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According to the calendar I’ve been doing this for a year, so this is my first blogiversary™ ^{[Talk Left]} in blogtopia™ ^{[skippy the bush kangaroo]}.

During that span I’ve managed to put out 966 articles, including Friday Cat Blogging™ ^{[Kevin Drum]}, and about 2,000 people a month drop by to see what has annoyed me enough to write about, a big group apparently interested in hurricanes.

If what I do annoys you, after cursing me, you can blame Andante at Collective Sigh and Steve Bates at Yellow Doggerel Democrat for making me think I should do this rather than clogging up their comments, which I continue to do in any case.

I started to relieve the pressure of the last election, just as many started to get involved a year prior to it. Blogging is much preferred to yelling at the members of the Religious Reich who surround me in one of the reddest counties of an extremely red segment of the South.

The local puppy trainer is considered a member of the “liberal media”, which is amazing considering that the main Sunday opinion piece is usually written by a member of the Cato Institute and the paper is owned by a libertarian company.

You find more “fish” on cars and business signs than in the bayou anymore, but the local “Christians” still feel oppressed. Every time a large business goes out of business you know the building will become a “church” in time, the result of a schism in one of the other “churches”. There are eight pages for churches in the local Yellow Pages, and a separate “Christian” business directory so you can be sure that the guy who unplugs your drain is “saved”. I’m not sure what the difference would be between “Pagan” and “Christian” carpet cleaning, but some people apparently don’t want to take the chance.

I have no reason to think that things are going to get better any time soon, so I’ll probably continue.

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