For the first four years of this site, The Vent was the only section that was updated on anything resembling a regular basis: most of the time, you got four of them every month, and anything else was done on a when-I-get-to-it non-schedule. In June 2000, though, I started doing daily blog updates, and at the time, I was concerned that The Vent would be pushed into the background. To some extent, it has, yet the same four-per-month production schedule has been kept for the five years since. And one thing that's been made possible by running two separate sets of pages is the ability to repurpose um, reuse the material from one set in a different context in the other. In other words, this is the equivalent of a clip show, a selection of spiffy segments from the first few months of daily bloggage, done mostly in the absence of a real topic. Try not to be too disappointed. Molly, my lately-too-often-beleagured car, came down with a bad case of the stalls, which only partially cleared up once she realized she was on her way to a service shop. As is my usual custom, I rented temporary wheels, and this time the agency came up with a 2000 Chevrolet Malibu in Betty Crocker Frosting White, possibly the very car that got GM denounced by wags as "Generic Motors"; stenciling "CAR" on its doors wouldn't be much of a reach. If Chevy trucks are, as the ads say, "like a rock," this mid-size Malibu is a packet of gravel. Over the lumpy concrete and randomly-located expansion joints of the Belle Isle Bridge at a modest 55 mph, it bounds and lurches like a kangaroo on diuretics. I'm starting to see why the General's market share is going into the old porcelain facility. This being Labor Day in the US, I put forth as little labor as I possibly could. And while so doing, I happened across some music video show on what they call Country Music Television, and after listening to a bunch of thrushes named Shania and Martina and what have you, it's perfectly clear that instead of Bob Wills and Kitty |