Comments on the blog were shifted from Blogger to the more capable Disqus some months ago. After an apparently brief and unintentional regression, they seem to have stuck with Disqus for the desktop site. However, some viewers of the mobile site apparently still got Blogger comments, which is a pity as those comments became essentially invisible to other readers. This appears to have been fixed now, but not before another batch of comments went invisible. As the Blogger to Disqus comment export mechanism is currently broken, transferring all the Blogger comments requires some doing and the author promises to accomplish it as soon as he finds time.
Speaking of comments, they are very much welcomed and preferred even over e-mails (unless they concern a non-public matter of course). The author reads all comments diligently and, at least until such time as there are enough commenters to sustain a conversation without him will at least try to respond to most of them.
Finally, the author is sometimes asked along these lines:
Why does the author refer to himself in the third person? Who does he think he is? Bob Dole?
The author—as was perhaps Mr. Dole—was at an impressionable age firmly instructed that the use of the first person pronoun is the hallmark of teenage girl (or perhaps the President giving the eulogy of a person barely known or remembered). Serious people do not use them, except perhaps sparingly in unrecorded, personal conversation with intimates. This discomfort with the first-person pronouns has become too deeply ingrained to be readily discarded. Sadly, there is too much of the teenage girl (or perhaps the Presidential) in the author. So as an expedient designed to maintain at least the façade of dignity, the author has adopted the transparent fig leaf of speaking merely of the author and never himself.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Administrative Notes
