Thanks to Dave, Leslee, and rr for their “public service announcement” posts directing folks to my new blog-digs. One of the sad outcomes of this week’s sudden blog death is my (current) inability to post any announcement on my still-defunct main site. At some point, I plan to redirect my Hoarded Ordinaries domain to this one, but before I can do that, I need to migrate most of the many photos I’ve blogged over the years, which still “live” on my old host’s server. So until I can do a massive migration to flickr, my old, dead-in-the-water site will live on, if only to house old photos.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the learning curve of tinkering with this new WordPress site and think I’ll be happy blogging here. As a Buddhist, I know that “impermanence surrounds us,” but sometimes it’s good, I think, to get shocked out of the usual complacency. Blogging is by nature an ephemeral genre: every day, yesterday’s post gets superceded by today’s, which is how days themselves work. The initial panic I felt on Thursday afternoon at the thought of losing any of the entries I’d not saved–and I’d been woefully irregular when it came to making backups–points to an interesting desire for permanence on my part. Blogs are not books: blogs consist of mere electronic blips that can be annihilated at any moment. Although books can burn, their paper-based technology seems so much more lasting than cyber-ephemera, which tells me I should revisit the blog-to-book project I’d begun and then abandoned last year.

In the meantime, I thought I’d offer a different sort of Public Service Announcement, this one displayed not anywhere in Ireland but in my favorite weekend lunch spot in West Newton, MA.

Not good for you

If Guinness is good for you, it must be a sorry state indeed to be Guinnless.