I think my header paragraph outlines it pretty well:

“A blog about all that is worthy in the Culture we call Pop. TV, Comics, Movies, TV, Music, Books, and a little TV as well. Updated every day, in a perfect world. The same world where Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson had not all won Best Director Oscars before Martin Scorsese, J.D. Salinger had been as prolific as Stephen King, and Whoopi Goldberg was locked away where she could never hurt anyone ever again.”

Clearly, I love TV, and I hate Whoopi Goldberg. My primary goal is to share my love for pop culture through the blog, but a lot of the time, that love comes out as tough love, or, just as often, flat-out hate. But it’s mostly funny hate!

I collect spores, molds, and fungus.

The blog is purely a hobby, but if people wanted to start paying me for it, I’d be cool with that. Although, now that I think about it, if the blog were my job, I’d probably start hating it and avoiding it, as I’ve done with any real job I’ve ever had.

I started blogging on this topic because I love pop culture, and I don’t know that I have an awful lot of meaningful input to offer on any other topic. I hate Dubya — that’s as deep as I get re: politics. But get me started on ROBOCOP, and I could go all day.

Why I began the blog at all was due to the influence of a few friends of mine who started blogging in 2004 — Ian Brill (Brill Building), Mike Sterling (Progressive Ruin), and Dorian Wright (Postmodern Barney). Frankly, I felt left out. The blog was a fun experiment to see if I could keep up with them, and communicate with them and others about the stupid crap they and I hold precious.

This fun experiment has turned into a surprisingly long-lived project. In June of this year, I celebrated my third “blogiversary” (though I hate that term, and don’t really know why I used it just now).

Generally between 300 and 350. For a while, it was nearly double that, but then Yahoo broke blo.gs, and the Comic Weblogs Updates page stopped working, and there went half my audience.

The only income I have is measured in comments. I’ve got no ads generating any income (at least, not for me — go ask Google how much they make off it).

I like to think any person who likes TV, movies, books, comics, and other assorted pop culture nonsense might enjoy my blog. Which is pretty much everyone in America, isn’t it? Hopefully, they can stand a little snark with their pop culture commentary.

It varies. I skip some days, though I try not to. Sometimes, I post a little nub of an entry, which takes about 10 or 20 minutes. When I sit down to really craft something I think has some genuine substance or creativity, it can run two or three hours. More, if it involves a lot of links or pictures.

Because I will give you a shiny new nickel.

That’s not true. You should subscribe because I offer up a view on a wide variety of American pop culture that’s unique, funny, creative, smart, unashamed of expressing love and unafraid of ripping the stupid junk to pieces.

Write every day. It’s the simplest and truest piece of advice, and one I wish I could follow myself. Not only does it help you to build an audience, it helps you to find a voice. When I go back through my archives, and read posts I wrote three years ago, I barely recognize the author. It took me a while to gain the confidence and ability to write what I wanted, how I wanted.

This blog can be visited at http://tomthedog.blogspot.com/

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