"Don't you ever wonder 'Why are we here? What's it all about?'" From philosophy and Monty Python comes this eternal puzzle of the meaning of life. I am currently considering it as well.

The advent of the Koufax Award nominations nudges me to consider the purpose of this blog. Many of the blogs I admire have focus, a central theme or subject for their posts. Pam's House Blend does a terrific job of exposing anti-gay actions and rhetoric of right-wing politicians and Christians. I Blame the Patriarchy has some of the sharpest (and funniest) feminist analysis I've seen on the web. The Heretik combines satiric graphics with piercing commentary. So I'm left wondering what, as it were, DemiOrator is all about.

While I do have a number of subjects I consistently write about, it would be difficult for me to point to one and say "That is what DemiOrator is all about. That is the truth I cleave to and speak of, in my own voice and none other." (Well, that's what I'd say in a faux classical, erudite Victorian writing voice.) I'm a magpie for subject matter, collecting shiny bits I find and showing them to my readers. I am somewhat eclectic in my tastes, although not strictly catholic. (Now there's a word I think very strange in its usage, not easily used today.)

Without some central cause, I am left with the root impetus for starting DemiOrator: as a platform for practicing my rhetoric and writing. The actual specific subjects are variable. It would be much easier if I could focus on just monophytes or anchorites, some very narrow field of interest, but I'm promiscuous and flitting in my attentions. Although I desire a wider readership, I suspect DemiOrator will never really appeal to a popular audience without providing consistently predictable content or subject matter. And the $deities know I need to clean up the visual presentation because it's a mess.

I seem destined to occasionally embark on these public fits of self-reflection, flagellation, and castigation. Obviously they rarely come to aught; the blog remains colicky and erratic. But it is my jittery child with ADD so I love it. Mostly.

And as a bonus if you've managed to read through my carping and whining, check out Satire I of Juvenal. A little difficult to get all the contemporaneous references in it but there are still plenty of very understandable barbs. Funny man.

WHAT? Am I to be a listener only all my days? Am I never to get my word in—I that have been so often bored by the Theseid[1] of the ranting Cordus? Shall this one have spouted to me his comedies, and that one his love ditties, and I be unavenged? Shall I have no revenge on one who has taken up the whole day with an interminable Telephus[2] or with an Orestes[2] which, after filling the margin at the top of the roll and the back as well, hasn't even yet come to an end?