With a URL that looks like a 100-car freight train, A Sunny Place for Shady People (http://www.sunnyplaceforshadypeople.blogspot.com/) won’t be an instant memory-for-blog-addresses pleaser, but it should be added to your Favorites nevertheless.
This is how The Old Buzzard (Tom Milner?) defines his Blogspot-hosted blog:
Pithy, contrarian, politically incorrect and curmudgeonly rants on sex, money, power and politics and religion and philosophy. In short: Nothing matters, everything changes and there are no guarantees. The rest is rationalization and bribery.
I am instinctively reluctant to heed such bold introductions to a blog, but scrolling down The Old Buzzard’s page convinced me that, in this one case, the flag statement was very much on bull’s eye.
This is not your plain vanilla Blogspot Weblog. The page design is imaginative and an eye catcher. A reading area with a white background rests on a page that has the appearance of a pin-striped black suit with purple lapels and a purple shirt collar at the very top. There are no links other than those to Home and Archives and they’re both buried deep at the bottom of the page. The Old Buzzard has paid the small dollar price required and has liberated his page from those irritating ads hovering at the top of all free Blogspot pages.
Now, the writing. Hard-punching, frequently irate, with a cutting edge, quick and sharp. The Old Buzzard stands by his guns and he does not hesitate to tell you right off the bat (otherwise he wouldn’t be blogging, I suspect). Consider this:
These Anti-Smoking League Nazis remind us of the environmental fascists alluded to above, who also run amuk too often, sheltering the damn snails, turtles and wildflowers and spouting the fables of “Mother Nature.”
Or this:
And, one dares not, anymore, use the word “niggardly” in speech or even writing, for fear of being labeled racist.
This is patently silly.
“Niggardly”‘s etymology is Scandinavian and unrelated to bigotry. It simply means stingy, as in “that niggardly Oslovian.”
And “Chinaman” is taboo, but not Chinatown, wherein reside not Chinamen but refined Asian gentlemen.
Let’s not even consider the crazed feminists’ complaints about utilitarian phrases like “Men at Work,” or the frantic lady Sabbatists who insist on, minimally, genderless deities or, more starkly, just plain goddesses.
These are not lines that would enthral the “moderates” and the “diversity”-bound, but they spring from what sounds like strong conviction. The Old Buzzard, in effect, says: “Here it is, take it or leave it”. Fewer and fewer people are willing to make this statement in public nowadays.
Blogging is, first and foremost, all about freedom of expression, and the A Sunny Place for Shady People is a perfect specimen of just exactly this premise. The Old Buzzard sweeps over broad territory and uses a great variety of “mainstream” stories as incentives for well constructed posts. This is a “war blog” in a broader sense.
The Old Buzzard’s domain is not for the insipid and won’t offer pleasure to “balanced advocates”. And I bet the Buzzard’s ideas draw strong opposition; a large crowd out there would find him humorless and “bigoted”. The only way to decide for yourself though is to visit The Old Buzzard’s blog. I sure will return to his part of the woods — and will do so often. A Sunny Place for Shady People