For What It's Worth.

Come on...focus.  I didn't put the title of this post in quotes.  Of course I'm not talking about the Buffalo Springfield song.  I'm talking about this blog.

The first post was dated 6/12/11.  In a few months, that will be 10 years ago.  During those 9 1/2+ years, there have been over 302K views.  This is a very rough and meaningless statistic, because it takes into account all views, even by people who have already read a given post, and are just checking to see if there are more comments.  In that sense, the number is sort of inflated.  On the other hand, this blog is very specific, and it is intended for a very small population of people.  The circulation for announcement of new posts is also very small, usually about 85.  So, in that sense, the viewership is an underestimate of how many people might be interested in the topics, if they knew the blog existed.

The "Stats" page says there are 757 posts.  It is not made clear if this includes only published posts, or unpublished drafts, too.  The vast majority of posts were written by me, but there are several other authors as well.  Most people who requested to be guest authors wrote at least one post.  Some requested guest authorship, but never posted anything.  I assume they were thinking about something, but changed their minds.  And several (or many?) people were offered guest authorship, and didn't accept the offer.

There are 3200 comments over the almost 10 years.  For a very long time, almost all of these were serious comments.  But there are two kinds of comments that are not serious.  The uncommon type is someone, or some computer, that enters a comment on a blog to which it is not connected, probably because of a certain word that triggers a comment.  These comments are almost always intended to sell something.  They are not personal, and they are not relevant to the posts to which they are attached.  The other non-serious comments are very recent, and they come from one Village resident who spews personal gripes that are not connected to the topic under discussion.  I'm in a peculiar spot about this resident.  He and I privately agreed that he would not be mentioned or referred to in any way, and that no one would say he was deceased (he did not explain why he thought anyone would say he was deceased if he wasn't, or why he would care if they did), and in exchange, he would cease/"desist" commenting on this blog.  His comments were always irrelevant and insulting to one or more people, and they added nothing to the discussions.  Unfortunately, he reneged on his part of the bargain, and I have tried not to renege on mine.  (The above description is an example of my failure to keep my part of the bargain.)

And the statistic about comments is the same as the statistic about views and the statistic about the number of posts: this is a very focused blog -- only aimed at particular matters of expected interest to BP residents -- and the statistics are therefore comparatively limited.

But still, the views statistic reached 302K just this week, or maybe the end of last week, and the number of comments reached 3200 today.  I have no idea if these are in any sense milestones.  They're not really, in the sense that the numbers could have been much higher in a different setting, or much lower in some other setting.  They just are what they are.  It's a curiosity and a coincidence that the number of views and the number of comments contain, for the moment, the same numbers: 3, 0 & 2.  I was just noticing.

Sure. Why Wait to Add Insult to Injury?

January 6 this year was not, in fact, the first time I talked about this matter.  That post was called "The Problem With Home-Grown Services," and I mentioned some complications that spring from having the Planning and Zoning Board be comprised of BP residents.  I said there was too much opportunity for two kinds of errors.  One was that the Board members would take the Codes personally, and over-regulate their neighbors, because their neighbors might want something that Board members personally don't happen to like.  The other was that Board members would take their colleagues personally, and not frustrate their possibly inappropriate wishes, because they work together.  They're neighbors.  And I gave an example of the latter problem, which is a house built by a P&Z member, and that house is a monstrosity in this Village.  It is grossly "disharmonious" with the style of the Village, and with the block in question, and it is so massive, and two stories, that it deprives everyone on that block, and possibly some BP neighbors on adjacent blocks, of privacy.

And I have to say -- I've said it before -- I love this house.  It's very modern, and I think the design is great.  Just not in BP, possibly unless the builder buys all the lots on that block, and uses them as his back/front/side yards.  And if he had done that, it would still be weird, and disharmonious.  This house, on Indian Creek Island, or Golden Beach, or parts of Coral Gables, or down Old Cutler?  Amazing.  In BP?  Is this some sort of joke?

It seems to me the house was completed a year or so ago.  Finishing touches were still going on in recent past months.  The builder/BP resident is a comparatively younger person -- I'd guess around 40 -- but no one lives forever, and the vast majority of people move from one place to another in the course of their lives anyway, and it was guaranteed that that house would be here, damaging the neighborhood, long after the builder/owner was gone.  And this is all because P&Z could deny any of its neighbors except other P&Z members.

Well, I got an e-mail from some realtor this morning.  I assume it's some sort of e-blast, and probably many of us got it.  The person who built this massive compound, that destroys part of BP, is now, already, selling the house.  He's asking $2.5M.  Ha, ha, P&Z and BP, the joke's on you suckers.  And I'm hoping to laugh all the way to the bank.

And it does no good to be angry about what P&Z perpetrated on us, or even to hope the builder/soon-to-be-ex-BP-homeowner takes a bath.  We're stuck with this building anyway.

It appears we need either new P&Z members, who can follow the Codes, and not feel personally invested and as if this was somehow all about them, or we need a P&Z function that is not executed by BP residents.  What we do not need is a board that denies one resident, because the planned trim is a shade of blue that is imperceptibly imperfect to P&Z members (do you think I didn't sit through that decision, and argue against it?), or a board that is more dedicated to harmony on the board than it is to harmony in styles of construction and decoration of properties here.

We're stuck with it now.