This is the random 2024 post. I randomly pick the blog post date for each month, and then, within that post, randomly select a sentence. I’m sure I purloined the idea from near twin Gordon.
A serious blogger like Kelly would review his output and highlight his favorite and/or best work from last year. This is a great idea, but it would involve actual labor.
January: “Even though it’s an online bank, there are plenty of ways to access your money by visiting any of the over 40,000+ ATMs in the Allpoint network.” At the end of December, I got a Visa credit card from Varo in the mail. It was sent to our home but addressed to someone we never heard of, and we’ve been here for over two decades. I later suspected that when I lost my wallet in the autumn of 2023, the person who found it (but did not return it) ordered a Varo card to be sent to my address and figured they could remove it from our mailbox. Ha! Our mailbox has a lock.
February: “Still, I didn’t bother voting for her because 1) she’ll get in without my help, and 2) she has a five-octave voice, which she often uses unnecessarily to the music’s detriment.” Why I didn’t vote for Mariah Carey for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the fan ballot.
March: “Bob Marley: One Love, Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green.” It was the last film I saw at the Spectrum 8 Theatre before it closed. Fortunately, it reopened a few months later under different management.
April: “The Average Body Temperature Is Not 98.6 Degrees” Linkage.
Politics
May: “Jay Bernhardt, the newly installed president at Emerson College, got an earful about the arrest of more than 100 protesters at the Massachusetts campus.” About the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
June: “[Lauren] Blackman and [Nicholas] Ward met in a production of a Broadway musical called Lempicka, which had previously played in Williamstown, MA, where it went through several revisions, and La Jolla, CA.” A concert that was part of the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s American Music Festival.
July: “It [Project 2025] claims that “centralized government ‘subverts’ families by working to ‘replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,’ utilizing the biblical language of natural versus the unnatural.” I mentioned Project 2025 at least a half dozen times.
August: “’The authors’ thesis is that the business world has a well-worn playbook that they roll out whenever anything that might cause industry to behave even slightly less destructively is proposed.'” Linkage about Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America.
How am I?
September: “My wife has some dry eye issues, so she’s become an expert at eye drops.” My end-of-summer health report.
October: “One in three tree species at risk of extinction: report.” A linkage post.
November: “Merry Christmas Darling – Carpenters (1970) – Only vaguely familiar.” This is the first of my holiday music posts.
December: “The play Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare, which I think I had to read in college freshman English class, was a bloody piece that frankly bored me.” A Sunday Stealing about books.
So it’s reasonably representative. There’s Sunday Stealing, which I completed over 40 times during the year. Ah, three musical posts, which I did at least once a week. I hit three linkage posts, which I do two dozen times a year. Also, I mentioned politics, movies, and a day in the life.
The picture of my kid was also randomly selected from the pictures I used in 2024.
Here’s a day in the life, in this case, Wednesday, June 7, 2023. Among other things, it was the second day of bad air.