Oh, hi. Make yourself comfortable. There are updates.

Hey everyone.

One of the (many) lamentable consequences of the rise of social media is the death-by-neglect of innumerable blogs. Almost including this one.

For a number of reasons, well, WELL afield of this post, I've pretty much abandoned the major platforms. Especially that citadel of hate, Facebook. And my relationship with Twitter is flat on its back with tubes and wires sticking out from everywhere.

So I'm coming back here, as a way to engage with my friends (old, new, and soon-to-be) without subjecting myself to the time-absorbing toxicity of FaceTwit, et al.

But that's not all.

I'll be using this as a springboard to finally make good on my longstanding threat to start a podcast. As we speak, audio equipment is arriving here and I'll be making decisions on hosting and platforms, etc. This is not unlikely to lead to a video channel...but not too soon.

The content of the podcast (and the eventual video channel) is what you have come to know and love (and miss!) from this blog: food and drink and travel and fountain pens and cars and watches and things I've discovered and My Inimitable Wisdom and stories from my life.

This all coalesced when I was looking up my reference recipe for cocktail cherries. (I had run out, having spent the last 15ish months upping my cocktail activities since that time had coincided with pandemic and politics. You may seen that in the news.)

Anyway.

As I was looking for it, I reread some of the vintage stuff and wondered why any sane person (read: me) would give up this fun activity where -- and this is the crucial bit -- I was the sole and supreme arbiter to go wade in the IQ-shredding bile of TwitFace, et al.? The answer surprised me a little: 

[SPOILER ALERT]

A sane person wouldn't.

So here we are.

-J.

P.S. Expect a redesign of the blog. A couple of years back, the imbeciles who at that time ran [spit] PhotoBucket [/spit] decided to disable - without warning - the links to photos hosted there, and replacing them with a graphic. To make matters worse, the price to "liberate" your images was somewhere between "exorbitant" and "extortionate." So I had to cobble together the design you see now, with which I have never been truly satisfied. So I will futz around and give it a more user-friendly and attractive makeover.