Every so often I do an editorial for this site on the amiable theory that it is, in part, an electronic magazine. It isn’t, of course. An e-zine pretends to be a magazine with issues and such. This is an ever-expanding archive of things no rational person would read. You aren’t rational are you? No? I didn’t think so. This is not the sort of thing that rational people read.

When I was a younger I was raised as a good republican. We had a saying where I grew up: Not every democrat is a horse thief but every horse thief is a democrat. When I had gotten a bit of growth to myself I looked around and saw that it was so. When I got a bit dryer behind the ears I noticed something else. Wherever you had a town where there were horse thieves there was always one mean SOB who dealt in stolen horses; that mean SOB was always a republican. So now you know the difference between democrats and republicans.

Another thing an editorial writer is supposed to do is deplore a lot of deplorable things. Consider it done. Me being an amiable sort, I’m not going to force my list of deplorable things upon you. You get to pick what’s deplorable. I’ll deplore it for you. Don’t bother writing me and telling me what it is that I’m supposed to be deploring. I’m flexible. Whatever it is, I think it’s deplorable. Count on it.

A good editorial writer prevaricates. Hmmm, I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s one of those long words that starts with pr. Ah, yes, I’ve got it. A good editorial writer prognosticates. It means the same thing only it sounds better. Probably has something to do with being a longer word. Or maybe it’s a matter of having little letter o’s in the word. Words with o’s in them are more professional. Notice that “professionaL” has an o in it whereas sleazebag doesn’t. If that doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what does. In any case here are some prognostications:

• People will continue to put up other really vile web pages.
• The future will happen; a lot of people won’t like it.
• A high ranking elected official will be forced to resign in the near future.
• The quality of popular entertainment will not improve; the special effects will improve.
• A herd of lascivious aardvarks will nibble your toes.

Let’s see. What else goes into an editorial? What we need here is to check the local paper and see what they do there. I’ve got it. What an editor does is lie a lot. Lying is good. I can lie.

So much for my official editorial duties. If this is the first time you’ve visited this site you want to check out the topics page. This has pointers to sundry major headings. One of the dubious merits of this site is that it has a wide variety of essays, not all of which are entirely serious. The essays page is the place to locate them, broken out by category. The humor page has bits and pieces of amusing things that I’ve accumulated over the years. You’ve probably seen some of them; you probably haven’t seen them all.

A small word on navigation. This place is a rat’s nest. A lot of pages are linked in rings; the next page buttons take you to the next page in the ring. Some pages show up in more than one ring; they get more than one next button. The place is sort of organized in layers; the up buttons take you up a layer. However a page may be pointed to from more than one place above; accordingly it will have more than one up button. If you get confused every page has a table of contents button. This lists all of the pages (well, almost all) sorted by the last time they were altered. If you haven’t visited recently you should probably check the table of contents anyway to see what has changed.

But enough about you. What about me?