I can’t remember whether November is the month where men are supposed to let their facial hair grow for a good cause or this is the month where people who want to be a novelist give themselves a one-month deadline to write a novel. Maybe it’s both, but I can’t remember.

And that gets me to my own November self-imposed experiment. I will write a blogpost every remaining day this month, and do so relying on ZERO research information. No internet, no Claude, no yellow pages, no reverse call number books. As example, I’m thinking of those big, fat books with all the phone numbers that private detectives use in film noir movies of the 40s, but can’t remember what such books are called. So I’m calling them “reverse call number books” without looking up what they are/were truly called.

See the fun?!? You, dear reader, will find out just how remarkably stupid your humble blogger is. And because it’s a daily post, you will come to learn just how dumb I am on such a wide array of subjects! Think Reddit, but even more useless. Great fun!

One might reasonably ask why I am doing this, and I admit a big part of the reason is that it seems like such a useless exercise, and as I age I am increasingly into useless exercises. Not like cardio or weightlifting exercises, which are useless in the sense that they don’t keep us alive forever, but exercises something like pianists call “etudes,” as I understand it, which might be wrong because I’m not going to look it up on the internet/Claude now to see if I might be mistaken about why pianists call things “etudes.” See how this works?

My only concession to online use during this month of “etudes” (along with using WordPress to write/publish these useless things) will be in posting wholly unconnected photos from my recent trip to Japan via Google Photos. In fact, I think I will curate these photos based on how little they have to do with the post to which they are attached. Yeah, that sounds good, especially because we bloggers have long known that posts without photos get no “hits” from the bots in Vietnam, which account for 95% of my readership. Gotta keep the bots happy.

Finally, in order to make these completely useless posts as reader-attractive as possible, I promise to keep them short in addition to their being a complete waste of time to read. You, dear reader, deserve nothing less than less worthlessness. Or should that be “nothing more than less…” It’s confusing and I’m 100% committed to not having Claude check my writing for clarity.

Now the photo.