Post 3664 - Wednesday Night Wailings

Or is this post 3748?

I am no longer sure, ladies and gentlement.

Let me explain.

I have tried to number these post consecutively over the years. You would think that this would be an easy thing to do. Look at the post number for the previous post, and add one to it.

Enter... a minor case of dyslexia.

I have transposed digits in numbers nearly my whole life. If someone told me to write down, for example, 13728, there is a good change I would jot down 17328. Not to be plucky or irreverent, but because the digits would get mixed up between my brain and my hand and some out the wrong way. Happens all the time. It is a good thing I didn't go into Accounting, huh?

So, why did I start numbering these posts?

I am not sure. I think it may have been that when I started with post number one, in late 2007, that I would never make it to post 3664. It was such a far away goal that it seemed like science fiction, so I dutifully kept adding one more to the next post until here we are.

Except, when I look at the blog's history, it says that there are actually 3748 posts. This would be 3749, actually.

I can explain some of the discrepancies. Early on, to be cheeky, I had things like post 100.1 and 100.5 and that kind of thing. But I know that there are times when I threw the sequence off entirely, forgetting that this is the 3600 series of posts, and lopping off one hundred, and starting up again at 3526 or whatever it was. More than one post that has the same post number, in other words. Once or twice, I plumb forgot to put numbers on the posts at all.

So, what do I do?

I am thinking of doing a "post jump" to catch up with the actual number of published posts, which would mean that the next post would be something like 3750, and not 3665. This would confound the archaeologists who, one hundred years hence, would discover this blog on some ancient hard drive Google left behind after it colonized Jupiter in 2062. These people would read the blog, love it of course, but then wonder why some 85 posts were no longer there. I have to think about my legacy. You understand.

I could just blithely go on and continue with this faulty number, of course. But I don't like that, either. I have written those other 85 post, gosh darn it. I have earned that higher number. The blog should not suffer because I messed up the numbering a few times over the years.

Or, I could stop numbering the posts. I like this suggestion the least. How many other blogs have the numbering built right in? It is comforting to the reader, and to me, to be able to see that there is a unique stamp on each and every blog post, here on Bevboy's Blog. No other blog post in the world is ever going to be called "Post 3664 - Wednesday Night Wailings". I guarantee it.

Perhaps I could use two numbers. "Post 3664/3749 - Wednesday Night Wailings", for example. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks, I could drop the earlier number, and just keep the higher number. This way, the archaeologists in 2118 will have a fighting chance of figuring out why the blog post numbering jumped that way.

So, what should I do, folks? Keep this numbering? Go for the "actual" number for the blog posts? Drop the numbering altogether? Use both numbers for a spell? Adopt a Dewey Decimal-type approach? How about a logarithmic scale? Astronomical units? Scientific notation?

Help a Bevboy out.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy