Sad Endings

I'm far behind on the latest news of the profession, but it's been a hard couple of weeks. While I was on vacation, OCLC fired Walt Crawford. I guess they didn't want to employ one of the very few consistently interesting writers in the library profession. Well, boo sucks to them, and I hope he comes out of it on top. But at least he hasn't stopped writing.

Such cannot be said of everyone. Next I found out that my favorite library soap opera was taken off the air. That's right, Happyville Library has been canceled, and you can't even view the reruns anymore. To tell the truth, it hadn't been as funny since Lily and the gang stopped making regular appearances, but I'll still miss it. It provided me with a lot of library pleasure, and the Happy Villain was also a consistently interesting writer.

And then the other day someone pointed out to me that Blatant Berry seems to be no more. The old url doesn't work, and when you go to the LJ page that links to it, all you get is this. I hope nothing bad has happened to the guy I've come to affectionately call Snipey Fellow Traveling Dude. I can honestly say, though not consistently interesting in any way, his blog was one of the best things that ever happened to the Annoyed Librarian, and I hope it returns someday. He never blogged much, but a high percentage of his posts were attacking poor little me, and his malicious, illogical, and totally unfounded attacks on the AL always brought lots of new readers who stayed on to read more. I liked having a high profile blog linked from LJ mentioning me so often. Probably never again will someone with so much readership decide to make me the "enemy." It proved to me the old adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

I know the AL will never have more than a cult following, but partly thanks to his attacks and the lovely new readers they've brought, my readership has doubled in the last 6 months from about 5,000 visits a month to about 10,000. I probably won't ever be joining the "A-Level" list of library bloggers, and I'll hardly be retiring on the advertising income of the AL, but to put this in some perspective, I started tracking visitors last May when I began blogging in earnest, and for that month had only 544 visits. That's more like a day in the life of the AL now. Those big bad A-List bloggers probably laugh at my puny statistics, but I'll just say thanks for all the readers and commenters. I love you all and I feel your pain! That probably didn't sound very sincere, and for a very good reason. Nevertheless, I appreciate you all! There, that was more sincere.

To keep the proper subject and emotional tone of a post entitled "Sad Endings," I should announce the end of the AL, but my detractors are just out of luck. I'm sticking around for a while longer. I probably won't be blogging as much in the summer, but there's a good AL-related reason for that. I'll give you a teaser of an announcement. There's a big AL writing project in the works, and a lot of my writing time will be devoted to it for the rest of the summer. So what you might miss this summer, you'll later be able to get through ILL. And for the mean-spirited among you who think I'm self-publishing a book, I'll just say that I'm not self-publishing anything, so there!

UPDATE: LJ must have had temporary technical difficulties, because the Blatant Nonsense blog is back! Yay!!