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What is this?`This is a logical response to a problem I don't have yet, but will - the unwieldiness of a large index. Before I was thrown out into Limbo, I was an academic, albeit only an academic in training, and academics do write, and write and write about everything - the way normal people talk, I suppose, which is to say, to excess, at times. That's not an altogether bad thing from a reader's point of view, but let's say that I write a new article once per week, for ten years. That would be 520 items for the index, forcing me to choose between throwing all of that mess at you at once, or nesting indices within indices, and leaving you to do a lot of guesswork - not a very friendly gesture on my part, in either case.

A personal ring is a way past that dilemma. Instead of having the visitor make his choices all at once, one connected one's pages together on multiple levels, and invites the visitor to go explore. What results is a more relaxing experience, which might be for the best, because, I'm afraid, at least one of the pages on my ring isn't going to be a very relaxing experience, at all. On it, on a grass roots level, one gets to see a bad piece of history happening, at a time when it could have been stopped. A number of bad pieces, really - the rise of what one author would later call "the defamation superhighway", the development of Political Correctness (which does, as we'll see, does come in a conservative, far right form) and the decline of economic opportunity in the United States. There is nothing relaxing about the story of a vulnerable immigrant who was blackmailed and pushed into what, at least from a layman's point of view, looks like a mental breakdown and what was clearly the murder of a completely undeserving party. These are stressful topics, and they should be - the willingness of too many to go into denial about the unpleasantness of what was happening is what made that bad history possible. But I can, at least, do what I can to leave you in as good a frame of mind to deal with the unpleasantness as I can.

Not that gunfire and political backstabbing in deep antiquity are all that I will be writing about. My webring id should be suggestive of one of the sources of subject material - mathematical art. Yes, there is such a thing. Also, I've started photographing the vanishing grasslands of "the prairie state" (no, you will not be seeing any cornfields or cattle), playing around with what is often a strangely neglected subject in Western cookery (dairy foods), and been doing a bit of journaling offline. I'm going to be deliberately choosing some of my more arcane interests for these pages, feeling that it would be more interesting for the reader to see his first recipe for kishk than his 87th for chicken teriyaki, even if the latter is a truly exceptional recipe for that dish.

Aside from the pages about the strangeness alluded to above, I hope you'll fun reading this. For those who'd like to know when I've posted something new, I can be followed on Twitter - this is me. Enough blathering. The code for my rings, and the rings to which they belong, can be seen below.