Is this thing on?

Hello, out there in Internet land! After a long absence I have returned! 

Don't all go crazy, now!

No? Not even a little crazy?

Fine, be that way. 

Anyway, yes, due mostly to work obligations, I have been unable to post for some time. I have come somewhat out from under the pile of said obligations, but my main reason for priortizing my online presence is this: 

Some of you may know that the fine folks at Raconteur Press have published my YA novel I've Got This, and it was put to me that my readers (who are all tasteful and good looking) might want to find a way to contact me. So here I am. Come at me, bro! 

The book is available from the typical sources (like Amazon, Books-a-Million, maybe the dumpster at Publishers Weekly) and my contact email remains the same:  frederick_key@yahoo.com. Someone has to give Yahoo something to do, after all. 

I hope to post regularly, but have not figured out a schedule yet. For those just peeking in for the first time, the general topics are books, comics, food, work, home ownership, what my dog did, the perils of modern living, and everything else. The last file, oddly, is the smallest. Maybe I should get out more. 

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you again soon!

-Fred

What has two thumbs and is loopy?

This guy! 

I just want to thank everyone again for your kindness, and a special shout-out to GregW for sharing his story and the link to Andrew Klavan's testament. For those who don't know, Klavan is a prolific writer and podcaster, son of New York radio host Gene Klavan, and fervent Christian and conservative. Funny guy, too. The video may be seen here: 

And let me just add that it had to have taken a minor miracle for Gary Carter to beat out a throw to first.

People wonder why there's so much insanity among the kiddos today, especially of the horrible type that leads to mass murder. Often this wave of killings, especially school shootings, is traced back to the Columbine massacre in 1999, and I think it's not a coincidence that by that year the Internet was up and running everywhere. Many of us from the pre-Net era have seen the unusual adverse effect of falling into the sea of digital humanity -- that it reveals our individual insignificance by the sheer number of human beings out there. 

Few things in real life can do that. Maybe if you come from a small town and move to a big city. If you just visit a big city, you have the specialness within the traveler to keep you apart from the masses -- I'm not part of that crowd; I'm me! But when you live there, it slowly sinks in that very few people know you and even fewer care. On the Internet, it's that times eight billion. Acts of extreme evil are one way, and the worst way, to fight against that feeling. It's a rare but powerful temptation, and we see the awful results.  

On the other hand, the Internet's saving grace is that it allows rare connections through space that would be impossible otherwise. Even this has its downside with people who work together for sinister purposes. But an online community that brings real camaraderie among people who would never ordinarily meet is very special indeed. I know most of you through the Great Lileks's blog, and it is the greatest chatroom (there's a bewhiskered term!) of which I know. 

So what am I doing now? Well, thanks for asking! I am taking your advice and putting my writing back up on Amazon, and I am not doing away with the blog. I can't commit to posting every day--thus the title change--but I certainly plan to do so most days. If the black dog bites again, I promise not to vanish over it.

I hope to see you around here, or elsewhere, and thank you for being my friends. God bless you and keep you, and keep supplying you with dad jokes and whatnot to bring your day sunshine. 

Robo Fred.

After I reported on the rise of artificial intelligence used by students to write papers and the reaction by the New York City Board of Ed last month, the problem may have temporarily solved itself. So many people are trying to use Open AI's AI writer that the servers are completely tied up. I get results! 

However, I wanted to get through myself. I wanted to see if I could retire from this exhausting work of blogging every day to have a robot write my blog for me. So I waited my turn to use ChatGPT and asked it to write a blog entry in my style. Herewith the results:

Good morning. This is Fred and I have more updates for you. The weather is all right. The dog is being very crazy today. I am not sure what the problem is. I wouldn't mind so much but the book I am editing is a real crowd-loser. It's called Eat Pond Scum, Live Forever!. I get sick looking at it. It's totally put me off my twinkies. If I have to eat pond scum to live forever, I'm A-OK with dying.

