N the course of writing many of these pages, the thing I did not expect to have stop me in my tracks was this page. Not because I was at a loss for words [which did happen once in 1976 and I blame the planets] but because of the impossibility of devising the layout I wanted in a manner that would be resilient to the blight of browser transmogrification. So now I have a two-fold rant: not only what it is about the Net that is stuck in my craw, but also about writing pages.

riting webpages is very much like being a live performer in that everyone wants to see their favourites played on your site ... "No, I don't know double drop-down menus, but maybe if you hum a few tags...." and everyone wants to tell you how to really get up there on the search engines. There seems to be an unquestioned assumption that anyone who posts pages on the Internet aspires to being seen by every biped with a dialup connection. I am not one of them; in fact, I have spent more time writing tags and directory files to prevent the pages from being indexed by spiders, crawlers, robots and anything else that delights the cyber-prurient than I have on formatting some of the content and still had to pull the page temporarily. I doubt that it is anyone's desire to have their email address harvested for a new raft of spam, or to have their labours of love back-ended for the purpose of convenient content and image theft, it holds no appeal for me.

o, what's the BlentAir bit about? It is the Internet defined [to me] in lines from Philip Larkin:

Of course, there was no Net then, he was talking about the church at the time. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a more eerily prophetic phrase to describe what the Net holds, some detail of virtually everything that is or has ever been an artefact of civilisation, from the sublime to the ridiculous, with more than enough of the unspeakably foul in the fray. If it isn't the Tower of Babel, it is at least a mirror of humanity of profoundly archetypal significance.
And speaking of eerie, here's a photo of me. Since I don't have a dog or a cat, godchildren of second-cousins or a cottage or a trip to Ibiza to make an online album out of, it will have to do. I could knock together something with a nice background that looks just like the stuff you panelled your basement with....but, at least I included My Favourite Links, which all hold a little of the sublime to me. To balance things.

THE FINE PRINT
The images on this site are original, except for: the milkthistle on the site index, detail images at the top and bottom of the wargaming page, street scene on the Love of Paris page, purple lilacs on Baybie Hoover's page, pink typewriter and external link icons on this page, and the original [Dover Publications] heart with wings from which the deCaelo logo was developed. I won't even begin to sort out the Laing site here, write to me. Thanks to The Natural History Museum for their kind permission to use the graphics on this site.
This site is NOT offering original clipart or graphics or any other content for use on other sites, private or commercial - you are required to obtain permission from the site owner.