Brews You Can Use
I read once that the average lifespan of a blog is six months. I actually would've guessed three months, but maybe they count the blogs that start off strong, then peter out to one or two posts a month, limping along like that for a long time before calling it quits.
That fact crossed my mind earlier this week when I ran across this 2006 column of mine from the National Catholic Register: What's Red and White and Tasted All Over? In it, I mention a dozen Catholic bloggers who write at least occasionally about drinking. I checked on all twelve of them and discovered:
Two are going strong (congratulations, Laudator and Crowhill).
One moved or, rather, apparently folded his wine blog into his general blog (Bainbridge).
One has a few blog posts in 2015, but is not active overall.
One blog is no longer open to the public (by invitation only).
Seven no longer exist or haven't been updated in over a year.
Based on that, I'm guessing the six-month lifespan estimate is pretty accurate. At 10+ years, TDE is an old, old man.
Incidentally, I went back and read that 2006 column. I really (if immodestly) enjoyed it. I had completely forgotten about this passage:
Read about the early 20th-century Catholic literary revival that biographer Joseph Pearce has chronicled so well. The wine flowed freely – so freely that you might think it was the fuel of the revival. G.K. Chesterton drank it, Maurice Baring balanced glasses of it on his bald head, Hilaire Belloc practically drank a barrel of it during a walking pilgrimage that he recounts in The Path to Rome.
Chesterton and Belloc loved the stuff so much that contemporaries claimed that they had misheard the Creed and thought it demanded belief in “One, Holy, Catholic, and Alcoholic Church.”
This line also cracked me up, though it's too clever for me, so I'm guessing it came from the pen of my ever-vigilant editor: "Drinking wine for the health of it strikes me as similar to living out the marital union for the exercise." Maybe I penned the concept in crass terms and he crafted it more subtly (and, therefore, more cleverly).
