Log 190: July 17 2010:Change of Web address

I've decided to change the address of my Web site, Boyce'sPaper, that I have been running since 1996,in the hope that maybe a few more people will be able to pick it up.

Until I changed from Magma to Airset a few years ago, my site was read by some 350 a month, with a spike to about 1,000 just after the 9/ll event. Since I went to Airset, for some technical reason the Google sweeping machine, that sweeps the entire World Wide Web every two or three months, has failed to pick up this Web site, and if anyone were to Google me by name, there would be links to many articles I wrote under the Magma designation that no longer exists, but nothing about my more recent posts.

Of course, the given behind all this is that I am hopelessly ignorant of the technology involved, so I have just gone along writing my stuff when I felt like it, and not really giving a damn if it is read by only a few people.

I have tried a few times to join what was described to me as "the Blogosphere", but although always promised it was a piece of cake, I always foundered on the simplest technical demands.

Okay, I am having another go now, have succeeded in getting this thing to its functioning (barely) level, and propose to write what everyone called "my Blog" and I always call my Web site from here until I die. I have just today acquired a lifetime supply of Blogs, just like going out and buying a lifetime supply of socks, every time I get a new pair. (Another of my laboured jokes about my age.)

Doug Perry, of Vancouver, who has been reading this stuff for several years, once said I had the world's oldest Blog (since it existed long before the word Blog came into being), and I was the world's oldest blogger. In that, he proved not to be quite accurate: a couple of other guys were found to be active who had a year or two on me, and I suppose by this time, when everyone in the world has his own Blog, there must be many more.

On my Web site I have posted two types of items: one is a commentary on anything that has been happening to me, anything I might have thought about, any film I have seen, or book read; and the second type is links to various progressive articles written in journals that are not normally read by many people, or that are of particular relevance, especially when seen from my left-wing point of view.

So here is another confession for any new readers who may happen along: I am 82, and more radical in my political thinking than I have ever been (or so I believe). I am coming to the end of a longish life spent in the media. I grew up in New Zealand, worked in newspapers also in Australia, India, England, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, from 1945 to 1971, then became a freelance writer of articles and books, and latterly a freelance documentary film-maker. I also wrote commentaries for the CBC for many years in the days when "public interest" broadcasting meant something to that agency. Actually, when I quit newspapers in 1971 I expected to make most of my living from the CBC, but in fact since that time --- nearly 40 years --- I have been employed for only two jobs by them. So much the worse for them, I say.

I grew into political consciousness as a democratic socialist in New Zealand, and have seen nothing since then to persuade me that capitalism as practised in its citadels of power, is a better system for human welfare than socialism. So I am an unrepentant socialist, and I am afraid I always will be. You don't have to read my rubbish if you don't want to. And if you don't like it, you have the silver lining of knowing that I can't last much longer.

I was able to add "filmmaker" to my c.v because of the extraordinary generosity of two people in the National Film Board called Colin Low and Tony Ianzelo, but I think some of the films I worked on over about 30 years are worth watching. They include films on indigenous people in Canada, on Chinese Communism, on various environmental and human rights issues. Some of them are well-known, and some deserve to be more widely known. (And some are better forgotten, I imagine.)

I have written a large number of books, some of which have been published. A few of them are worth reading, I think, although others may not agree with me. As I get on top of this system I will put an item on with my c.v, naming the books and films.

But otherwise, this is simply by way of introduction, and by tomorrow or soon thereafter I will probably be raving away as comes naturally to me.