SmartRemarks

As I write this, the U.S. stock market has plunged downward for seven straight days. Just two days after dropping below 10,000 for the first time in four years, the Dow dropped below 9,000 for the first time in five years. That’s a 39% slide from its historic high of 14,000, set only a year ago… and there’s no clear bottom in sight.

Meanwhile, the bailout plan passed by Congress is so far failing to have any calming effect whatsoever, as the solvency crisis spreads around the world. Paulson is now talking about immediate capital injections, as I wrote earlier that most economists had been advising all along, and commentators are grateful that Congress (quietly) slipped authorization for that into the bill.

In a nutshell, people are in a panic. Read the rest of this entry »

More than two years ago now, a good friend of mine observed that I seemed to have a lot to say about a lot of topics (or as some other acquaintances might put it, I’m hard to shut up), and that perhaps I ought to start a blog to express myself. I thought this was a terrific idea, and decided I’d get to it right away. I spent a fair chunk of time reading up on the software options (settled on WordPress as clearly the best), blogging technique, and so forth. (And I tried to get the actual domain “SmartRemarks.com” — but despite the fact that the owner has it up on an auction site and isn’t using it for anything, his asking price was a couple orders of magnitude higher than the reasonable offer I made him. Go figure.)

That was, as noted, more than two years ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, not only in the areas I’m inclined to write about but in my own life (I’ve started and ended an entire job, for instance). Blogs weren’t exactly novel even in 2006, but at this stage of the game, out of the 6.7 billion people on earth, I suspect I’m about number 6.8 billion to start a blog.

So be it. I’m here now, and this is where I’ll say what I have to say.

It’ll be eclectic… I’ve always specialized in being a generalist. People who blog about blogging (there are more than you’d think!) insist that if you’re “serious” about it, if you want to “monetize” your blog, you need to find a single narrow niche or gimmick and market the hell out of it. I’m not going to do that, because I suspect it would drain all the fun out of it as well. My posts will probably fall into quite a few disparate categories. Let the chips fall where they may.

Prominent among those categories, I’m sure, will be two particular enthusiasms: American politics, and comic books. I think we’ll all be better off if I don’t try too hard to connect those two. If I actually pick up any kind of a following here, then, it’ll probably involve groups of people who are interested in one particular category of posts and don’t give two hoots about most of the rest. (But hey, you never know. Maybe I can inspire some crossover.)

I’ll just have to rely on finding interesting things to say.