About this blog
This blog was started on January 22, 2007 as sort of a joke, yet sort of not a joke, i.e., a suitable microcosm of the entire blogosphere. Many narratives could be cobbled together to explain its genesis and they'd all be true—or they'd all be poppycock—depending on how seriously one takes any given story line.
One would be that it came into being as an outgrowth of this project of which I was proud to be numbered among the early contributors. Hence the address "Contra Pauli", which also signified my open invitation for my readers to attack me on my viewpoints and "say all the horrible things you wanted to say directly to me...."
Another good narrative would be that I wanted to have a blog where I could scribble things down which didn't need to fit within the framework of an overall theme. I already had started some blogs with themes (example) and I wanted to make a go of what I called a "kitchen sink blog", even though I had sometimes ridiculed these as being in danger of becoming self-referential blather-fests.
The title Est Quod Est was not the original title or "name" of the blog. I forget what that even was, except that it was not as it presently is. For a short time I had a habit of changing the title and the top graphic every few days. Although the web address had always remained the same, changing the title played havoc with people using blog readers and a few readers complained. Since these few represented all my readers at the time, I decided to settle on Est Quod Est as the official title, a latinization of "is what it is". The graphic I chose, somewhat at random, is a detail of Albrecht Durer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a favorite of mine. Some days it seems to fit, other days it doesn't.
My reason for the title is that I had gotten to thinking that bloggers and blog consumers had become too pretentious and too demanding, respectively. Thus I'd write things like this send-up of those criticizing First Things for not publishing articles on chemtrails or some other whatnot. (Yes, I know First Things isn't a blog, but they have a website....)
One last note: I doubt very much that people will be able to know everything about me by reading this blog, although they can learn a great deal. They can find out that I'm what my grandfather called a "serious Catholic" and that I'm a conservative Republican and happily self-employed. I don't like to publicly discuss my wife, kids or relatives here—a practice to which I've referred to as "gerberization"—and which I feel is dangerously rampant on the internet. I invite anyone who wants to chat with me on absolutely any issue to do so privately by sending me an email at this address.
Sincerely,
Pauli