I wanted to buy a cartoon to run in this space with some Fredcoin, which is the world's greatest cryptocurrency, but it turns out the exchange rate is a little lower than I had expected. I needed an electron microscope to see how many Fredcoin fit in a regular dollar. Some people would say only a moron wouldn't find this depressing, but I don't! 

Meanwhile, I am recommending books, which you can find elsewhere, especially the ones I have written. Check them out! Or I will make more bad jokes. Or make you watch the Beloved Mets.

Come back tomorrow -- could be memes, could be cake. It could be memecake. It may be more complaints about the dog. Probably that.

💻💻💻💻

Okay, I was just joshing. After waiting to use ChatGPT for a couple of days, I did what I hope all the students are doing, and just wrote my own piece. 

However, to keep you from being disappointed by lack of AI blogging, I asked one of the AI image generators, Fotor, for a picture of Fred going off to war on a horse, wielding a pen. I didn't say whether it was I or the horse who would be holding the pen. This is what I got:

Doesn't look like me at all. Neither does the guy, for that matter. At least the horse doesn't have a teeny little face.

MFP and we!

Stacy McCain, the invaluable blogger known as the Other McCain, called upon Thursday, January 27, 2022, to be "Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day," and I said I would. 

Here's some crazy now!

In the unlikely event that you see this post and not the one at McCain's much more popular blog, I thought we ought to go through the basics for my own benefit as well as everyone else's. 

What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? 

MFP is a supposed mental illness that is said to affect crowds--thus the mass part. Dr. Robert Malone says this is a kind of induced psychosis caused in the population by a lack of social cohesion on one side and a large fear stimulus on the other: 

The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible "object of anxiety" and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.

As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view.  Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong. 

 

Both of these conditions were present at the outbreak of the Chinese Death Virus known as COVID-19, so if the theory is correct, it was an ideal time for mass formation psychosis to take hold.

Is MFP Real?

Well, it isn't recognized by the American Psychological Association, which got its collective knickers in a twist when Dr. Malone described it on Joe Rogan's show and listeners attacked a psychologist who disputed (or as they like to say, "fact-checked") a claim that "millions of Americans have been 'hypnotized' into accepting mainstream messages about COVID-19, including the importance of vaccination, through 'mass formation psychosis.'" It certainly seems like some of the attackers were very personal and rude, and even threatening, and I will not excuse that. Anyway, that's not the question; the question is, is there such a thing as Mass Formation Psychosis?

I have reason to think so. There have been so many crazy stories in the past year on all sides, like the mom who locked her kid in the trunk of the car when he tested positive for COVID-19. Who does that?

On a personal note, I know a perfectly respectable woman in the healthcare industry who in 2020 thought Trump was going to send troops into the streets to enforce quarantine, but now is cutting off friends who won't toe the line on masking in all times and places. She cut me off cold, and I was being nice about it. 

So yeah, I think a lot of people have gone nuts over this virus, but the insanity was probably bubbling right under the surface anyway.  Which sounds like "lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression" to me.

Why Is This Being Treated as a Conspiracy Theory?

Why shouldn't it? 

I know some very nice and intelligent people who are suspicious of the vaccines for COVID, but some people are close to the microchip-implanting theory level, that Bill Gates has personally put a microchip in each vaccine. I gotta say, if so, it is really small, because that was the thinnest needle I ever got stuck with. 

The problem, as I see it:

1) Despite the angry APA objections (in part, I think, to the idea of "mass hypnosis," which sounds like a supervillain plot), the MFP conforms with previous theories of mass delusion. Long before Eric Hoffer wrote True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Charles Mackay wrote Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds (1841). And Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism trod this ground mightily, although a lot of leftists hate its conflation of Communism and Fascism despite both being a form of totalitarianism (Mussolini's famous dictum of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” applies to both). So what's the problem with writing about it? Do psychologists resent taking sociology and philosophy seriously?

