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!
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 . . .
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.
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
