ibm-correcting-selectric-iii-redClose watchers of the blog may have noticed some changes in this site this week. Ads, once deflated on the site, have popped up again. Things look a little different. There is no splash of spam on the edges. And like the gaping hole in city street excavation, for one minute yesterday, the blog was stripped back in time to May and my Contact page was filled with pirate, unreliable mail-order Cialis ads.

The site is being updated and slightly spiffed up by patient helpers guiding the blind Luddite out of the shadows (at nights I dream of nothing more modern than the hum of a good IBM Selectric III).

In doing so I’m joining a band of fellow independent bloggers largely from Connecticut, where I lived for 25 years before my move to D.C. in 2011. That some of these people are also former writers from The Hartford Courant before they also left through various means, makes it an instantly collegial group. The fact that a few of them are names also widely known, from Susan Campbell to George Gombossy, is the coldly calculated business decision — to make a few of their many fans look this way. (Though I would add that I’d join any club that’d have Campbell, a friend from the trenches of the old mother Tribune Co.).

So hello to any new readers I might have as a result (I write about TV and stuff and most reliably post what’s on every night). Goodbye to the gullible seeking cheap Cialis. And back to work.