I found it. The end of the rainbow, a double rainbow, in fact. Location: Tellico Lake, Tellico Village in Loudon, Tenn. I can report that there were no pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, green men, fairies or gods at the end. Just beauty.

"Complicated"

Julian Symmetry 1

Crescent

View more here.

I don’t think I’ve posted about this before on this site, but, I’m into fractal art. I’ll try to post some more in the future as I make them. Enjoy. These were created using Mandelbulb 3D.

Fractal: Baker's Dozen

Fractal: Starfish in Pastel

Fractal: Walk the Plank

View more here.

If I could make it rain today | And wash away this sunny day down to the gutter I would
Just to get a change of pace | Things are getting worse, but I feel a lot better …

You know it’s been awhile when, just out of curiosity — I did this 30 seconds ago  —  you have to load your own website into the browser just to make sure you’re still up and running.

Looks like we are still live. That said, I will explain briefly the nature of this much too long hiatus. First, I moved to a different state and to a new job. As such, I wasn’t online for a good portion of that hiatus. As it turns out, AT&T’s promised “self-installation” U-verse package doesn’t quite live up to the billing. Second, and this is the real kicker, I write more, much more, at the new job. Thus, my creative energies get utilized more throughout the day rather than just for 30 minutes or an hour late at night and half-medicated on port. Third, I really enjoy Madden 12. Don’t get me wrong. I suck at it, but I have slowly been climbing my way out of the gutter. Thus, instead of being 20 games behind .500, I am now about 10 back. That’s what we call progress. Fourth, I really enjoy reading long and verbose accounts of the Civil War. And it wouldn’t much matter if I liked it or not at this point. I’m now entrenched in the 2012 office read-off, except this time, Blake and I happen to be in different offices. But I’m sure that won’t stop us from slogging our through one obscure book after another.

So, yes. I’ve been slacking off with regard to this site. Fresher posts are forthcoming. I hope. I never have quite been able to reach my goal of one or more post every single day, and I don’t know if I will. We’ll still call it a goal, but I’m afraid if I commit to it for sure, one hobby will just have to go. Did I mention I’ve been studying some calculations in order to improve my skills at Texas Hold’em? Good use of my time, I know.

OK, so I don’t have an exact page count for both of us — we both teetered out a little toward the end of the year  — but in the office read-off between Blake and myself, we completed somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,500 pages apiece totaling 21 books each. Without further adieu, here are our towers side by side in the order with which we completed them (books on the bottom were read near the beginning of 2011):

My tower on the right is missing “Tried By War” by McPherson because a pal of ours is currently reading it. And to answer the most immediate question that may surface about this post: yes, judging from the rather dense material above, we’ve got problems.

In any case, here is my list for 2011:

- “Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920″ – Gillis Harp – 264
- “Letter to a Christian Nation” – Sam Harris (reread) – 114
- “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” – David S. Reynolds – 592
- “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho – 165
- “Middlemarch: A study of Provincial Life” by George Eliot – 794
- “1491″ – 403
- “Thomas Jefferson Vs. Religious Oppression” – 150
- “Night” by Elie Weisel – 120
- “1421: The Year China Discovered America” by Gaven Menzies – 491, finished in spring
- “From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion” by Robert Leckie – 623, finished in late spring
- “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson” by Charles B. Sanford – 179, finished in summer
- “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” by James McPherson – 384, finished in summer
- “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South” by Albert Raboteau – 321, finished in summer
- “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” by John Andrew III – 199, finished in august
- “Union 1812: The Americans who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A.J. Langguth – 409, finished 9/7/11 = 5208
- “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788″ by Pauline Maier – 489, finished 10/2/11 = 5697
- “The Federalist Papers” by Madison, Hamilton and Jay – 527, finished 10/30/11 = 6224
- “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby – 370
- “The Theory of the Leisure Class” by Thorstein Veblen – 400 = 6994
- “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler – 260
- “The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution 1781-1788″ by Jackson Turner Main – 286 = 7540 (21 books)

I nominate “Ratification” as the de facto best book that I’ve read this year, with “From Sea to Shining Sea” coming in second and “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” at a close third. My personal favorite was “John Brown: Abolitionist,” and my proudest achievement this year would be, of course, “Middlemarch.” Shew. Looks like I’ll have to bring out the heavy guns this year to top that. Maybe some Edward Gibbon is in order.

OK, so yeah, this is a little bit gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but here we have Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt singing and playing a New Year’s Eve tune. Zooey is on the lukulule, while Levitt is on the guitar.

The only thing that fascinates me about this is that movie stars are typically so sheltered from the general public that we rarely get to see what they are like as people. Zooey, on YouTube (user name: hellogiggles), breaks this trend, and that’s one reason why I’m a fan:

For the record, I don’t know if I am going to stay with the banner that I just added to the site, revert back to the old one or create several that I can just rotate in and out. If anyone has feedback on it, good, bad or ugly, shoot me a comment or email me.

