In defense of Hank Johnson” post, while it’s a wonderful thing to be linked by such blogosphere luminaries as Instapundit and Powerline, it’s also true that the best April Fools jokes are unexplained as such.

    But an awful lot of readers (both new and old) thought I was being serious in my fanciful riff on the Guam video, despite the date being April First, and despite my putting a reference to April Fools Day within the body of that piece in what I assumed would be a big hint. I really didn’t want to put a note in the post itself saying “ALERT: April Fools spoof!” (I thought that would ruin the joke), although such a message appeared many times in the comments section.

    But people don’t always read the comments section, and many just didn’t remember that the date was April 1st. I waited till today to write this explanation, since April Fools Day is now over and now The Truth Can Be Told. So here it is: that post on Johnson was a spoof. Unfortunately, too many people may have already gone away thinking I’m some sort of weirdo who spreads unsourced rumors on a daily basis.

    Those were the days, my friends.

  14. Interesting to review the 2010 comments and see who’s still around.

  15. Whether it’s Tom or Miss Frankenstein, I’d like to see blog posts on diagramming sentences.

    In fact, I’d like to see a specialized AI assistant that draws diagrams side-by-side, as sentences are written, on this blog.

    I especially look forward to the comments.

  16. That is, if it is the content you want, as opposed to a convert. Grok away, no one is stopping you.

    My first pass included a smiley at the end.

    But then I thought, nah, neo readers are savvy enough to detect a joke, especially on April’s Fool.

    Most are.

  17. Cornflour:

    Diagramming sentences was one of my favorite things in grade school. We had a lot of assignments of that nature. For the most part, my teachers were born in the 1800s. In fact, I believe that all my grade school teachers had been born in the 1800s.

  18. @huxley:My first pass included a smiley at the end…. neo readers are savvy enough to detect a joke, especially on April’s Fool.

    Funny, I made the same mistake.

  19. I hadn’t checked that 2010 post, so I thought the dade esque avatar might be real,

  20. You had me going there for a moment!

    I loved diagramming sentences as a child. Nobody gets to do it anymore.

  21. Jeez neo you even tipped them off – artfully of course and I don’t mean Deco – that it (old Guam post) was April Fool’s and they still didn’t get it? Not a feather in thei IQ cap …

  22. I guess that the joy in diagramming sentences was a girl thing.
    As I was in grade school from 1941 to 1947, I got my fill. Too bad I don’t remember any thing–except that there were lines branching off here and there. The trick was to know where to put the branches.

  23. Grammar was easily my least favorite class. Poor Mr. Holechko. Not one student had any respect for the guy.

  24. @ Oldflyer: “The trick was to know where to put the branches.”
    I am finding in my own writing (sans diagramming) that I find it preferable to continue to use full nouns, rather than too many pronouns, to ensure the proper subject is understood in a too long run on sentence.
    And some phrasing word order can seem OK in various options, but then one particular order ends up seeming the best/ better available.
    A lot of what passes for journalism seems to lack any real editorial support, including essays by the journals “editors”.
    Even after 60+ years from the diagramming stage, I hope some of the preferred word structure still seeps through to today.

  25. Barely remembered diagramming from grade school, I think it was well on the way out by then. Then I fell in love with it when I home schooled my kids. But it did remind me a little of the old golfer’s joke; I hate golf, I hate golf, I hate gol… I love golf!

  26. Neo, @3:51— You got me thinking, resulting in my having to take off my shoes to do all the counting of the years, but it seems most of my teachers could have been also born in the 1800s… late 1800s. My father was born in 1887. Long story. I have surmised over the years of visiting here that we are about the same age, but raised on different coasts.

    My teahers were different from any teachers I later had contact with either through my daughters’ schooling, or those I encountered in the course of my work. I’m very glad I got the model years I got.

    Diagramming sentences seemed weird at first, but made sense and I can still do a reasonable job of it today…

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