2) Yes, maybe these days, because it goes against the desired zeitgeist. The problem is, there really have been conspiracies around, which no one wants to acknowledge even as the truth comes out. The Russia collusion that should have been a massive political scandal on the perpetrators, the strange billionaire who funds district attorneys who will not uphold the law, the complicity of our National Institutes of Health in the origin of the Chinese Death Virus and the refusal to stop funding said research in 2020 despite a presidential order, the code of silence and outright lies over Hunter Biden's laptop and exposed shenanigans prior to the 2020 election, the "fortification" of the election, the failure to report the weakness of the vaccines and even their risks (which was not the media's position in 1976 when there was mass vaccination but a Republican president), the criminal attacks on parents by school boards, the failure of lockdowns to stop anything but prosperity, the elite class's refusal to abide by the rules it wishes to impose on the rest of us for everything from policing and disease spread to global warming, the non-punishment of most upper echelon types for any malfeasance, the support by the same for rioters while our cities burned, and on and on.   

3) Which leads us to the fact the elites in our society have been failing us for a long time, and COVID exposed them not only as failures, not only as hypocrites, but also as thieves, cowards, and bastards, who do not care about the poor and actively hate the middle class that feeds them.

My advice to those in charge of stuff: If you want the people to stop believing in conspiracies, stop conspiring. As Jacques Abbadie once wrote, "One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages." What do you expect us to think when you've been so very bad?

A pause.

I'm afraid circumstances are requiring me to announce a hiatus in this blog.

No, not that kind!

Sadly, it's not a vacation, nor a big book tour (ha!). I just have a lot that must get done this next week and no time in which to do it. I hope to be back next Saturday, but plan to post again if the situation worsens. 

Please enjoy the rest of your April!

Sunday sloth.

Please excuse the lack of a decent post today. We had a late night with our dinner guests -- well, late for me and the dogs, who normally pack it in at 10 p.m. -- and I had no chance to prepare.

I admire people who always have company about the house, people who keep the place looking just good enough that no one ever thinks it's a dump. They always have the fixings on hand to whip up a lasagna or shrimp curry or Mulligan stew to feed fifty at a moment's notice.

I am not like that. I throw a dinner party for a handful of people I think I deserve a medal. You'd think I'd been hosting an Indian wedding for two weeks.

What I'm saying is: Don't come over.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that our normal state here is chaotic enough, but we like to pull it together for guests. The houses that were always fun to go to were in complete chaos all the time and liked it, so the more the merrier, right up to the cabin scene from A Night at the Opera.

But that's not how it goes around here. Families with eleven kids or something have to adjust to that to survive, with youngsters running in and out all the time. Sometimes I wonder how those parents keep their sanity. Sometimes I wonder how they keep their sanity when the kids grow up and suddenly there is no chaos anymore. You can get used to chaos.

That's all beside the point, which is: I had no time to write anything yesterday, and today I have no time or energy to write a post.

Hey, wait a second -- I DID write a post! It may not have been any good, but here it is all the same. Bully for me!

Technical difficulties....

...please stand by...

Nah, not really, but Microsoft did one of those OS upgrades last week and I expected the worst. Took forever. Still, when I consider how many people use MS software, how much crap we all download on our PCs of varied and sundry levels of compatibility and soundness, it's a miracle these upgrades take at all.

My dad could not have fixed a computer, I'm sure. He died before they really became a thing, back when the Internet was barely more than a military concoction and home computers were for people who wanted a thousand-dollar paperweight. I wonder what he would have made of all this.

He was a tool guy, a man who worked with his hands, and he could fix anything. And if he couldn't, because it required more technical expertise outside his field, he could bring in one of his pals. He always knew someone on The Job who could handle what he couldn't, and vice versa. They weren't really social guys, but they'd go to one another's houses when a project needed doing.

