look, ma! I’m someone’s blog of the month!

Es­ti­mated reading time is 2 min­utes.

ON OC­TOBER 29, 2015, I pub­lished an ar­ticle ti­tled “on william strunk and vig­or­ously con­cise writing” on my Neal Umphred Dot Com web­site. It’s as boring as the title makes it sound—you’d have to give a damn about the most im­por­tant figure and the most im­por­tant book in the his­tory of Amer­ican writing! And, lo and be­hold someone named me Blog of the Month!

In the piece, I posted an image of the 1919 edi­tion of Strunk’s The El­e­ments Of Style and noted that I had found it on Jerry Morris’s My Sen­ti­mental Li­brary site. Jer­ry’s site was one of the few that had de­cent pho­tographs of these rare books on the Internet.

Last week I re­ceived a mes­sage from Mr. Morris that he had re­ceived sev­eral new sub­scribers who he was able to trace back to my post above. I was pleased to know that my readers were ac­tu­ally taking my ad­vice and vis­iting rec­om­mended web­sites for fur­ther edification.

Mr. Morris also in­formed me that he had picked Neal Umphred Dot Com as the ‘Blog of the Month’ on his Biblio-Connection site. Ex­cept for John Ross’s The Round Place In The Middle Site—but John and I have a mu­tual ad­mi­ra­tion thing hap­pening so it’s not the same—this is the first time any of my work has re­ceived much at­ten­tion from an­other blogger!

 

Concise writing: top-half a screenshot of Jerry Morris's Biblio-Connecting website.

Concise writing: bottom-half a screenshot of Jerry Morris's Biblio-Connecting website.

This is a screen­shot of the top and bottom por­tions of Biblio-Connecting. It’s in­ter­esting to note that the Florida Bib­lio­phile So­ciety is pre­senting some­thing to do with my home state of Penn­syl­vania. As Mr Morris took this screen­shot of my site last week, he has the ‘old’ look of Neal Umphred Dot Com, not the hip now and agogo ‘new’ look that graces this site’s home page as you read these words!

So if you do give a damn about grammar and punc­tu­a­tion in the Eng­lish lan­guage and the beating(s) it has taken at the hands of tor­turous tex­ters, blovi­ating blog­gers, and other sadistic sages (in­cluding jour­nal­ists for ‘name’ web­sites who haven’t read The El­e­ments Of Style), then click on over to Jerry’s sites and subscribe.

And tell him Neal sent ya . . .

 

Elvis art FanPop 1000

FEA­TURED IMAGE: I found this in­ter­esting piece com­bining photos from Jail­house Rock (1957) on the FanPop web­site. The artist is cred­ited as Flint1 and he/she/it ti­tled this image “Edge of Re­ality.” I know, it’s not quite painting-on-velvet, but it will just have to do. Elvis’s recording of Edge Of Re­ality was the flip-side to 1968’s If I Can Dream in most coun­tries, one of the best pair­ings of the ’60s. But down under they pre­ferred the flip so Edge got as high as #2 on some surveys.

 

Leave a Comment