Easy Links for New Arrivals Here
Number 1 song of 1951. Click the graphic for the YT link.
Why this song? This is the first day of winter, with Christmas fast approaching, and it’s my custom to post end-of-year thoughts about this time every year. With the world on the brink of massive change, I find myself looking back to some of what has been lost of our traditions and shared American experience. Rosemary Clooney is an interesting part of that for me. I was born in the time between the song’s reign on charts, Clooney’s biggest hit, and the movie White Christmas, which was released in 1954 and starred Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen. Watched it every year when we were kids, a movie as innocent as we were and one I haven’t watched since then. The world changed permanently a decade after I was born and we are still grappling with those changes almost 60 years later. Seemed a good time to remember the distance we have traveled since then.
“Come On A My House” struck me as an appropriate intro to the post, which is addressed to the newcomers at this site. Instapunk Returns has been published over a span of five years, with one year of dormancy while I devoted myself to other projects, and it has recorded my thoughts and observations about a lot of chiefly American topics. I never bought a domain for it, or promoted or advertised it on Google or elsewhere. It found its own steady audience and I add to it as the mood strikes. But something has changed of late. Take a look:
I have some overall numbers that are interesting. There have been 10,000 visits to Instapunk Returns in the last 30 days, but also ~6,000 visits to my other principal blogs, which are rarely linked from my Facebook page. So I can see that some of you are poking around, exploring a bit.
That’s what I’m going to do here. Make it easier to poke around. “Come On A My House.” It’s actually quite a large house. With a lot of fun things to do in it. What follows will be some category subheads, very brief descriptions, and links with instructions to facilitate exploring. No sermons, just travel tips and directions.
Exploring Instapunk Returns
Not going to give you a “Best of” list to tick down. That’s eye-of-the-beholder stuff anyway. The best approach to widening your view of the 560+ posts here is the Keyword Search function at the top of every page. The best approach is to keep search terms short. Avoid adjectives. Focus on nouns and names and acronyms. Here are some tested examples that produce good results: AI, IQ, atheism, music, Biden, Kamala, Harris, AOC, woman, women, feminism, Trump, consciousness, charts, statistics, diagrams, Harvard, Uniparty, RINO, Boomer Bible, election, sex, gender, LGBTQ, and Laird. (Variants of these terms also work: plurals, “ist” instead of “ism”, nouns instead of acronyms and vice versa…) There will often be a link at the end of a page produced by a search to “More Posts.” These are definitely part of the search result and can go on for multiple additional pages, until the prompt for more posts disappears.
The other useful tool for exploring is the Menu box which appears at the upper lefthand corner of the Main Page. The Main Page is always accessible by clicking on the left-pointing arrow that appears at the top of each individual post. The content of the Menu entries consists of links to Pages at IPR or to PDF files.
If you get lost trying to find your way back to a search from an individual post or links within that post, you can always start over quite easily. “Instapunk Returns” typed into your browser will always return you to this site, where you can repeat the search. Takes about 20 seconds. Getting lost following links is no big deal. It’s part of the point of the site. Ultimately, everything is connected.
Which is why other parts of “My House” will be the subject of the rest of this post. I’ve been writing for a long time and produced works in many media, including computer graphics, photographs, videos, audio recordings, and every kind of writing there is. One thing that binds them all together:
My Postulate: “All Writing is Fiction.” There are no exceptions.
Exploring the Instapunk Sites
There have been three major Instapunk sites. The immediate predecessor to this one was Instapunk Rules, which is still freely available, though no longer updated. It was active from 2013 to 2019. This is the best link for accessing it:
Instapunk Rules. I gave it up because it became too long for the capabilities of the provider, Wordpress. I lost the ability to revise or add posts, and the links to the last couple of months are dicey. This link drops you into a date that works fine, and the search function and date headers (thru Dec 2018) should also enable you to look for specific content. It covers everything, like all the Instapunks do. There are 500+ posts to choose from.
Instapunk, the original version, was active from 2004 to 2014. It was worked on continuously throughout those years, generating between two and seven-plus posts per week, for a guesstimated total of 2,000 total entries averaging 400 to 1,000+ words each, usually with multiple custom graphics. Even conservatively estimated, that’s over a million words of text. The link here dumps you into the complete list of linkable weeks:
The site also contains its own “Best of” list (sort of, chosen at the time to be representative of scope and variety). Here’s a link to take you to:
Searching through the long list of weeks doesn’t have to be daunting. Picking a date at random can be a quick time capsule reminding you of events you may remember. Alternatively, pick a week that encompasses an event, controversy, or scandal that drew a lot of attention in the press or broadcast news. Very often, you will find a post that discusses it from the Instapunk perspective. (This approach also works at Instapunk Rules.)
Here at IPR, many of you have already discovered the page devoted to the original Instapunk:
These are a work in progress. I add to them when something reminds me of a post I can go looking for at the original site, where many individual posts have their own links at the Wayback Machine. Many have been picked because they are funny. Some, not so much. Often, the links to complete weeks name topics covered in those weeks. A leg up on the big list.
