Monday, July 26, 2010


An Announcement
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friends -- You imagine it can't happen to you, and then it does. Here's why 2Blowhards disappeared: Our webhost, who'd given us impeccable service for eight years, made a wee goof. He put the backup disk on the same machine as the disk this blog (and various other websites) were on. It was only to be for a few weeks, while he prepared to move the backup to a super-secure offsite location. What were the chances of anything untoward happening during those mere few weeks? Then the motherboard fried, and it partially overwrote all of the disks on the machine, originals and backups alike. Poof went the blog, as well as its backup. The damage was so severe that it looked like there'd be no recovering any of our work whatsoever. We had a few anxious days, believe me about that. A lot of heroic work from specialists, though, finally turned up most of our content, enabling us to put 2Blowhards back online, even if minus several months' worth of recent postings. Our webhost swears on a stack of O'Reilly computer books that he'll never do anything so foolish as to put a backup disk on the same machine as the original, ever again. But our unexpected hiatus gave Donald, Friedrich and me a chance to evaluate where we stand vis a vis blogging. For a few weeks we wanted nothing more than for everything to return to normal. Then, as more time passed, our feelings started to change. We compared notes. We've been running 2Blowhards for a long time. How much did we really want to continue? What we finally decided is that 2Blowhards has reached the end of its natural lifetime -- and that, because of this, we're retiring the blog. We'll be keeping 2Blowhards online for a while (maybe even several years) as an archive of our work, but we won't be putting up any more new postings. I'll leave comments open for a few weeks, but I'll be closing them down soon after to keep the blog from turning into a spam-magnet. Friedrich and I first started posting here back in 2002; 2Blowhards was one of the very first of the cultureblogs. (Donald has been blogging with us since 2005; several other writers have contributed as well.) Our shared conviction was that the public conversation about culture was 'way too restricted, and was in dire need of being bashed around. The choke-hold that the official class -- the pros, the profs, the critics, the editors, the journalists, often the artists themselves -- had on how the arts were talked about and thought about drove us crazy. The opinion-making class would have you believe that there's only one -- or at most only a few -- ways to be a respectable, informed, and legit culturefan. Baloney to that, we felt. As we knew from experience, there are innumerable ways to enjoy an interest in the arts, as well as uncountable worthwhile ways to... posted by Michael at July 26, 2010 | perma-link | (0)