PS: For those of you who haven’t gotten enough talk about (mediocre) Christmas music, here’s a reflection on the cockroach-like indestructibility of the Christmas carol. And for those of you who’d rather skip the pendanticism and go straight to a youtube mashup video of dogs and cats singing Christmas music, here ya go:

And with that, a very southern gospel welcome to any visitors coming our way from AAR.

A wise man has noted that, “Generally speaking, blogging is like shouting into a hurricane: it might make you feel better, but hardly anyone hears you and it rarely has any real-world impact.” And this is true. I kinda think of blogging as the grown-up equivalent of a child projecting his voice into a box fan set to HIGH and listening to the distortion. Or maybe that was just me as a bored kid finding ways to pass the time in a single-wide trailer on a rock-holler farm in the Ozarks.

In any case, it wouldn’t be too much to say that the community of conversation and candid camaraderie that’s taken hold over the years around here has irrevocably changed me as a writer and a thinker - transforming my view of myself, the music, and the various modes of relating to it that co-exist. Plus, like a younger me talking into a fan on that farm in the faraway foothills of Missouri, it’s just plain fun. Thanks for seven great years.

Onward into Blog Year 8.

I had asked the interns to look into this option while I was away on hiatus, though honestly I didn’t get my hopes up (as intern coordinator, it’s best not to expect much: after all, it’s been nearly five years since the site switched over to wordpress from the old handroll approach, and the archives from the handrolling years still have been fully converted … but then again, when the only compensation for interning around here is a Just Call it Southern cd every September and a chance to do a rotation in the mailroom and read all the gossipy unprintable email from and/or about all their favorite performers, one can’t really be too picky, can one?).

But lo! Wonders never cease. As you’ll notice, they haven’t quite figured out how to get the shortcut prompt to stop appearing once you’ve added the icon. I’ve been told a fix may be possible, so stay tuned, I guess.

I only made up one of those, but they’re all so outrageously lame as responses to a blog about southern gospel music as to be kind of funny in their lameness, and honestly I have sort of come to look forward to just how much more preposterous the next fevered tale will be than the last (new ones usually spring up in the aftermath of particularly unwanted criticisms and flourish in the sandy soil of the uninspired imagination that puts more energy into trying to discredit who they imagine me to be than just engaging the with the substance of the criticism). At any rate, I’ve never found any of them  worth dignifying with a response, and still feel that way. Comes with the territory, I figure.

However, since L’Affaire Harold Reed broke out, the old chestnut about my having tried out for the Nelons and been rejected has reared its head and started surfacing repeatedly in the comments section. This is the kind of pedestrian lie whose banality could lend the fiction a certain plausibility  even to reasonable but uninformed people.

So let’s put this one to rest, shall we? I have never, not once, ever tried out for any professional gigs in southern gospel or any other form of music. None.

I think I get why this idea might be so appealing … for some people, it’s a lot easier to tell yourself that there can’t possibly be anything worth taking seriously from a reject sodomite pianist etc. than it is to have some of your closely held ideas challenged or your settled positions interrogated or disrupted or whatever by someone who outside conventional industry roles. And yet, while the purpose of this fantasy seems to be to try to discredit me personally by demonstrating my lack of  musical skills, it actually attributes to me far more musical ability than I really have in fact, because to try out for the Nelons, even in their current pale-imitation phase, you’d have to be a lot better than I ever have been.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my coffin.

Alas, the interns are struggling with the twitter sync. The twitter plug-in is installed but no dice. The consensus opinion now seems to be I need to update my Wordpress framework (I’m still using … well, a really old version) and see what happens. That’s no small ordeal for my interns so it may take a bit. But we hope to live to tweet another day.

Meanwhile, posts should be autopopulating on facebook within a few hours of posting here (long story). Feel free to give us a shout out if you catch posts on either forum in the nearish future.

And of course if anyone has any ideas about the twitter situation, feel free to weigh in.

I wanted to let you know how much I’ve enjoyed reading your blog.  As you know I’ve been reading it since you started it several years ago.  I’ve laughed at some of the posts, gone out and bought cds as a result of some of the posts (Eric Reed’s Mercy and Grace project), questioned my own outlook on a number of issues…

 I’ve also the comments section of the blog as well but I’ve noticed a huge deterioration in many of the [commenters’] posts and I was wondering what your take on that is and if you have noticed it as well.  It really seems that many of posts are consistently showing a real lack of respect for the opinions of others.  Many posts start off sounding rather dogmatic and many of them end in near fistacuffs.  I guess I’m more surprised that many are so quick to react this way.  I know that if I could see many of the posts that got “edited” I would be even more surprised but it has gotten to the point that I’m actually able to gloss over many posts based on the writer (Wade, Harry etc.)  I know they are entitled to their opinions as well but they manage to offend, hurt and bring people down so quickly that it becomes a waste of time to even read it.

 I’ll always read your blog quite frankly.  I’ve enjoyed countless posts of yours and I have honestly appreciated your insight on a ton of issues.  I guess I hope for better things to come from many of the other readers/posters.

