By the way, if you're a new visitor to Number 2 Pencil - welcome, and thanks for visiting. It seems that as soon as I went away last week, my hit counter went haywire. If Bravenet is to be believed, my daily hits last week were, on average, quadruple the normal number of hits I recieve. Of course, I wasn't checking my hit counter last week, and Bravenet doesn't allow me to see now where those hits were coming from then. This exact same thing happened last year, when I was featured on the FoxNews website as the "Blog of the Week" the very same week that I was at yet another foreign resort with limited internet access, and thus was late in answering many of the supportive emails that I received. My timing is impeccably bad, it seems.
I think, though, that a lot of these recent visitors might have found me through the Dissident Frogman, who's off on vacation himself. Before he left, he designed a new banner that cycles through various kudos he's received on other sites, and he saw fit to highlight a description of him that I posted on the previous incarnation of this blog:
I'm going to pack my bags and settle a few things here and there before I leave.
There are several quotes from my esteemed blogging colleagues in the ticker on top of the dissident frogman's home page.
I don't know why, but one of them that I've always considered as well thought suddenly comes back to my mind:
« Equal parts profane satire and blunt seriousness, this renegade Frenchman (...)
Kimberly Swygert, Number 2 Pencil. »
Pertinent depiction isn't it?
Half profane satire, half blunt seriousness.
Maybe it's time to drop one of them.
Or maybe both.
Bye now.
Wow. I'm tremendously flattered that the Frogman, whom I greatly admire, noticed that I linked to him at some point in the past, and that he chose my description as one that is pertinent at this time (and perhaps has provoked some sort of reassessment of himself). I don't think he needs to change one whit, of course, and I'm just as impressed with the photos that he's taken so far during his trip to London as I always am with his political commentary and his social conscience. He's one of the most phenomenal bloggers around, from both intellectual and artistic viewpoints, and if you haven't viewed the clip he designed about the WMD controversy in Iraq, you should do so. His twin slogans of "Time to Take Sides" and "Art vs. Europression" describe his determination and his creativity perfectly.
Posted by kswygert at July 13, 2003 10:55 PM