Toward the end of his life he told me that he couldn't fix cars anymore, that the computers in them would get messed up if he tried. I was stunned. He had been fixing cars since he was a kid, knew all the parts and what they were for, and he could handle anything that didn't require the engine block to be hauled out. But this is where we are now. Everything is Smart, which is rendering us dumb. I'm lucky if I know what hole to pour the wiper fluid in.

I know a few guys who tinker on their vehicles, guys like my dad who could probably build one from scratch if they had the right tools and the time (what American boy hasn't dreamed of building his own Centaur -- although it would be illegal now in most states to take it one the road, I'm sure). But all of them work on pre-1980 vehicles. There will always be car guys tinkering on cars, but I expect eventually all those cars will be Theseus's ships, philosophical conundrums with no original parts.

Among many things I would do differently were I to live this life again, though, would be to pay attention to my dad when he was doing home projects. He was a terrible teacher but I was the absolute worst student. Now I'm paying for it. Oh, sure, I can get a PC to work ("Here's the start button!"), but fix a lamp? Dude, better get one of those Radio Shack nerds in.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads. My heart was busted when my dad died. My car, my computer, and my heart are still the only things around here he couldn't fix.

Not much.

Hi, gang! I don't have much to report today. The weekend was full of events; we had folks here from out of town, and it was all I could do to keep up regular posts. After all, 4 out of 5 doctors recommend a dose of Vitamin Fred daily, and I can't disappoint my public. (That fifth doctor is a freaking no-good Commie bastard. Just saying.)

I hope to have some info tomorrow about the weekend's events that you might find interesting. One of the events of the weekend was that baby dog Nipper turned two years old. He didn't seem worried about getting older, wasn't looking for wrinkles or gray hairs. I guess in dog years he's just 14, though, so it makes sense. I suppose he'll be looking to get his driver's license soon -- after all, he'll be 21 in dog years next May -- but I won't do it. Dogs are terrible drivers. Maybe better than cats, but still.

Anyway, more tomorrow! And remember: No Commie Doctors!

Repentance.

AAAARRRGGGHH!

I feel better.

I may or may not have wiped out every user comment ever on this blog.

Okay, now I feel bad again.

See, this started a year or so ago when I tried to allow Disqus commenting capability for the site, just like a real blog. But Google, the host of Blogger, hates Disqus and wants it dead. So I found the only way to do it was to screw around with the code. Well, apparently Google was onto those tricks, because all I managed to do was screw up the commenting on the site. And I never could quite set it to rights again.

If I knew how to properly code, I'd be making some real money, instead of what I make now, which is like Monopoly money with fewer 0's.

Anyhoo, my pal St(ii)eve alerted me that the site had sunk to a new low last week, preventing any original comments and only allowing comments on comments, which is nuts. So I reset the preferences... and wiped out everything.

Sorry!

On the bright side, you should now be able to comment without having a Google (or Gmail) account. So I do hope you will, and I'll stop messing with code from now on, even if it means we wind up with comments about Free Vigara and Russian women Want to meet american Men now.

If it helps, I went down to Confession yesterday. Not for the sin of comment wiping, but for other problems and sins that have weighed on me. I was really mad at one guy last week, for example, which I've decided was probably not fair. Plus, today is Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, and I wanted to get all shined up for the big day.

Confession, or Reconciliation as the kids call it now, went very well. Of course I went to a different parish than I usually attend, because I'm scared our priests will think less of me -- not that that's true, but it's hard to overcome that feeling (and I know a deacon who does the same thing). The priest who helped me is a very kind man, and I did feel better when I left.

Historically Catholics have gotten razzed for Confession, first because it's so hard and second because it's so easy. "Why do you have to tell some dope in a collar what you did wrong? That's between you and God." Or, "You can kill a guy and say two Hail Marys and you're off the hook?"

I won't address the first razz today, but as for the second: I've never killed a guy so I don't know. Probably a lot more than two Hail Marys. I would think the priest would instruct me to give myself up to the police, among other actions.

