Best Of - The Fourth Hundred Posts: Bring It On!

Another of my mottoes is: the more you know, the less you know.

Invariably, this is because somewhere along the way there comes the sickening awareness that we can never know everything there is to know. Maybe you can deal with such a realisation, but as I said, it makes me ill. I am, and have always been, a militant know-it-all, and will continue to be. If I can't know everything I'll damn sure give myself a stroke trying.

I made my 400th post on 25 March, at the time when the seasons changed. In addition to the planetary ones, I have seasons of my own, emotional ones. In the winter is when I feel most British - probably summat t'do with t' rain. In the spring and summer I am almost entirely a New Yorker. Oh, I'll still watch "Little Britain" now and then in the warm months, fugeddaboudit, but I'm just as likely to be roaming around the alleys of Vancouver taking photos of grafitti or endlessly re-watching Woody Allen films. I only really feel Canadian in the fall, the only season in which this country is uniformly beautiful, a fact enshrined upon our flag which, after all, isn't green but red.

If the first hundred posts were about getting started, the second hundred about technical innovation, and the third about the delivery of quantity, the last hundred posts have been about improving the quality of the writing. I would much rather, now that I see how quickly these posts pile up, write fewer posts better than more posts worse. Much of my self-loathing arises from my desire to always be a better person than I am, whether smarter or kinder or fitter.

Being an inveterate reader, I've managed to absorb a lot of different styles of writing in my life, and it's that diversity I'm trying to reflect now. Unless there's a miracle, this blog will never pay me to write it. I could, however, make a pretty nice living writing (and/or taking pictures) for a variety of publications out there, much of it from the comfort of this very desk. The blog, then, represents a kind of portfolio of my capabilities, and will continue to grow to reflect that.

I'd like to thank all of you who read the Pop Culture Institute, whether you're a regular commenter or a diehard lurker. I've taken you down some dark corridors here, maybe lost a few of you along the way, but I hope I've also enlightened and entertained you as well. One thing is for sure: it's been my pleasure to do it.

My favourite post of the last hundred is called "Stanley Park Sojourn". Here it is again.