Happy anniversary to me, and other briefs

Today marks 14 years since I posted the first words to this humble, low-traffic blog. In that time, I've posted almost every day, with a few exceptions for internet outages due either the electric going out in the weather (Hurricane Irene in 2011, although we weren't hit as badly as some places not far from here), or changes in Internet provider. In that time, I've done a little over 6,000 posts, although of course not all of those are movie reviews. Lots of stars have died over the past 14 years, and some of them get programming salutes on TCM, both of which have ben the focus of posts here. (Unfortunately, the current iteration of Blogger doesn't seem to mention how many posts have any given label.) That, and list posts/blogathons, most notably in recent years the Thursday Movie Picks posts.

Over the past 14 years, the internet has changed quite a bit, but thanks to my inertia and more modest circumstances, I haven't changed quite so much compared to the internet. Print blogs like this seemed to be the rage during the first decade of the 21st century, but in more recent years there's been a huge rise in video blogs and posting stuff to YouTube that would be a lot more convenient to read in print on one hand, and various short-forms of social media on the other. I don't even have a good video camera beyond what's on my smartphone and tablet, so I'd really have to make an investment if I wanted to do video reviews of the movies I post about here. I do some tweeting, but it's usually quick off-the-cuff responses to other tweets that people in various places link to. I tried for a bit to post tweets about the new posts I put up here, but that lasted maybe a few weeks.

I intend to keep blogging as long as there are interesting movies that I haven't seen, and/or as long as Blogger is still a thing. Having to change to another platform would, unsurprisingly, be a pain in the butt, as much as getting a new computer is. (The vast majority of my blog posts are on an external hard drive that's migrated twice; I did a few posts in the browser itself.) So I can certainly see myself getting to 7,000 posts in a few years time, and likely even some thousands more beyond that.

Today also happens to be the birth anniversary of W.C. Fields, so I'll include a video of the cigar box-juggling routine he did on vaudeville and reprised for the movie The Old-Fashioned Way:

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