The penance in Confession is usually pretty light, although it can feel heavy to the sorrowful heart. But really, what else can we do but pray? If I thought I could have a huge tattoo put on me, or carve a bloody mess of my thigh, and that would not only pay for my sins but prevent me from ever doing them again, I'd be all for it. The Church might approve of that plan. But humans don't work that way. One of the reasons I suspect tattoos are so popular these days is that people sometimes use them as a means of keeping themselves true -- a guy may not actually say I don't trust myself to stay faithful so I will tattoo my wife's name on my neck, but that's what his heart is saying. Then he winds up paying a lot of money for tattoo removal, because we are what we are; if we don't learn to control ourselves we can't trick ourselves into control. But that too is a topic for another time.

Titian's take on Pentecost. This kid's got talent.

As for today, the comment bar is open, so please feel free to share your comments on that, or comments on comments, or comments on Free Vigara or Nigerian princes or British princes or anything else that catches your fancy. And if the commenting feature still doesn't work, all I can say is, I won't be surprised. And SORRY!!!!! 😢 I'll go carve something in my thigh now.

This time I have to leave.

Well, all good things must come to an end, and so do things like this blog. I thought about what I should give up for Lent, and I decided: Everything! Dust thou art and all that.

In some regards, the blog has done what I'd hoped, in that it kept me busy every day, made me write something every day. In other regards, it has been a disappointment, or rather, I have been a disappointment.

I'm grateful for every one of you who stopped by to spend a few minutes with my words and pictures. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your visit.

For now, the books are available from iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google.

Good-bye and God bless,

Fred.

Old blog, new tricks.

Approximately 1,038 days ago -- actually exactly that many, since that's how many entries I've done on this Blogger site -- I left my old blog behind on Blog.com. Why? Because Blog.com, despite its name, is the worst site ever created for blogging. Mostly because it does not work. Only found out now that the Better Business Bureau has straight-up flunked it for "Failure to respond to 5 complaint(s) filed against business". I get the feeling that a couple of stoners snagged the URL in the 90's expecting to be bought out for millions, money that never came.

The site would crash, sometimes my page, sometimes everything. Half the time you either couldn't upload pictures, or when you did they wouldn't display. When I finally had enough I left a sign on the site directing people here, and left the free part of the site up. But now everything is down. It would appear that Blog.com is no longer a going concern. 

I'm rather annoyed by this. Not because my old site was a marvel of unsurpassed brilliance. Even I'm not so beguiled by myself as to think that. In fact, I didn't back up all that much of it because the content was topical, or consisted of reviews of things from the dollar store, or was just stuff that was fun at the time but didn't seem like something I would want in my papers at my university library after my passing.

But there are some things I backed up, which I may trickle out just so that they once again appear somewhere online. Stuff like how I got to be such an awesome cartoonist:

 My opinion of Twitter:

And my answer to the Buddy Cop movie:

I hope you'll bear with me if you see any familiar retreads in the weeks ahead. Some of my old gags are like my wee little children, and I hate to see them vanish. 

1,000!

Google's Blogger software tells me that this is my 1,000th post on this site. To celebrate, I stole some artwork from someone else's site.

Woooo

Also, for today, content is absolutely free to enjoy! In fact, if you act now, you can get the rest of the content from this point on absolutely free, too!

How can you get in on this great deal? 

Just show up!

I'd appreciate it if someone would try to comment. Not only have I been unable to add Disqus (using Disqus's own code) (!!) (?) but I fear I may have also screwed up the regular Google comments. I hope I fixed it last night, but something is still hinky. If you can't get through, remember, I'm at frederick_key AT yahoo.com.

