Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Stage 3 of my summer vacation starts today -- posting will be light to non-existent for the next three weeks, so chat amongst yourselves!

I wrote this twenty years ago today (well, technically yesterday now):

Twenty years ago, a boy of eight sat in front of a decrepit black and white TV and tried to make out the suited figures walking across that desolate surface. If he thought hard he could remember Gemini. His father could remember Lindbergh. He couldn't appreciate how immeasurably far the world had come since Kitty Hawk, how impossibly great an effort had been expended since 1961, but he knew what was important and he was there watching. He heard the words that everyone knows, and he watched until that strange buglike craft lifted and returned the men whom history had just rendered immortal to their companion in orbit and from there back to the embrace of the mother planet. He knew where he was going when he grew up.

Twenty years later, when the future he had planned on has been bargained away, he's sure of fewer things. He does know that he had the privilege that July day in 1969, of living through the event to which all previous human history will be just a footnote. And he knows too that whatever else may happen, there will still be ...

footprints on the Moon.

If you have looked in on the blog today, you will have noticed lots of spam comments. I've been cleaning them out every time I check in, but this is by far the worst spam attack I've yet seen. And it's weird spam too -- It just seems like randomly generated garbage which isn't even trying to sell anything or bump the link counts of spam blogs.

At any rate, it finally just got too bad to keep up with, and I have broken down and installed the "WP-Spamfree" plugin, which is supposed to be very good about blocking spam comments from "bots" without rejecting comments by legitimate humans. We will see!

If you think it is blocking your comments by mistake, let me know at closings at columbiaclosings dot ocm

There is still a list of words, by the way, that will get your comment sent to the approval queue so that I have to manually let it go through. This includes lots of brand names for medicines, the words"insurance", "poker" and a number of others -- If your comment doesn't go through immediately, wait a bit, and if it's legit, I should approve it from the queue next time I check in. This is *not* related to the spam plugin, and has been in effect for months.

I don't run this blog to make money, which is good, because it doesn't.

On the other hand, if it did make some money, that certainly wouldn't be unwelcome. I would gladly do a seven figure deal for the movie rights (I would insist on Speilberg directing..), and who knows, more realistically, I might try to shop around a Columbia Closings book someday.

I went so far as to sign up for Google Adsense, and may actually turn it on at some point, but that requires some work with the theme and HTML, and looking at Internet chatter it appears that a blog targeted at a 40+ demographic in one medium-sized city is not going draw the traffic to make it worth-while. Now, don't take that wrong, it's already worth-while for me, and I'm happy to have each and every one of you Columbia Closings readers and commenters!

What I can do fairly easily is open a Cafe Press store. Cafe Press is a web shop that will put your designs on products of your choosing -- the standard set of merchandise: Tee shirts, cofee mugs, postcards, prints, wall clocks and the like. Now, I don't really have designs per-se, I just have pictures, but some of them I like pretty well, so I've set up an initial shop with some Columbia landmark products, as well as a bit of coastal scenery from Pawleys Island. If anyone actually buys anything, I'll be adding some more, if not, well, as W.C Fields said:

If at first you don't succeed...try, try, again. Then quit. There's no use being a danm fool about it.

I believe Cafe Press to be a reputable operation, so I expect that deficiencies, if there are any, will be due to my pictures not being as exemplary as I had thought, but in that case, they have a 30 day return policy.

Anyway, take a look here, that's always free!

Quicktime VIdeo:

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After Vacation Part 1 a few weeks ago, I'm down in Charleston for the Piccolo Fringe.

I saw The Upright Citizens Brigade tonight and it was a very funny show. They will be playing again during the week, and I recommend you come down and see a few shows. Tickets are available through Publix or ticketmaster.com. The whole fringe schedule is at The Have Nots site, and of course I will be catching the holy city's own national quality improv troupe as well.

Anyway, posting will be light to nonexistant for the rest of the week, though I will try to pop in often enough to keep comment spam down.

Everybody have a great holiday weekend!

I've been doing some research this weekend, and by research, I mean Xeroxing old phonebooks.

I've had some old USC phonebooks in the house and have used them here from time to time, but old Columbia phonebooks are surprisingly hard to come by. I believe I've hit all the antique malls in town at one time or another without any result, and even went so far as to put an ad on Craigslist. Even that one though only netted me a 2000 book (though it is much appreciated!), not anything from the 50s through 90s.

Then I had one of those D'oh! moments and went down to the RCPL on Assembly street and it turns out they have AT&T/Bellsouth/Southern Bell books back into the 1930s! (They also have "city directories" and some of the off-brand phonebooks as well). These are all on the third floor in the local history room. The only fly in the ointment is that they don't circulate, so you have to look at them there, and Xeroxes are $0.20 per sheet. (Perhaps I'll try taking some copies with the closing-cam, like I'm starring in my own spy movie..).

Anyway, I've got a number of old Yellow Pages ads that will be turning up here as new posts and updates to old posts.

Go here for a substantial update. (it's not good news..)

Just for fun, here are the recent traffic statistics for columbiaclosings.com. These are given in requests, and my understanding is that a page with multiple pictures will be ranked more highly since each request for the page generates a separate request for each picture. In each case, the most recent data is not accurate since the day, week, or month may not be over yet.

Daily Traffic:

Weekly Traffic:

Monthly Traffic:

For some reason, October was a very good month, and you can certainly see the impact of my three week vacation at the end of July and the start of August.

As to what draws people to the blog? Well, Godaddy's report claims that if a search engine gives query data, they list it in the report. I'm not sure what that means in terms of whether this includes google or yahoo or MSN or what. I particularly like numbers 10, 24 & 29: