Narnia in BelfastFriends,

Welcome to the beginning of a new blogging year here at John-Wright.Net. For the next fifty weeks of 2008, we’ll be attempting to bring some reason to matters of political discourse, current affairs and a lot more. It’s an election year in America, which will be fascinating and murderous at one and the same time. I’m already fed up with it, just thinking about it. But it will be an important year for our ideas on both sides of the pond.

I’ve just returned from a two week trip to Belfast, and wrote part of this post while sitting in an airport in Dublin, delayed for a whole day on my way back to Los Angeles, California. I hate airports. Not only that, but the people who munch their snacks beside me annoy the hell out of me. There was a guy sitting next to me munching and crunching in a horribly obnoxious manner and I couldn’t concentrate (this was also due in no small part, I suspect, to his vivid crop of ginger hair, and the fact that I’d been sitting in the same seat for three-hundred and twenty-one hours and thirty-three minutes).

Anyway, I’m back from holiday/vacation (the British/American language dilemma gets bigger every year for me) and, by the way, the photograph accompanying this post is the best of the crop shot by my photographer wife Melissa over the two-day snow in Belfast (yes, it does look like Narnia and, yes, many brass monkeys are now testicleless as a result) – © Melissa Wright Photography?

I’m ready to start the blogging year in earnest: I believe 2008 will be the best year so far for this blog (its sixth year in existence) and hopefully for the radio show as well. I’ve been deluged with stuff to do since I got back, and deluged also with support from fans of the show so it’s nice to know I was missed. Stephen Graham, William Crawley and I were laughing about that over lunch last week: the reason broadcasters hate to go on vacation is that they’re scared their stand-ins will be more popular than them! Thankfully that doesn’t seem to be the case in my instance. This blog has an interesting relationship to my radio show: it’s known to some of my listeners but not to most, and that’s intentional. The tone is the same but the content of the blog much more determined and bellicose than that of the radio show, and that’s something which only a portion of the audience will enjoy. So, they’re in a state of separated togetherness. Maybe this blog is like the uncensored, print version of the radio show? In any case, it appears to be working for now, and my bosses are nice people who are blissfully uninterested in blogging.

Then, I wrote a beautiful post yesterday responding to the LA Times’ Michael Kinsley on a great response he made to libertarian ideas. I deleted it by mistake shortly afterwards, and am both too stupid to figure out how to retrieve it, and too overwhelmed with the volume of shit I have to deal with in the next few days to rewrite it. (Well, alright, I’ll probably rewrite it sometime soon, since I thought Kinsley’s article was exceptionally worth responding to. But I won’t do it with a smile on my face.)

I’m delighted that Stephen Graham continues to contribute in 2008: I know the readership enjoys his insights immensely, as do I. We continue to link to people we like, and continue to point out who the morons are in the world around us. (Education, education, education.) And we’re going to have fun doing it.

Join us, won’t you?