Meanwhile, I would like to point out that I've managed to put up something in this space every day since May 25, 2014, the day I finally had enough of my old Blog.com site's malfunctions. Now, when I say I've never missed a day, I also quickly add that they haven't all been posts of great distinction. If I had to go back and read them all straight through, I'd probably quickly decide that:

(1) I complain a lot more than I think I do;

(2) My life is totally ruled by dogs and food;

(3) I talk a lot about the weather, for a guy who doesn't get out much;

(4) If I put the hours into a fitness regimen that I put into this, I can guarantee, without fear of contradiction, that I would have injured myself by now.

Dumb as it may be, the purpose of this site was always professional: to get in the habit of daily writing (or at least cartooning) and to promote my books. Which may be seen to the side over there. Right there, where you want to click, see? Thank you.

It's been fun, and I hope to continue through another 1,000 posts at least. Starting tomorrow I guess this blog will have had a longer run than Anne Boleyn. And no one's threatened to cut off my head to this point, which is nice. See you tomorrow!

Yes, another one, with an explanation.

Yes, this is the third elephant in the coffee shop cartoon in a row, but there's some reasons for that:

1) It's Groundhog Day, so we do things over and over, right?

2) When I first started drawing a man sitting in a coffee shop with an elephant, I did not know what punch line to use. Eventually I came up with more than one, and you know, our punch lines are like our children. We love them all equally, even the slightly dopey ones.

3) I had intended to unveil the Disqus commenting feature today, but I have not been able to make it function. Disqus supplied the code, but when I followed the instructions it didn't work. Don't know why yet. Still banging away at it. I am not a coder. I speak HTML (pronounced "hatemail") like Dave Barry speaks foreign tongues -- in his case, just enough to get beer and find the toilet.

So today's cartoon is mainly brought to you by failure, and my reluctance to let jokes go. Will I have another elephant joke on Friday? No! No way! Absolutely not! Maybe.

Disqus among yourselves.

Question for the audience:

I don't get a lot of comments on this site, but there's usually a good amount of traffic -- and thank you very much! -- and it's been suggested to me that adding Disqus for comments would help.

Disqus is a neat platform; I use it for commenting on sites like Instapundit and the Great Lileks's place. Login once and you appear with your username and icon all over the place. Apparently the Google-supplied comments feature on this site (Blogger is a Google subsidiary, as are we all) is irritating or otherwise not too useful.

Google doesn't make it easy to switch, but I hear it can be done. The things I want to know is do you, the blog-reading public, support the move to Disqus comments. You may chat about it yourselves in comments, although I guess if you could do that it wouldn't be such an issue. You could also write me at frederick_key [care of] yahoo.com to weigh in on that or other issues of the day.

And if you don't wish to discuss this problem, perhaps one of the other topics will spur your conversation:

1) Would Carole King's Tapestry have been as big an album if she sounded like Brad Roberts of the Crash Test Dummies?

2) Oprah + Weight Watchers: Match made in heaven or sign of the apocalypse?

3) New England Patriots. Dallas Cowboys. New York Yankees. Philadelphia Flyers. Which is a greater force for badness in the world?

4) Dungeons & Dragons: Would it be just as good without the dungeons, and maybe more dragons?

5) Speaking of dragons: Today begins the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Rooster. The other animals are bunnies, monkeys, dogs, etc. etc. ... and dragons. Why is there only one fictional animal in Chinese astrology? Did they really truly believe in dragons the way they believed in tigers, snakes, and pigs? Should we ask them to replace it with something real, like the Tasmanian Devil? Wouldn't that be great?

6) What's the best shampoo to use when you're going bald? Does it matter or is it okay to just keep scrubbin' the ol' scalperoo with Lava Soap?

7) If a girl decides she doesn't want to be badass but just be a nice little girl, will she have to beat up everybody so she can do what she wants? Or can she only do what she wants if she wants what she's supposed to want?

8) Black hole vs. Galactus eating contest -- who will you pick to win? Who would Stephen Hawking pick, hmm?

9) Why dogs are better than cats. Sorry, that's not a question, just a statement.

10) But enough about me; what do you think is awesome about me?

