Introduction

Diogenes lived in a barrel, about 2,400 years ago, as everyone knows. He was the original cynic, named for living like a dog. We now take "cynic" to mean someone who questions everyone's motives, and perhaps has himself questionable motives. But Diogenes questioned everyone's values. It is said that he was looking for a single honest man, but that he never found one. He lived in a barrel because he wanted to live a simple life, without possessions. And thereby hangs a tale told by one of the earliest writers of illustrated verse and prose, Wilhelm Busch, whom some credit with being the inventor of the comic strip. You'll want to find the story for yourself. I've just included a picture of the relevant panel.

I used to maintain a fairly large personal site, first on GeoCities, which was bought by Yahoo, and when they shut down their personal sites I moved it to some other server, where it kinda languished. Trouble with these sites is that there isn't much to motivate me to keep them up.

While it was sitting on GeoCities/Yahoo I used it to learn about site design. The site evolved from the typical GeoCities look (too many pictures, and a lot of vicarious mark-up), to one that was fairly sparse with the pictures, and used HTML5/CSS3 standards (before they were standards).

Most of the site was dedicated to book reviews. I started writing book reviews to help me remember which books I'd read. Most of them were short, one or two-line items. But where I was able to think of more to say, I put the review up on my site.

This blog will be dedicated to more book reviews. I'll also try to figure out a way to resurrect the older reviews. We'll see how that works.