A PAUSE FOR REFLECTION

This blog began on October tenth, 2005. At that time I needed to park a number of links to interesting Jewish blogs, and I was getting back into seriously reading material that I had jumped all over several times in the preceding years.

"Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath ... "

Yes, a fair amount of that material was Torah Talmud. That stuff has always been a fascination, ever since an old friend of my mother wrote a book about the development of the Jewish and Christian deity in the context of other gods and deitic concepts in the ancient Near-East.
It was more-or-less a social history of monotheism against a Documentary Hypothesis background.

[No, I shall not mention the book, as I cannot remember the author or her name. When she wrote it I was not even a teenager. When I was a teenager, I was peculiar.]


At that time (2005) I was also still steaming mad at the Dutch, largely because of anti-American garbage on the editorial pages and in the comment sections of Dutch Newspapers: The NRC Handelsblad, the Algemeen Dagblad, Telegraaf, Volkskrant, De Limburger, and Het Parool, among others.

The Dutch have for several decades been snooty and arrogant about us filthy Yanks, and the sheer gibbering idiocy of the Bush Regime gave them far too much fuel. Plus, like many right-thinking Europeans, they hated Israel. Especially at that time, because Israel, as every body knows, is the "Little Satan", palsy-walsy with the United States, who are the "Big Satan".

No right-thinking European has been palsy-walsy with the United States since the Vietnam War, when the left over there gained the upper hand regarding socio-political dialectic.

[From my second to my eighteenth year I was in Holland. And I'm still bitterly resentful of the attitudes towards Americans that were prevalent then among "educated" Hollanders.]


Most Americans, insular and blinkered, were (and are) ditheringly oblivious to all of that; if they thought about Europe at all, it was in terms of cheese, museums, and natives lining the road to the front waving bottles of wine as Eisenhower's troops headed into the fray.


In the ten years that I've blathered here -- it's a soapbox, and I am the Lizard-King of Suds, dammit -- much has been mentioned.
There have been changes, there has been growth.


This blog is far less Jewish than it started off.

This blog is far less Zionist than before.

This blog is far less Netherlandish.

This blog is less anti-Dutch.

This blog is less angry.


There is more food, more Chinese stuff, and not as much Indonesian and South-East Asian material. As I stopped subscribing to any mailinglists populated by know-it-all Dutchmen, the amount of fury towards the Dutch, in their language, has also lessened.

I should also mention that though I still read Dutch newspapers on the internet, it's mostly limited to Het Parool and the Telegraaf.
Glib stuff, and cats in trees.


Also, five years into this blog -- five years ago -- my relationship with Savage Kitten changed from love and lust to friendship. Just friendship.
Yes, I am now as romantically unattached as any teenager fears to be, and sometimes I feel far more alone than I could possibly have understood when I was a teenager.

But at other times I am still a teenager.


I've nearly killed myself with hot sauce several times. Optimism.


The amount of anti-Christian bile, and venom directed at Republicans, has increased somewhat. That was inevitable, and is all their fault.


The one thing which has remained constant is that I do not publish between late afternoon on Friday and nightfall on Saturday.
This blog is not kosher, but it is shomer-shabbes.




I am looking forward to ten more years of spewing myself here.
By that time, I may be senile and speaking in tongues.




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