Thanks for reading. It’s been fun.

Some of you have figured out that I don’t own this web site. The guy who does has decided that it’s not making any money and just isn’t worth his effort. So he’s pulling the plug. He offered to sell it to me – lock, stock and histrionics – for $100. But I’m not going to take him up on it. The net-net on the net: ColorComments.com will soon be no more.

This site got started when I replied to an ad on Craigslist. It seemed like a straight-up deal so I went for it. It was a straight-up deal! I have to admit that the guy who owns the site lived up to his end of the deal and I did my part too. In the beginning, there were maybe six or eight of us who answered the Craigslist ad. After 454 blogs, I think I’m the last one still online. It was just the wrong idea at the wrong time.

When I started trying to be a writer, I invented a “rule” for myself: I don’t write for free. That’s the reason I won’t buy the site. The rule helps me stay focused on reality. I used to use computer wallpaper featuring a quote from the great English writer, Samuel Johnson to help me remember the rule.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

The purpose of the rule is not to get rich, but rather to stop myself from drifting off into irrelevance. The only real guarantee I have that my writing is actually worth anything is that someone is willing to pay for it. I don’t need much. This site has paid about $10 every six months but that’s actually enough. If someone went through the trouble of actually writing a check for ten cents, it would still be an affirmative act that would be enough. Self-delusion is a disease that ruins more minds than drugs. I don’t want to be another victim.

I’ve been trying to be a writer for about ten years now. It’s a tough biz. I don’t know how other people do it. I’ve been a “contributing editor” of a computer magazine that went belly up. I’ve written articles for several other magazines. I’ve gone to writing classes and seminars. And I’ve won prizes in two writing contests. I’ve been trying! You might think that would give me an entrée into greater things but I’ve discovered that the writing world is full of walls.

I’ve written one novel and another is almost finished. To my knowledge, exactly three people have read my novel completely through. (A couple of others claim they’re going to. They lie. You know who you are.) I really only have a file of rejection form letters from literary agents to show for my fiction writing effort.

My biggest success so far is a different web site I write for: visualbasic.about.com. People go to that site for technical answers about the Visual Basic programming language. It actually pays a decent amount of money. Even Samuel Johnson had to write a dictionary to pay the bills.

About.com is a web portal site owned by the New York Times. They’re probably the biggest money maker for the New York Times corporation, but that says more about the newspaper business and the average intelligence of Americans than About.com. The New York Times is a first class organization with amazingly excellent journalism. But they’re a money toilet. About.com mainly features topics like recipies and body-piercing advice. They scrape up lots of the money to be made by not underestimating the taste of the American public. The real money is in trivial and ignorant bloviation in America today. The fact that Limbaugh is the most highly paid radio personality on the air is a filthy stain on American culture. But my “rule” says that it’s “reality” regardless of my personal opinion about it.

Still, I can say that it has been a very rewarding experience for me. I hope the handful of you who have been readers can say the same.

This shot was taken on April Fool Day this year. I thought that when the weather starts to heat up in May, it will start to look better every day.

Access to the Eagle Craigs is from Rockville. The Eagle Craigs are part of a “Wilderness Study Area” but there’s always controversy. For example, a few years ago, Dan Jessop (one of the “Colorado City” Jessops) turned a fine for trespassing with 4X4 trucks on a nearby Wilderness Study Area into a multi-year legal battle that has become the poster child case for every off-road group in the country. By most accounts, about a hundred thousand dollars has been spent fighting a fine of a few hundred dollars. I couldn’t find any information about what eventually happened. Perhaps someone will let me know.

The view is toward the southeast across State Road 9 just at the entrance to Zion Canyon. The left side of the picture shows the entrance to Parunuweap Canyon – AKA – the East Fork of the Virgin. The entire access to Parunuweap is private property and it’s difficult to get there. You can hike down from the top, but it’s a difficult descent. One section of the trail has the name “Fat Man’s Misery”.

The Tea Party might not be a flash in the pan.

Charlie Crist’s departure from the Republican Party in Florida has a lot of people wondering just what’s happening to us. It’s a good question. As it turns out, there’s only one time in our (relatively) short history when something like this happened before.

The United States has always had a two-party system. We’re set up so that third parties can safely be ignored. Their only real impact has always been as a “spoiler” – as when Ralph Nader single-handedly elected the idiot Bush in 2000 (to his everlasting shame). But just once in history, it didn’t work that way.

In the 1850’s, our nation was unalterably split over the question of slavery. The Supreme Court had ruled in the Dred Scott case that slaves were still slaves even if they were taken to a free state. It all boiled over with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was essentially a “states rights” law that said states could decide by popular vote whether they would allow slavery or not. (Back then, Democrats were the champions of “states rights”!) Whigs, the opposition to the Democrats at the time, could never figure out where they stood on the issue. Here’s Wikipedia’s take on it:

“The party was ultimately destroyed by the question of whether to allow the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-slavery faction successfully prevented the nomination of its own incumbent President Fillmore in the 1852 presidential election; instead, the party nominated General Winfield Scott, who was soundly defeated. Its leaders quit politics (as Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The voter base defected to the Republican Party, various coalition parties in some states, and to the Democratic Party. By the 1856 presidential election, the party had lost its ability to maintain a national coalition of effective state parties.”

This is essentially what the Tea Party people want to do – destroy the Republican Party as it now stands and elect the next President, just as Lincoln was elected in 1860, on the ashes. It’s not that far fetched. Today’s Republicans can’t figure out what they stand for either. Grass-roots Republicans believe in balanced budgets, non-interference in foreign wars, and smaller governments. Republican administrations run monsterous budget deficits, start or continue foreign wars, and expand the federal government. (Bush was responsible for the biggest expansion of federal power seen since Roosevelt.) Republican voters tend to vote “against” the other guy rather than “for” their own guy (They are ‘The Party of No’.) but they figure it out eventually.

There is no single, soul wrenching issue that unites them like slavery united the Republicans in 1860, however. Even if the Tea Party people were somehow successful, I’m not sure what they would do.

The key lesson for the Democrats in all this is to avoid the same awful fate. Passing health care was a good first step in actually standing for something. But we need more. Much more.