Select among these and let me know what you decide. Show all work.

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Very big in France.

I'm not quite sure that the Google metrics for this blog are correct.

I don't really get hung up on readership data. I'm here to get the thoughts out of my head that get stuck in there, to try out ideas, to keep disciplined as a writer, to promote my books (hint!), even to be a voice crying in the wilderness. Not that I'm not thrilled to have readers. I appreciate everybody who stops by my humble demesnes more than words can say. Especially 💖you💖.

But Google is telling me that I've been getting the bulk of my traffic from France.

Since I do not write in French, and most of the people who live in France read in French, I wouldn't expect there to be a lot of appeal for my stuff in France. I took French in junior high and high school, but I've resisted the temptation to try my hand at it. I occasionally may say, «I must punctuate my quotations in the French style!» but it's a passing thing.

I can only think of three reasons why so much traffic for this site appears to be coming from France:

1) Something about my work appeals to the elan, the sacre bleu, the plume da ma tante of la belle Francais.

2) French hackers are using my site to smuggle malware or secrets or other bad things by piggybacking on my URL.

3) Google has made some weird error, mistaking France for another entire nation.

4) There is an Internet rumor that "Fred Key" is an alias for "Jerry Lewis."

Lacking any further information to the contrary, I'm going to go with #1. Yes, I'm choosing to believe that I'm very big in France. Who knew?

Liberty and Fred Leading the People

So, French people, let me just say how long I have admired your novelists, your scientists, your chefs de cuisine, your... Well, I'm sure there's a lot of other things. I'm sorry if I ever said anything mean about France in this space. I don't blame you for the metric system. You were only trying to help.

Let us continue to enrich our friendship, shall we? Or as we said in seventh grade, Le papillon est rouge et bleu et blanc et vert!

Battles with Blarg.

The former host of the Vitamin Fred site, Blog.com, is still making me nuts a year after I switched over to Blogger.

When I started doing this mostly useless but occasionally entertaining feature more than three years ago, I wanted to go with an outfit that wasn't an overbearing Silicon Valley Internet Death Star, but maybe a plucky bunch of guys who had the smarts to reserve a great domain (blog.com seeming to be the perfect place for a blog, n'est-ce pas?) and, being number two (or three, or 23,412) would try harder.

Didn't work out.

Many were the days that I would get the dreaded 502, the bad gateway that meant that my site was down, and sometimes that the entire Blog site was down---all two million users, according to Blog's home page. This often came at the most inopportune times, such as smack in the middle of one of my serialized stories, or when the great IMAO was planning put up one of my pages as the Link of the Day.

And let me point out that I was paying actual cash money for the privilege of using the site; it's generally free to use, but I paid a fee so I could post Amazon ads for my books.

So last May I threw in the towel and made the switch to the Internet Death Star. When my subscription ran out on Blog.com the Amazon ads went away, but the rest of the site remained up.

But when I checked in to reference an old entry---after the 502 error cleared up---I found that now all the pictures are gone. Every image I posted on the site: gone.

Which sucks. Because there were a lot of cartoons up there. And product humor. So now there's a lot of pages like this:

Found this in the dollar store! For reals! Can you believe it? Look at this thing!!!!1!!!!!

Har har! That's the most amazing thing I ever saw! 

Yeah, so I'm a little peeved.

I'm planning to take the damn site down, after I save some entries that might be worthwhile. I'm sure that will mean a lot of dead links from this site, but I'll fix whatever I find.

Not sure if there's a takeaway from all this, except to say that maybe Twitter would have been a more appropriate site for the semi-ephemeral nature of the Internet. If there's a video online of me getting my face shoved in a cake, it will be posted for all to see for the next century; but if there's a cartoon I'm really proud of, it will vanish into electronic dust at any given moment. That's e-biz.

Fred Hollywood.

