It was exactly a year ago today that I published my first diary, Unknown American Artist Edition, for Top Comments. You were all so welcoming and interested in my obscure painter that I knew I had found my family within a family here. And since then I've published 41 more diaries (as you remember, I took a 15-day break during June, some of which provided fodder for another Top Comments diary) and I've had a wonderful time doing so.
Yes, I did a couple of brain-numbingly stupid things (exactly two I'll admit to, in fact, one of which, well . . .), but you forgave me for them, so follow me below the Great Orange Divider Doodle as I review the high points and the low points of this year -- and wasn't it a year!
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Please come in. You're invited to make yourself at home!
So the high points. What do I write here? I think the only thing I really stay away from my "regular" writing is literature. I don't stay away from history (the Sarah Josepha Hale edition for erev Thanksgiving, for instance); I CERTAINLY don't stay away from music (I'm only writing music diaries for Top Comments now), and I don't stay away from LGBT issues either, especially since (I'm sure you're tired of hearing this, Chris) that's what brought me to Top Comments to begin with.
I write recovery efforts: Don Marquis and his characters, Archy and Mehitabel, and the comic strip Pogo. I write memorial diaries: for Jonathan Winters and for Ray Manzarek. 41? 42, really, because one of the diaries I wrote a lot of was published as Steveningen's. That was fun. You know what else was fun? I think I know why Election Day 2102 was available. 21 Top Comments. Most of which came in after 5 PM. All of which had to be formatted. I concentrated on the election results which affected LGBT Americans and I was thus able to do a lot of linking to other diaries. As I said in the comments:
Of course, I was given lemonade to begin with, and all I really did was pick out the decorative pitcher to put it in.
My niche? Do I really have to have one? I THINK that
Puppets with a Twist might be the great exemplar diary of what I bring to the Top Comments party. As I said in the intro:
In this world of paywalls, every so often you find an article that SCREAMS "diary me" that you can't link to because you subscribe to it on a gadget that doesn't give you access to the article on the net. This time, it's an absolutely fascinating article by Joan Acocella in the April 15 issue of the New Yorker , which I read on my Kindle, about an American puppeteer named Basil Swift who has taken puppetry FAR beyond anything that we normally think of when we think of puppets. Fortunately, there's enough video (and the trip to YouTube said, "Diary me, YOU IDIOT"!!!) to allow me to tell this story
Diary me, you ask?
I should explain the "diary me" command I've been throwing around in comments for a while. My most recent "diary me" moment [I wrote the diary this is from for Top Comments in February] was in President Obama's second inaugural when he said "Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall" -- Steveningen will tell you my reaction was a "diary me" reaction. All those diaries where I went after Erik Eckholm in the New York Times for talking to the radical right on stuff like reparative therapy? "Diary me." Paul Ryan, eviscerated by Charles Pierce? "Diary me." VERY rarely, unless it's Seneca Falls, etc. or some of my few meta-diaries like Coming Out and the "F" word: Discussing LGBT issues at Daily Kos, does a "diary me" diary take more than 30 minutes to write.
I hyperlinked the diary in the blockquote because I think it's the best diary I've written here at the GOS. Incidentally,
Puppets with a Twist took me a LOT more than 30 minutes to write!
And then I write about art, and I write about my own life. The first two months after Jim died, I shared with Daily Kos in general. After that, just with my family (diaries for you, comments for New Day) within the Daily Kos community. A good number of those. I think the two most exemplar of THOSE are a pair of companion diaries (actually, here we have a trilogy, only I didn't write the middle one): The Overcompensation Edition as I entered the fifth month of my bereavement, Steveningen's diary Dave with a Pearl Earring - The Lost Vermeer Edition, and My New Phone Edition. THAT was an adventure. Thank you, Top Comments, for making it possible. As Dragon 5616 said in Chrislove's Seventh Anniversary diary,
Top Comments needs community participation to work and so does Daily Kos. As the banner says: NEWS COMMUNITY ACTION. Community is right in the middle. It's the link between news and action. And Top Comments is right in the middle of community.
