A nice round number

What a long strange trip it's been and continues to be.

1,000 flips and 40,000 clicks ago, I laid down this riff - and stayed there.

Knock me your lobes one more time and I will hip you to the story of the Woodshed.

Believe it or not, the first two blogs I ever read were Powerline and Glen Reynolds. I'd read some piece of crap in Time about political blogs in the wake of the 2000 U.S. presidential fiasco that mentioned those two and went to take a look. Naturally, I was appalled after reading just a few posts. Heh, indeed.  Much like Todd Snider when he first saw Jerry Jeff Walker, I thought to myself "Well shit, I could do that" - so I looked around for a better example of what blogs should be and I found my blogdaddy, Atrios.  To paraphrase Lord Buckly, some fellas are Kos cats, some are Josh Marshal men, some dig on Tbogg, but me I started out as an Atriot. 

This blog started as a group forum for me to writing messages back and forth with the members of my tribe back home, but very quickly became a one-man show. Hanging out in the comment threads at Ecshaton in the 2004 campaign ("Mars, Bitches!") lit a fire under me to start writing my own screeds here and eventually I started copying stuff from work onto the blog and discovered the Canadian blogosphere and things got more and more fun and interesting as I looked around and found more and blogs and more and more material. 

I moved on from Eschaton and started commenting a lot on a variety of blogs, especially the Galloping Beaver and Axis of Evel Knievel, back before Dave Noon joined Lawyers, Guns and Money. 

I blogged my little blog and things chugged along at a steady dozen hits a day. And then The Asylum Street Spankers can to town. Wammo and his lovely wife Tracy bunked with us on their last night in Japan and when he was checking his email that night, he found out that the video for "Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV" was finally finished and had just been put online. Naturally I put it on the blog and did a little blogwhoring and the next thing I knew someone had put it on the Democratic Underground  site where it went viral. About half of the 40,000 visits this blog has received have been for that video, and three quarters of them came over a period of a couple of months.

Eventually, and only Cthulu knows why, probably a combination of pity on his part and persistant commenting on mine,  Admiral Dave asked me to help fill in at the Galloping Beaver while he was off at sea and so I got to hang out virtually with Alison, whose blog I already admired, and West End Bob (formerly know as West End Bound) and Laura and Boris and Dana while Dave and Cheryl were off catching salmon or something.  And by the time Dave and Cheryl got back I had infested the place like a bad smell you can't get rid of, and rather than fumigate, they let me stay. I like to think I contribute some small measure of leavening silliness and indignant moral outrage to the place, but it is Dave's place.

The Woodshed is mine and has been since before it was a blog, before it was even The Woodshed, in fact. Back in the days before teh intertoobz, when the closest I'd come to cyberspace was reading the science fiction readers group on the in-house IBM company email bulletin board as a lowly co-op student at the Don Mills Lab, I worked for a series of small community newspapers starting in Ingersoll, Ont. and progressing through Caledonia, Port Dover, Listowel, Napanee and finally Picton. The first place I worked still had typewriters and I even went door to door delivering copies one week in the middle of winter. All for wages that would have qualified me for welfare. I started writing a weekly column in Caledonia and hit my  stride on it in the Port Dover Maple Leaf. By the time we got to Listowel, it had been named the Woodshed and it was both the highlight and major stress point of my week to sit down and try to come up with an idea. I think of those as the precursor to this blog, although there was no such thing as blogs at the time.

And wonder of wonders, I still have a hard copies of a bunch of them that I found again only just a few weeks ago amid the paper-strewn chaos that is my desk. And this week I will be posting some of them, as soon as I get the dead-tree copy typed into the laptop.

I will also be reviving "the Rules" and "Kanadian Korner" a couple of series that started out strong, but eventually faded off my mental radar as shiny objects entered my field of vision.

As you can see I've done so renovating of the look of the place, and changes will continue for the next week or so. If you'd like to be on the blogroll, drop me a line at rev(dot)paperboy(at)gmail.com

Soon there will be swag and probably a lot more stuff at the emporium.

And there will be music -- once a few technical issues get sorted out, Radio Woodshed will take the internets airwaves with audio attitudes, platitudes and assorted dudes from a variety of latitudes to put a cut in your strut and glide in your stride...

until then, well,  I'll let Ms. Davis speak for me.