History, politics, people of Oly WA

Category: me blogging

Here is that meta blog open thread you’ve been waiting for

Well, maybe I’ve been waiting for.

Either way, I think its about time to take a pause in the blog and let you tell me what you think about what’s going on here.

It has been about five years since I changed the tone of this blog and just over two years since I’ve really been trying hard to blog twice a week.

And, to be honest the last few weeks, I’ve been very close to missing that twice a week deadline more than once. Mostly, I think, I’ve not been feeling inspired by what I what I’ve written about and I need to touch base.

So, please, tell me what you think. What do you think of the blog lately?

Olympia Time in 2013, so what did you think of the new way of blogging here?

So, this time of year seems a good a time as any to ask, but what did you think of Olympia Time this year? I’m not sure how many noticed, but I started on a regular schedule of blogging about April or May this last year. Two posts a week, which turns out to be eight or nine posts a month.

I’ve kept to a handful of topics, mostly local history and blogs. But, I’ve stretched out to include Cascadia Exists too. These posts explore the political or social patterns that already exist in our region.

I also dribbled out much longer written pieces that didn’t really have a home on the blog. I finally polished them up and put them together in a free (or pay what you want) book.

For the time being I’m going to keep up this pattern, two posts a week and every other Monday an Olyblogosphere. The posts under the Cascadia Exists header are getting long and numerous enough that I might try stitching them together into something more coherent (another book!) by fall.

I hope your 2013 went well, and I hope all the best for you this year. And, I know your dying to know, so here are my favorite posts I wrote since I started the new regime:

1. Better Bob Bunting

2. The long history of the Seattle Freeze

3. Thoughts about loss and oysters

4. Why won’t those damn kids just obey the will of our Grecian columns?

5. The time when the King County Arts Commission complained about the cultural insensitivty of the Seahawks logo

6. Sue Gunn reconnected the ends of the Cascadian political spectrum 

Holy cats, in my previous blog life, I was a jerk

I’m manually scrapping the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine this morning for old posts from my previous local blog “Oly News Boy” (killed off sometime in 2004). And, man alive, I was a jerk. I know I probably thought the way I wrote back then, but damn Emmett, calm down, would you?

Here’s an example:

See? SEE? I told you that Matt Heins was a freaking stupid candidate.

I knew something like this was going to happen, the law would eventually bite him in the butt, and for God sakes, he deserves it. Wasting our time like this, making the Position 3 race go into a primary like that, wasting the “tens of thousands of dollars” that he says that he’s not going to raise, so I guess the freaking laws just don’t apply to him.

“I know it was a form, but I didn’t know it was a legal requirement.” Nuff said.

My memory is fuzzy now, but I suppose Matt Heins ran for city council. Boy, and I suppose I was mad at him for not filing forms correctly.

Anyway, “Nuff said” Emmett? Who are you, Stan Lee?

Here’s what I’ve saved so far. The plan is to repost them on the archive of this blog, so you’ll get everything in one place. Stupid mid-20’s Emmett and all.

One lesson learned, I have learned not to delete blogs without saving them. God bless the good folks at the internet archive, but I cannot for the life of me remember why I deleted Oly News Boy.

Olympia Time reborn! (and, did you notice the new header??)

Well, maybe not so strong as that. But, back to blogging on a regular basis here at my home blog.

I’ll try not to take such a long break next time, but 2010 has been sort of busy, and its not like I haven’t been blogging, just not over here so much.

The time off did help me refocus on what I want to do over here. In short, here is how I’ll refocus myself:

1. Politics, eh, not so much. Unless something is really interesting, I’ll not write about politics much here.

2. Deep map of Olympia. PrairyErth is one of my favorite books. Not because of the particular topic (Kansas, eh…) but of how the topic is treated. Williams Least Heat Moon drills down into each little portion of a Kansas County, exploring it from the inside out. That kind of treatment of a particular place interests me, so I’m going to try to write more history here.

By the way, the new header is a detail from a Sanborn Map of Olympia in the late 1800s. The detail is of a gulch that used to stab deep into the current capitol campus. The old greenhouse and sunken gardens are now on top of that now filled gulch.

Sanborn maps are pretty cool, and you usually have to pay to see them. But, the Timberland Regional Library grants you access to all of the maps for Washington.

3. A zine. Olympia Time, the Zine. This is more of a promise to myself than a goal, but since I’ve been getting involved with the library, I’ve fallen in love with the zine format. So, I’m going to start doing four zines a year based on things I’ve written about on this blog. Promise. I have an editorial schedule and everything. So, hopefully the first one will come out within a month.

4. Local sports. I have this concept inside my own head called “real sports,” which is the shadow land of competitive sports in between youth (including high school) and the kind of stuff you see on television (including affiliated minor league baseball). So, anything like small college sports, independent minor league baseball, or high level amateur soccer. So, now there are two examples of this (beyond the local colleges) around her: the Puget Sound Collegiate League and Capitol City FC. Hopefully, I’ll try to write more about these organizations.

My blogging prehistory: Olympia News Boy

From August of 2001 to the spring of 2004, I maintained Olympia Newsboy. It was my first shot at blogging and, for the most part, I think I did a pretty good job.

I started out with complaining about the scalping laws in Seattle and their selective enforcement and also got into local politics.

I can’t really remember why I shuttered Olympia Newsboy, but from what I can tell from this blog’s archives, I started Olympia Time just about time I shuttered Olympia Newsboy. I can’t explain it, but despite shutting the blog down, there wasn’t much of a lapse in blogging.

Anyway, thank God for the internet archive, I’m probably going to sweep up as many posts that were saved there and fold them into this blog.

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