Begging Blegs

I feel badly because here it is December of my seventh year blogging and I have not engaged in a “begging bleg” to implore you to send money to help me defray the vast cost of supporting this blog upon which you have come to so heavily depend, and to keep me and my cat from starvation. (My wife can fend for herself. It seems it is not good form to beg for one’s wife.)

Actually, of course, it doesn’t cost me anything to maintain this stupid blog, since Blogger is free. I have no idea why you would come to depend on this thing, heavily or otherwise, or what you would depend on it for. The cat and I are not only not at starvation’s door, actually both of us are a bit overweight.

But I feel kind of left out being the only blog on the Internet not begging for money. Nor do I have any other blogs out there pimping for me, saying that, “Hey, Jayhawk over there at On My Mind is the last bastion of sanity on the Internet, and he really needs your help.”

Of course, writing this crap and referring to myself as “the last bastion of sanity on the Internet” sort of beggars credulity, but…

I followed one such referral which described the guy as “unique among group prog blogs for never drinking the Obama-as-progressive Kool-Aid and for not trading truth for access” because I’d never been there before and it sounded like an interesting place. Well, I didn’t know what a “group prog blog” is, and it actually sounded a little bit obscene, but the rest of it sounded sort of interesting.

The first post was the “begging bleg” saying that he wanted to launch the fundraiser on Monday rather than Saturday, but that the “server people are being quite insistent.” Or, he could use blogspot, like the rest of us do, and “the server people” would not charge him any money at all. I saw nothing on his website that Blogger would not accommodate. And I guess launching on Monday would be better because then people could run to the bank and get cash to… Okay, maybe I don’t know why Monday would be better.

And perhaps I overestimated what a “group prog blogs for never drinking the Obama-as-progressive Kool-Aid and for not trading truth for access” blog actually is, because the blog in question consisted of miscellaneous trivia. There was a cat that was kind of cute, there was an insect and an “interesting” weed. Only two of the dozen or so posts that I read were written by the blogger, the rest were nothing more than links to other material, and pretty much none of it had anything to do with politics, liberal or otherwise.

And for this the guy has a goal of raising $55,000 per year to satisfy “the server people.” News flash: you can maintain a website containing hundreds of pages and major interactivity for about $1500 per year. A blog such as his on a commercial hosting service would run about $100 per year. Maybe he has a lot of cats.