 Keep on writing, screening and editing.  The SG world needs this.

I didn’t ask for anniversary presents, but this ain’t bad as gratifying responses from readers go.

But more to the point: yeah things do seem to be getting uglier in the comments lately. Hard to say what’s going on. Maybe the proportion of boneheaded comments to original, thoughtful, and interesting ones is no different than it ever was but that the increase in comment volume (in both senses of the word) has accentuated the loudest, crudest, most anti-social voices. Could be that more people are reading (they are, if traffic metrics are any indication), and so a certain strident bloc of commenters think the only way to be heard above the crowd is to shout and hector and badger and bait. Could be fewer people are reading (or commenting) and the place has gone to the trolls, die-hards, deadenders and lifers – in which case the spike in traffic would be registering an uptick in the number of times the same people log on (from different computers?) to keep flogging the same old stuff. Maybe it’s a general direction in comment quality afflicting more sg blogs than this one (DBM discusses “stupid comments” here, though I’m not suggesting two is a trend).

I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve found myself more impatient of the numbskull posts, and more and more I have less and less trouble hitting the EDIT and DELETE buttons. I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing, but it’s probably not all bad either. I’ve made this plea before and you see where it’s gotten me, but still … Less trolling and flaming, please. Honestly.

David Bruce Murray is about to mark his millioneth page view (congrats to him, and go over there to help him hit the mark sooner), which reminds me I haven’t done a traffic update in a while. The short answer: up, up, and up. The slightly longer answer is that we’re edging upward of 20,000 hits a day on a regular basis, which translates on the high end to 12,000-15,000 page views daily (and reliably 11,000 per day). If current trends hold, we’ll hit 1,000,000 page views in 2008 by mid June and easily surpass 2,000,000 by the end of the year. Of course I continue to be grateful. It’s all chump change by Big Blogging standards, but it’s pretty much entirely homegrown, gimmick-free success (or whatever my detractors would call it … virtual carcinogen? interweb pathogen? bunch of crap? sin?).

Less grandiosely, it finally occurred to me to change the time stamp feature so that my posts are no longer associated with UTC, which is the WordPress default. From the $2-bill post onward, all entries and comments will (at least they SHOULD) carry EST timestamps, reflecting the time zone of origin. Unless you know a way to retroactively apply this change, all previous posts retain their original UTC time label.

Finally, there may or may not be a review this week. Depends on how long I have to be gone. But judging by last week’s pyrotechnics, we might all be able to use some time between rounds.

Update: Thanks for all your emails and suggestions. With your help and Google I’m pretty sure my problem is a good one, insofar as nothing is “wrong” per se, just that my traffic is heavy enough and WP’s PHP infrastructure creates usage demands such that I’m bumping up against my ISP’s CPU limits (as opposed to data transfer limits, which hasn’t been a problem and shouldn’t be, as many of you point out). Soooo, after an evening of Googling and searching and reading deep in the bowels of virtual geeekdom, I’ve made some tweaks, namely uploading a plugin that WordPress gurus swear by (wp-cache) as a way to make my ISP’s CPUs think I’m running a static page. Ideally, this will show some results over the next few days and get me out of the leper colony and back into the good graces of my ISP. Stay tuned.

Later update: you may have trouble posting comments for a day or so while I sort out my server issues. Be patient. Things should sort themselves out soon enough.

Update: Well you’ve all been extraordinarily helpful as per usual. Two hitches: 1)I can get the favicon into the root with no problem and it shows up at http://www.averyfineline.com/favicon.ico. However, it doesn’t show up at other pages within the site, as far as I can tell. I tried opening other avfl pages in IE and Firefox. No luck. I tried newly bookmarking the page and reloading it that way. Still no dice. Hmmmm. 2)Clearly the icon is just not terribly useful at the itty bitty low-quality size necessarily for the favicon. I’ve tried cropping it down to focus only on paper-sack guy himself and not so much his computer, but you have to squint really hard and do a lot of wishful thinking for the image to be more than a bloppy glob. Which may mean …. back to the drawing board.

If you’re dumb enough to be doing it from a static IP address, I’ll notice at some point and block you from commenting. If (more likely) you’re using a dynamic IP address, there’s probably not much I’ll be able to do other than shut down a thread altogether. That would be an unfortunately draconian measure, and I hope it won’t be necessary.

Finally, on a slightly related note: the email addresses you’re required to give in order to post comments are never used for any other purpose than verification that you’re not a spambot and for me to respond to you directly if the fancy strikes me. Obviously people can (and do) just give fake emails (you know who you are … dartanyon). But just in case you’re doing it because you think you’ll be pounded with unsolicited email, rest assured that won’t be the case. And if you don’t want me or others to know who you are (a perfectly reasonable thing in this bidness), just create a real but generic email address with hotmail or yahoo or somebody like that.

As always, you can email me directly with comments, questions, tips, and tirades.