General Policy re: Comments on The Daily Beat

We love comments here at The Daily Beat, but we do vet them before publishing them. You wouldn't believe some of the snark that folks submit.

Case in point, somepne attempted to post an ad hominem comment very recently, and we chose not to publish it. Why?

Our general policy is that we are not going to publish ad hominem attacks.

Furthermore, if you want to ensure a snarky comment doesn't get published, use "Anonymous" as your screen name.

We're willing to be argued with and to admit when we are wrong, but there's no need to call us names, especially when hiding behind the veil of anonymity.

Celebration time and a Kerouac book giveaway

I was just looking at statistics for this blog and we are closing in on 400,000 all-time pageviews. As this goes to post, we are at 398,732, leaving 1,268 to go.

By my calculation, unless we have an anomaly (i,e., a very light or very heavy day), we should reach that benchmark in about 5 days (given that we average about 250 pageviews per day).

To celebrate, we'll give away a signed copy of my silly book, The Beat Handbook, to the first person who posts a comment on this blog after we hit 400,000 pageviews. I'll keep you posted on when we hit the magic number, and then the scramble to be the first commenter can begin.

I'll need the winner to send me her or his snail mail address, of course, but we'll work that out when the time comes.

We'll need a special post the day we hit 400,000. Maybe an idea for that will come to me in the next 5 days.

Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on The Simpsons

I have yet to see it, but apparently Jack and Neal made an appearance on The Simpsons last night. The episode is titled, "Let's Go Fly a Coot." I suspect that you can watch it at one of the (most likely illegal) sites here: watchseries.

Let us know what you think.