3-18-22-31-34-39

I really, really like Sunday mornings. Someone needs to bottle that stuff and sell it, because I would buy the hell out of it. Or, you know, I need to win the lottery so that every morning is Sunday morning. I usually get 70% of the work I get done in any given week on Sunday morning, getting up early, drinking the hell out of some coffee, and just grinding away. All that's missing is a full slate of NFL games, instead of a weird melange of baseball, basketball, and dudes on ice skates.

I hope my post on PageRank and blogs wasn't taken in the wrong light, or inadvertently added fuel to recent assorted blog fires. I was trying to stay pretty agnostic and to just throw some stuff out there, as far as mechanical stuff going on behind the scenes that not everyone is aware of.

As far as assorted blog fires, not much to say about that. I think as long as blogs exist, communities of like-minded people will form. Inevitable, like the tides.

Although the members may share a certain percentage of like-mindedness, pretty much any "successful" community I've ever seen is also, simultaneously, headed in ten billion different directions and composed of people with ten billion different motivations. If you demand that everyone conform and follow a rigid set of expectations, well, that ain't much of a community, really, besides the fact that such endeavors usually fall apart pretty quickly.

In "successful" communities there's usually just enough of a common thread to keep things from spinning haphazardly out into the ether, but very few other demands that might cause friction. With poker blogs, that common thread is, der, poker.

Ain't nothing wrong with blogging for yourself, and no one else, whether it's to improve your writing or to simply capture your thoughts. Ain't nothing wrong with blogging for the sole purpose of building an audience and sharing thoughts and words with someone other than your brain, to get satisfaction from having an audience and to bask in that attention. Ain't nothing wrong with blogging for profit. Ain't nothing wrong with blogging for yourself/others/profit, simultaneously.

You can analyze and formulate and postulate until the cows come home but in the end it really doesn't matter. If you want people to read your blog, post things that people are interested in reading. If you want to improve your writing skills, post well-written posts. If you want to profit from blogging, post valuable content that will enable you to profit.

Getting caught up in PageRank and rankings and reciprocal linking is ultimately a zero sum game. It's really much simpler than all that. Here's the million dollar secret to fame, riches, and mad writing skillz that make all the hotties swoon at your feet, ripping off their panties:

Find something you're really, really interested in and write about it every day.

That's it. That's all there is to it, no matter what your motivation is. Do that and whatever else you're looking for will eventually land smack dab in your lap.

(Shoot me your email address so I can provide wire transfer information for the $1 million dollars to be transferred to my bank account.)

In other news, is Matt Millen the dumbest human on earth? Seriously. Leinart lands smack dab in your lap and you're too stubborn to admit that you've completely and utterly botched the QB position your entire tenure, choosing instead to pretend that Kitna/McCown is a long-term solution, and drafting a LB with a cracked noggin', who could be one more concussion away from never playing another down? For years your crow eye seemed fascinated by shiny, gaudy WRs, which you kept drafting, year after year, yet you somehow seem intent on ignoring that you need a QB to consistently deliver the ball to them.

The Knicks or Lions seriously need to scrap management and run a reality TV series with the winner getting to serve as GM for two or three years. Because, honestly, I think any sports fan with two brain cells to rub together could do as good a job as Millen or Isiah has, and they'd at least get some cash/ratings/ticket sales out of it.

Poker kicked my ass yesterday. No two ways about it. I picked up a few tokens at Full Tilt in the peep Sex SnGs (you guys are right, good lord those things are soft) but that's about all that went right. Dropped 150 BBs in a matter of twenty minutes at TopRankedPoker, when the crazy monkeys at the 6 max games suddenly caught fire and I couldn't win a hand, despite many overpairs and sets and flopped straights. Boo, poker.

ScurvyWife fired up her new kiln last night and the house didn't burn down, so thumbs up for that.