Incidentally, the new phone diary went on until WELL past midnight Eastern. We had fun with it.
But now, the brain-numbingly stupid things. Of course we remember that on May 2 I completely forgot I had Top Comments for that day (something many of us have done). I got something together to post 25 minutes late and you obligingly made it a really nice open thread about, well, NOTHING. We had a lot to say about nothing too.
I really have not apologized sufficiently for the other one. As fate would have had it, I had the Top Comments assignment for December 5, 2012. I had something ready, too, because I had a lot of academic assignments that semester and, since my major teaching responsibilities had ended around Hallowe'en, I was trying to get things that I knew I had to get done done and out of the way. Yes, you ASKED if I wanted someone else to write that night, but NoooOOOOoo. Never mind that I was wrangling the high-impact diary for that week. It didn't occur to selfish me that maybe YOU wanted to do something along the lines of said high-impact diary for me, which would have been MUCH more appropriate than the whiny meta stuff I posted. I was trying to make believe everything was normal and SHOULD be like normal was the day before (yes, that's denial). Thank you so much for your help, brillig, and we got through the evening well EVEN THOUGH I kept responding to the whiny meta stuff that you were courteous enough to address because I hadn't left you an avenue to address what what you really wanted to address. And of course 14 of the 25 comments in Top Mojo the next day in BeninSC's diary were from the high-impact diary and there was even a picture of me in the picture quilt that navajo had posted from the red-carpet lunch for me in November.
My excuse, of course, is that I was in shock, which I was. I've thought about that and how it happened, and my conclusion is that you were all too nice. If you had told me that I shouldn't write and that one of you would take care of it I probably would have understood. Now we know, and I hope we don't have to do that for anyone else.
But I learned from that. Seven weeks later, I understood the process and shelved a diary that ran the following week (my Jimi Hendrix Experience diary - and didn't we have fun with that) to do my first "how am I doing" recap after Jim died especially for the Top Comments community, because two of you were featured in it, only that's not all that happened. New Year's Day with gizmo59 and his husband. The first LA Kossacks meetup. My first weekend under the care of steveningen and scaboni. All restorative, but that diary was written at exactly the moment when commonmass and I began to bond as members of a club we didn't really want to belong to. Hence the title: The Cosmos Giveth and the Cosmos Taketh Away Edition. Interestingly, that received the most recommendations (78) of all the diaries I wrote in the past year, and it probably deserved them. Number 2? Well, my MOST meta diary, what with all the concatenation of trolls that night (elfling even showed up to report on one of them): my Trolls at Daily Kos DK4's Fault Edition which had 72 and BY FAR the most comments of any of my Top Comments diaries (192).
I also wrote two diaries that were SUPPOSED to be for Top Comments but that ended up being for the whole Kos community. The first one was modeled after a rather spectacular Top Comments diary. As I wrote
Regular visitors to Top Comments also probably remember the wonderful diary BeninSC wrote about the quilt the community made for him to help him through his recovery from a horrific bicycle accident.
I thought it was such a good diary it was the ONLY thing that came to mind when I had the occasion to thank the Kos community for a quilt and I signed up for the February 17 Edition, which would have been Jim's 67th birthday, for it. But I procrastinate, and
the actual diary (which I DID republish to Top Comments) published at 2:20 AM Eastern February 18. It was especially for you and for the SF Kossacks, and I'm very happy with the way it came out. For my February 17 commitment to Top Comments? I wrote
something I knew I could write in 45 minutes at 5:30 PM when I realized the quilt diary wouldn't be finished.
The other one ran into the same completion process issues but it wasn't as obvious. That was the diary I had to write (yes, there was a "diary me" command involved) about my first Netroots Nation and the four days I spent in San Francisco afterward. (And how about the hugging, brillig?) It was supposed to be finished for Pride Sunday (June 30) but it just wasn't. But, as it happens, I wrote one of my better (not that you'd know by the numbers) diaries on the history of Pride celebrations the Sunday I had expected to publish the omnibus diary and, from the comments, it seems that you all had a good time with that diary too.
Wow! I've had such a good time being an official member of the Top Comments family. I really like giving back, and occasionally teaching, and I expect to be just as erudite and quirky in selecting my subject matter for you and for this community in the months to come. And, of course, more Happy Gay Fun Hours!
And now for the stuff that makes this Top Comments:
TOP COMMENTS, August 8, 2013
Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors! Let us hear from YOU when you find that proficient comment.
From blue aardvark:
This contribution from Bindle to Jed Lewison's diary on Mitch McConnell's Tea Party-tinged campaign manager rated a Zing!
From
Crashing Vor:
Hillbilly Dem relates a thigh slapper of a not-racist getting called out [and sets off a confessional thread] in my own diary, "I'm Not a Racist."
From
Ekaterin:
elfling's diary about the first stage of DK5 was a gold mine for comments. In this case, Mokurai's reply to our submitter's comment,imagining what would have happened had the changes been announced in a hate-mail-a-palooza diary made our submitter laugh.
From
smileycreek:
This entire thread, kicked off by blue aardvark and abetted by xxdr zombiexx, marathon, and delver rootnose in elfling's diary about the first stage of DK5 is Top Comment-worthy.
And further along in the same diary, blue aardvark made another comment that was flagged by elfling as well as by kos himself!
From
your intrepid diarist:
It feels like a serious day here at DKos. You would have expected, in Jen Hayden's diary about Dr. Sanjay Gupta explaining why medical marijuana is in fact a good idea, that I wouldn't have to mine it until comment #191 to find Roadbed Guy's invocation of Lily Tomlin to explain why cynicism is an equally good idea.
TOP MOJO, August 7, 2013
(excluding Tip Jars and first comments)
1) Outstanding diary by skepticalcitizen — 170
2) If we don't have domestic spying programs, by thenekkidtruth — 150
3) "if america does it, it's not a crime"... by memofromturner — 143
4) Best diary of the year, IMO... by Love Me Slender — 140
5) Cops are out of control by xxdr zombiexx — 115
6) "I am disappointed." How do you think we feel? by FishOutofWater — 115
7) Lewis knows the need for by xxdr zombiexx — 103
8) Wow... by Meteor Blades — 95
9) I wish the media was half as liberal by Major Kong — 90
10) Depressing: Nixon quotes being used to effect by David Harris Gershon — 88
11) You'd almost feel sorry for the guy... by Blazehawkins — 87
12) Disgusting cretins by Jimmy D 84 — 86
13) Completely crazy will NEVER be crazy enough by Walt starr — 86
14) Most of the time I just wish there were some news by akadjian — 84
15) These are strong words from him given by David Harris Gershon — 82
16) The GOP has no good options left by dricey — 77
17) I wish Obama were half as socialist by Dallasdoc — 77
18) Lewis speaks from a position of white privilege by FishOutofWater — 75
19) Enslaved Africans worked stolen "Indian" land by FishOutofWater — 72
20) If Dr. Fata actually gets 20 years... by Meteor Blades — 71
21) The election of the first Black President by Diogenes2008 — 71
22) Should be 20 years of chemo treatment. by Jen Hayden — 71
23) That's what the Taliban did. Crazy was never by cuphalffull — 71
24) Ha by david mizner — 69
25) We are ALL Africans by Tony McArthur — 66
26) Amazing how many people hate America, and by detroitmechworks — 66
27) Most of us are glad, TomP. by MBNYC — 66
28) Obama: Guilty of PWB by banjolele — 66
29) Hard Left turn? by CwV — 64
30) I worked with a black guy many years ago by xxdr zombiexx — 63
For an explanation of How Top Mojo Works, see
mik's
FAQing Top Mojo
TOP PHOTOS, August 7, 2013
Enjoy jotter's wonderful PictureQuilt below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. Have fun, Kossacks!