No, my books have not been picked up for the movies, but I'm sure they'll all be optioned soon. I hope some smart Hollywood producer will dump a pile of money on me for the rights. Not that I want the movies to be made, because they would ruin the stories; I just want option money. Big Scrooge McDuck piles of option money. Thanks!

Failing that, I'm thinking sponsorship.

This summer's blockbusters seem to have a ridiculous number of sponsor deals. It used to be that the #1 movie would have a sponsorship deal with McDonald's, #2 with Burger King, and the others would go catch-as-catch-can, picking up Subway (which had Green Lantern), Taco Bell (which had the 1998 Godzilla), and so on. Now every movie that comes along has got a sponsor, sometimes many, and it's not just fast food. Inside Out is being sponsored by Clorox and State Farm, for example. When did a Pixar movie ever do this kind of deal? (The Toy Story short "Small Fry" even made fun of the Happy Meal tie-ins.) And to do it with a cleaning product and an insurance company?

Jurassic World, opening today, has got Mercedes Benz and Dairy Queen. Are there two less likely bedfellows than Merc and DQ?

Seems to me I should be able to get my hands on some of this promotion dough. Too late for Jurassic World, although I like to eat ice cream and I've always wanted a Merc. I could have been the bridge between the sponsors! Let's look at some upcoming blockbusters and see how a little dose of Fred could help with the promotions.

Terminator: Genisys (July 1): Fred blogs about the time he fought off a Series 70 Terminator with a stale Twinkie and a badminton racket.

Ant-Man (July 17): Fred explains in depth over the course of a week why Ant-Man is the most rockin' Avenger of all time. Brings in mention of obscure Avengers characters (Jimmy Woo, Elsa Bloodstone, Captain Britain, etc.) to show off his bona fides.

Pixels (July 24): Fred sets up a game of Pac-Man on his blog, totally stealing it from the one Google did.

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (July 31): Fred takes massive doses of painkillers so he can write about what an awesome thespian Tom Cruise is.

Shaun the Sheep (August 7): Fred dresses his icon as a sheep for two weeks.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (August 14): Fred tries to gin up excitement for International Talk Like Robert Vaughn Day.

Crouching Dragon Hidden Tiger II: The Green Destiny (August 28): Hi-YA! Fred turns over the blog to his alternate Wudang personality, Fu Redd, to teach people how to climb walls with their toes and crap like that.

And that's just before Labor Day! So come on, Hollywood; drop Fred some green and let's make movie magic.

Welcome to the new place.

Come in, sit down, make yourself at home. Yes, I had to move the ol' bloggeroo. Why? Because my previous host sucks harder than a nuclear powered Dyson, that's why. Six days ago they severed my sign-on from the blog itself, so I could log in, but not access my blog. That's helpful! Every day I sent an e-mail (no other way to contact them) and every day there was no reply. So, the hell with it.

Not that I want to name names. Okay, it was Blog.com; you beat it out of me.

I really, really wanted to like Blog.com because they seemed to be small and plucky and personable compared to the big boys, but their ability to keep the site afloat was, shall we say, lacking, and their customer service was virtually nonexistent. So, here I am, Google!

If you're new to the wonder that is Fred, just note that I have been writing and editing for a long time, and had I known it was going to be like this, I might have gone into a real job. Well, it's too late now. I have novels, available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, available at quite reasonable rates. I also have grit and determination. I also have a pounding headache, but that's not important right now.

I solemnly promise: No cat videos.

On this page you will continue to get daily updates on all things Fred. I will probably retire some of the features of the old blog, like the dollar store reviews -- I think I've bought about as many different things from the dollar store as I ever need to. We'll see about the others.

The old blog will be up for a while, but remember to change your bookmarks, all of you! (Looking at you, Mr. Philbin.) Meanwhile, I hope to see you around here.

I hate moving, I really do. Everything is in boxes and I can't find anything. And who put the toilet brush in the kitchen box? It clearly says KITCHEN on the side. Come on, people, work with me.