how the hell did I end up here?

Es­ti­mated reading time is 2 min­utes.

CHI­NESE CHESS PIECES? If you looked at the chess board at the top of this page and thought, “How the hell did I end up here?”—don’t worry, every­thing’s just fine. When I started this blog in 2013, I knew little of what I was doing: that in­cludes what con­tent I wanted to post and how to make the con­tent easy to read and at­trac­tive enough to make you want to read!

Many of my early posts had three glaring problems:

  They were in a small, san serif type­face that was dif­fi­cult to read.
  They had no im­ages or il­lus­tra­tions whatsoever.
  They were silly pieces written to fill up space. 

Per­haps the biggest problem was that I didn’t know how to up­load im­ages to the in­ternet, or down­load photos from the in­ternet. For this reason, I was un­able to re­place the de­fault image at the top of the home page that came with WordPress.

Even though I had three blogs, they all had the same photo at the top: a chess­board with an­cient Chi­nese pieces.

The only thing that dif­fer­en­ti­ated Neal Umphred Dot Com (about this and that and lots of pol­i­tics) from Rather Rare Records (about col­lecting records and the music on them) and Elvis – A Touch Of Gold (about Pres­ley’s records and movies) was the color of the border at the top of each page!


TwentyEleven default chess copy 2

This photo of a chess game in the making was the image that graced the top of all three of my websites—and prob­ably hun­dreds of thou­sands of other Word­Press web­sites around the world wide web.

I changed a few things

I don’t know why anyone would have wanted to read all the way through any of my es­says or ar­ti­cles. So, I changed a few things:

  I deleted dozens of old posts as ir­rel­e­vant or even embarrassing.
  I wrote this post that you are reading.
  I linked all those ir­rel­e­vant posts to this one.

That’s why you’re reading this post ti­tled “How The Hell Did I End Up Here?” in­stead of the post whose title at­tracted your at­ten­tion in the first place!


Ananda Flyer banner gold 800

For a while, I used this piece of art­work by my then 3-year-old daughter Ananda as the header image for this site. Even­tu­ally I found the photo of the gor­geous upside-down kitten that graces the top of this site’s home page.

A few choices 

So, I am going to try to keep you here by pro­viding you with links to a few choices and hope one looks inviting:

•  This is a link to my home page.
•  This is a link to my blog archive page.
  This is a link to my most widely read post.
  This is a link to my fa­vorite post.

Fi­nally, I’m a Virgo who likes long walks at night in the rain with an um­brella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who tries to live by this adage: It ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble—it’s what you know that just aint so . . .




Leave a Comment