I’m into fractal art and that was what I used to create the banner. Here is the original image:

Credit: Jeremy Styron

The idea behind this piece is a philosophical one, and it expresses the kind of dread that we would be faced with if, indeed, there was a permanent, unalterable god watching us every waking and sleeping hour of our entire lives, and, as Hitchens said many times, even after we are dead and when the real fun begins. The “man” in the image is seen kneeling and cowering in the shadows at the bottom and heaven’s various “entities” (God and the angels) are portrayed by the blue and white forms above. The image and the banner are not to be interpreted with a kind of acceptance of such a scenario, but rather, sardonically, as I hope the quote from Bertrand Russell, and well, the content of this site, indicates.

As readers will see, I am now attempting, shamelessly, to monetize this site.

For more than three years, I have offered original commentary, book reviews, film reviews, etc., on this site for free. I liked that model, as this website remained free of clutter. But let’s face it. My stream of consciousness prose takes time to produce, and if this site can generate a little extra scratch, I might as well jump in.

This site generates more than 100,000 hits per month, and I thought it was time to begin seeking out sponsorships for the website.

So, here’s the deal: As an introductory offer, I will offer advertisers 50 percent off on a banner ad of your choosing and regular price after the first month.* Available ad spots include at the top of this site, along the right sidebar and at bottom. I would prefer spots to be at least remotely relevant to the content of this site (i.e., book stores or other retailers, graphics or web design companies, musical acts, photographers, or anything else artsy) but will accept any type of ad so long as it does not contain explicit or pornographic content.

Here are my regular rates and banner sizes (subject to change):

• 125×125 — $150
• 468×60 — $315
• 160×600 — $450
• 728×90 — $490

For now, I am using “canned” ads but will simply replace those ads with your ad or run them alongside your ad.

Contact me here for ad inquiries.

The second round of business: notice in the menu bar, I have added a link titled, “My Amazon Store.” Here, you can find book in topics that are of interest to me (philosophy, history, literature, etc.). You can also follow the link to purchase any or all of the books that I have read in 2011 or on which I have written reviews in the past year.

That’s about it. I hope these changes aren’t too distracting. Just trying to bring myself into the 21st century of blogging, even if my reading list keeps me, enchantingly, trapped somewhere between the 18th and 19th.

Please support this site’s sponsors, and as always, thanks for reading.

* Note: Ads must be free of explicit or pornographic material and must be approved by me before going live.

For the first post on this read-off, see here. In short, Blake, a co-worker of mine and I are having a friendly office read-off to challenge each other on reading this year … or to torture ourselves. We’re not sure which one is more accurate.

In any case, 2011 is winding down, and at this point, I’m about 600 pages behind him. I’m not sure how that happened, except for the fact that Blake and I seem to deal with workweek loathing in different ways. I tend to drink more, read less and kill people in Counter Strike: Source more. He apparently just reads, and I respect that. Heck, tonight I worked almost 12 hours with only about a 30 minute break, wrote three stories for the newspaper after 7 p.m. and still found time to get through about 15 pages of “Freethinkers” (See my last post). Reading does provide a release. Oh, and if anyone is curious, no, we are not just speed reading or plowing through pulp fiction like Dean Koontz, although in order to catch up, I have seriously considered it.

For the most part, with a few exceptions, it’s all been non-fiction and fairly meaty material at that. I’m attempting to retain as much of the information as possible, and I’m sure Blake is as well, since, if you don’t read non-fiction to learn, you might as well not read.

I’m trying to shoot for at least 8,000 pages by the end of the year. Here’s the list:

- “Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920″ – Gillis Harp – 264
- “Letter to a Christian Nation” – Sam Harris (reread) – 114
- “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” – David S. Reynolds – 592
- “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho – 165
- “Middlemarch: A study of Provincial Life” by George Eliot – 794
- “1491″ – 403
- “Thomas Jefferson Vs. Religious Oppression” – 150
- “Night” by Elie Weisel – 120
- “1421: The Year China Discovered America” by Gaven Menzies – 491, finished in spring
- “From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion” by Robert Leckie – 623, finished in late spring
- “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson by Charles B. Sanford – 179, finished in summer
- “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” by James McPherson – 384, finished in summer
- “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South” by Albert Raboteau – 321, finished in summer
- “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” by John Andrew III – 199, finished in august
- “Union 1812: The Americans who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A.J. Langguth – 409, finished 9/7/11 = 5208
- “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788″ by Pauline Maier – 489, finished 10/2/11 = 5697
- “The Federalist Papers” by Madison, Hamilton and Jay – 527, finished 10/30/11 = 6224
- “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby – (Currently reading. On page 205 as of Nov. 7, 2011) = 6429

Of course, I will provide another update at the end of the year and list my favorite book, the most rewarding and the most difficult.