Death of Randy's blog

Randy's "Battle of Gettysburg & the American Civil War" has been officially abandoned. As with so many previous postings, Randy has taken pains to explain. Have a look.

There is a sadness in the last postings tending towards morbidity, a worry about ennobling war, and fretting about failing to secure Joe Avalon's attention, oddly enough.

Blogs of this type are rare. Each entry in BGACW represented a major writing and thinking effort and taken together with the copious (good) photo stills, each entry represented a small production. Nothing coming down the pike is going to be this atmospheric or produced.

I found it strange that Randy wanted to protect his identity by showing half a name; that he eschewed the all-pervasive blogroll; that his internal post links, rare they were, tended to link to himself only; strangest of all, that he put such stock in the weakest of all his writings, the analysis of Gettysburg casino development.

But bloggers are idiosyncratic and his work was the unmistakable emblem of a personality. The result was a damn fine blog.