A quick post from my iPhone simply to say: keep that beer away from your computer. Far away. You might think, “I’m no drunkard, no blunderbuss, no thoughtless rube. I need not be concerned when my ale is in close proximity to my computing device!”
But I tell you now: You are wrong!
As many readers already know, the reason I have not been blogging lately is because I was the victim of a violent assault last week from which I’m still trying to recover. I’m writing now to say “I’m alive”, for one, but also to make a kind of promise that I’ll start writing more soon, particularly about the incident* in question.
To do that, I still need some more distance from the attack to digest it, repair myself a bit more physically and psychologically, and get some perspective. There are still myriad medical and legal issues swirling around it, so it feels too early to do what I consider a kind of official chronicling of the assault.
But I’m feeling a little better, the elections and other events have my mental machinery churning, and I’d like to get back on the horse. So I hope you can expect more posts from me soon, one of which will eventually be the story of something that has violently shaken my life and that of my family. I’ll also get to tell you about some of the wonderful folks who have been helping us out.
So please don’t remove Near Earth Object from your bookmarks and RSS readers. Neither I or this blog are dead. More is coming.
* I hate referring to it as an “incident,” though I find myself and others doing it anyway — it implies a kind of banality that offends my memory of what I’ve been through. But that’s for later, I suppose.
For being relatively obscure on the Web, I do a great deal of worrying over how to package my bloggery. First I had a separate blog for my music and theatre work, and another for my political opinion. Then I merged the two, which was the first incarnation of Near Earth Object. Soon I began blogging so much on the subject of atheism in American culture, that I felt it best to begin a new blog wholly on that subject: Bloc Raissoneur. That became my prime outlet, and so I yet again merged all my blogs into one. But eventually I felt that the name was too hard for folks to remember and understand, and that my blog host, Google, was being too evil.
So it was time for yet another change. Hopefully the last change for a long time. But it’s a good one, I think. This is, once again, Near Earth Object, one blog to rule them all. This blog will cover everything its predecessors and namesakes did: politics, culture, atheism, books, parenthood, my own music, my theatre work, etc. It will also envelop and take the place of my Tumblr blog, Mr. Fidalgo Would Have Your Attention. So Near Earth Object will have it all: long-form essays, shorter observations, and quick snippets of quotes or images that have caught my fancy (or ire).
You might notice the theme of this blog mimics somewhat the old Tumblr blog; I really grew to love its minimalism and lack of noise. I don’t consider this theme in-stone, and I will be relying on the help of folks such as Justin Sapp to help me refine it. Speaking of help, I owe an enormous thank you to Synthaetica of Un:Enslaved for hosting this blog and going to so much effort to get it up on its feet (and more recently with help from Jesse Galef). Another thank you goes to Alan Simpson (Twitter/Tumblr) who tried to valiantly to make this new site work as a Posterous blog, but its limitations frustrated me too much to commit. Also thanks to Miranda Celeste Hale (sort of my blog-sister-in-spectacles) for her help and advice.
Bloc Raisonneur and Mr. Fidalgo Would Have Your Attention will go dormant, probably permanently. All their material, with minor exceptions, now lives here. I think I’ll stay here a while, too.
Due to my ham-fisted tinkering, I may have destroyed all the comments ever placed on this blog. I’m working on bringing them back, but it may be too late. If so, I apologize!
Update: Okay, the old comments are back, though I did destroy any comments on this post. Sorry, Brent. 🙂
Let me just get this out of the way, for formality’s sake. As I mentioned to some who follow me on Facebook and Twitter, I have a new job, and that job places me in a more formal position within the atheist movement. This, of course, can put a minor strain on what I now say publicly in regards to atheism, religion, politics, etc., as one can never tell what will be in conflict with the message of my organization, what might reflect one way or the other on said organization, and on and on. So let me simply say that nothing on this blog or on my Examiner column is in any way endorsed by, approved by vetted by, associated with, married to, dating, or has in any way to do with the organization that employs me. That said, I will be experimenting post by post with what I feel is now appropriate given my new role. This concerns me very little, frankly, and I don’t expect any readers would really even notice a difference, particularly since I have expanded the scope of this blog beyond mere godlessness. I will, however, never blog about my employers’ activities, or anything to do with the group, other than perhaps promote my own appearance at an event or when I am giving an address, simply to let you know I’ll be doing it, but that’ll be it. Okay? Okay.
Speaking of which, I’ll be speaking this Sunday to the Center for Inquiry’s DC branch, doing my “new taxonomy for atheists” spiel. This, too, has nothing whatsoever to do with the aforementioned employing organization.
Whew.
In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been absent yet. The signs we thought we were getting last week that our baby was going to be born any second seem to have turned out to be erroneous. This evening, however, Jessica–who normally goes to bed no later than 10pm–decided at 9:45pm that she absolutely had to vacuum the bathroom floor.
The lore, of course, is that when preggies get those overwhelming “nesting” urges (to clean up the house and whatnot), birth may be imminent. Well, so far, nothing’s brewing, but I am, as always, ready.
So for now we remain at BIRTHCON 3. When she hits pre-labor, we’ll raise the alert to BIRTHCON 4, and I’ll probably let the tweetosphere know it’s happening.
If you’d like to be among the few, the select, the bored who are following the Fetus Fidalgo developments, follow me and the hashtag #fetusfidalgo.
Just a quick heads up to let folks know that the birth of my son could happen any day now, so if you notice that I have suddenly stopped blogging, no, it’s not because I’ve found Jesus (in my trunk), but because I am gleefully (and I imagine sleepily) looking after my offspring.
It is also possible that the kid is going to wait until mid-December to come out or something crazy like that, but IIIIII don’t think so.
Until then, of course, I plan to keep prognosticating semi-regularly. I’m just saying: if things go dark for a while, that’s why.
Same goes for my Examiner column, of course, where you can listen to my recent address to the Northern Virginia Ethical Society. That should hold you over.
Twitter has become such an ingrained part of my heretical online existence, that it seems silly not to integrate some of it into this blog. On Fridays, the Tweetosphere bogs itself down with well-intentioned tweeps plugging the folks they think everyone else should be following. So starting this Follow Friday (#FF), I hope to highlight one tweep every week that I think had made the Twitter experience a more interesting one.
I cannot promise to keep up with this in a perfectly consistent way, but if you remind me, I’ll be less likely to forget.
So for my first #FF entry, I’m going to recommend someone whose own blog-tweet melding has inspired this idea: Julie Ward, a.k.a. @rationalbehavio, who is responsible for the blog Attempts at Rational Behavior. Apart from traditional blogging, she keeps track of particularly ridiculous religionist tweets and adds her own snarky commentary. Her new series, Ignoramus of the Week, is one of my new favorite things on the InterTubes. (And this week’s is a doozy.)
So go ahead and sign yourself up to follow. Of course, you can always find me in the Twitterverse here: @PaulFidalgo.
Live in the DC area? Have you reproduced in the past 8 or so years? Like silly musicals? Have I got a distraction for you.
KT for Prez!, Charter Theater’s new children’s musical about a 6-year-old girl running for president, has opened at Theatre on the Run in Arlington, VA. The book is by Jessica North Macie and the music is by me. That’s right. Bring your kids, learn a little about politics, honesty, and vegetables, and hear music written and recorded by yours truly.
I want to bring my kid, but he probably wouldn’t hear it all that well while still residing in my wife’s abdomen.
As for you, you can click here to find out more.
Near Earth Archive 