Exploring Other Blogger Sites
There are more than 50 sites of various kinds at Blogger. Most are works in progress (W-I-P), some still not ready for prime time, others tied to a specific point in time, completed, and just part of the record for occasional reference as relevant. The more serious efforts have also been attracting attention of late. How you found them I don’t know, but these are the ones that seem noteworthy or possibly interesting to visitors.
Johnny’s Last Chance Garage. A diary by one of the principal characters from my punk writer saga, Johnny Dodge, who escaped the 1985 Punk City Massacre on the night of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. He starts it and writes for some years before departing for parts unknown and leaving his foster daughter behind to continue the writing until she too departs for parts unknown. (She has a site too, but it’s still W-I-P and on the list for when I get the time.
Quantum19. Here might be the parts unknown to which Johnny Dodge departed. There’s talk of a “New Punk City” hiding in plain sight somewhere else in the Punk Multiverse.
Death of the Republic. This is an online book with two components. A series of subject matter posts about the factors that have killed the Republic envisioned by the founders, plus a blog record of the early phases of the Biden administration after it took office. When I did briefly try to peddle this to a publisher, I was informed that a blog is never a book, so fugeddabout it. Never mind that the first novel ever written was in the form of a diary, as was the first pornographic novel (a shameless parody of the aforementioned first novel, ha ha ha). Another work that would be considered a blog were it published now, one of the greatest works of 20th Century history, William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. I’ll stop there. I promised “no sermons.” Sad thing about the publishing world. They’re still nostalgic for the pristine isolation of the typewriter and the line by line by line truth of their own cloistered caves. Sorry. Get on with it, IP. Which leads me to:
Afterpunk. A site I rarely promote. Very self-absorbed and often dark. I’m a writer, you know. We get that way, compelled to confess our own frailties, vanities, fails, empty boasts, and other me-me-me crap, with an occasional spike of illumination. My advice? Leave it alone. Go have fun at any of the following…
The Vomitorium. Things that make me want to throw up. Still a W-I-P. But what’s there is a good start anyway.
Beating Inflation in Secret with Joe. Funny. Mostly. Short. That’s good.
The Hillary Borg. Also funny. But more true than is good for any of us.
The Mermaid Organization. A complement to the Hillary site. They are intended to join in the out there of other W-I-P sites. But there’s enough to provide some directional cues to the seekers among us.
Beto Juice. He was a Boomlet. This is a Bloglet of his brief run at the White House. Done and dusted.
The Authors Hall of Attention. Another W-I-P site. More Pages (funny stuff) than Posts. That will change. Have the content, just haven’t got it posted yet. (Trying to kick myself with this reminder.)
The Afterworld. Didn’t get it done in time for the Biden/Harris second term. Got distracted by the election of all things. Curses, foiled again.
Exploring Video Sites
The Johnny Dodge Channel. Video and audio files numbering in the hundreds on all manner of topics. Food for browsing.
The Robert Laird Channel. A smaller collection of videos and audios, used most often to store things for easy use elsewhere, although most items work fine without external context.
The Random Thoughts Channel. Another small collection of things that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else.
Facebook. Includes videos created specifically for FB posts on current events and personalities, as well as audio files including personal material and excerpts from news and other broadcasts. Emphasis on humor on the video side, current events and issues on the audio side.
Boomer Bible Resources
All of these are available free of charge except for the book “Why is There a Boomer Bible?, which can be purchased at Amazon.
The Modern Archive. The complete book available for borrowing in increments of time. Noteworthy for being a page by page photographic copy of every page in the book, proven by the fact that here and there one can detect bleedthrough from the print on the other side of the page. Astonishing somebody did all that work. There’s no cost to borrow it for reading in full screen display mode.
The Original Boomer Bible Website. A vast site originated by fans of the book independently from the author, although he participated extensively after being informed of its existence. Too much content to describe and a lot of concealed but helpful gems of creative thinking about the book.
The Boomer Bible and 9/11. A large site detailing linkages between TBB and the Twin Tower attacks.
The Online TBB. It features the three testaments and a Live Intercolumn Reference, although it lacks the two Prefaces, the Book of Boomer Brayer, and the Hymnal.
Wikipedia. A overview. FWIW. Not by me.
Also:
Exploring Laird Books
They’re all shown and available at Amazon, except for The Boomer Bible (TBB), of which they may or may not have a copy.
The Books of R. F. Laird (All formats) 22 or more at this count. Fiction, satire, poetry, cultural commentary, history, and bibles.
TBB can always be procured from various booksellers on the Internet…
Exploring Facebook
There are various arcane ways of searching and exploring Facebook, from which I have been suspended multiple times, shadow-banned for months at a time, and generally regarded as a delinquent member. I have posted there off and on, more on than off to be frank, over a period of 10 years. There’s not that much overlap with my blog content, since my FB posts are more focused on what the mass media are talking about, whereas my own websites are focused on what I’m thinking about. You can get a good sense of this by selecting from my FB image files, which are indicative of post content and, when clicked on, display the image full,size with the accompanying post text. Clever feature. You can browse from here:
They’re shown in reverse order, newest first. Might be worth your while to give it a try. Guessing you’re still allowed to comment, no matter how old the posts are.
The Facebook Main Page has multiple new entries every day.
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That’s all for now. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Another angle on the White Christmas thing…
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