For those of you who are a bit slow on the uptake, or perhaps it’s just one of those slow days anyway, ‘golb’ is, of course, ‘blog’ spelled backwards. This is intended to summarise the intention behind this site: to offer an alternative point of view and challenge accepted ideas. To deal in opposites. To be an opposing site.

Great.

Of course, like all good intentions, it’s not going to last very long, is it? I’m quietly confident that within a month, or maybe even less, this fine intention will have degenerated into yet another egocentric rant, of which there are depressingly many on the mighty electric Internet.

I’m new to blogs. Not new to reading them of course but certainly new to actually pasting one of them onto the Internet. There’s a lot more involved than you think. Until recently, I might have guessed that PHP meant Professor of Philosophy but it turns out to be a scripting language, and like all languages it has to be learned. The hosting company and the providers of the blogging software (take a bow WordPress) make it all sound so simple but the few clicks that it takes to put your site online are only the start of a much longer process of making it look good and work well.

So if this site doesn’t live up to either of these criteria, sorry. Come back in a couple of weeks and it might be better. At least that’s the good intention.

Naturally, I made a quick search on Google to find any other golbs out there. There are several. For instance, there’s Norman Golb (1928- ) who is, apparently, the Ludwig Rosenberger Professor in Jewish History and Civilization at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Take a bow, Norm. I wonder if he has a blog, and, if he does, what he calls it. Perhaps he calls it ‘The Opposite’ too – or Norman Golb’s blog.

Then there’s the golb that ‘is a piece of software which searches a directory recursively for mp3 and m3u files and creates an SQLite database out of the information found’. Amazing. Why would anyone want to do that? I can’t think of a more useless waste of time. Unless, of course, you happen to be an mp3 file desperately in search an SQLite database. Not the sort of thing you usually see in a Lonely Hearts column, is it? ‘Mp3 file seeks friendly, intelligent, considerate SQLite database with a view to procreation. Must be fond of children and a non-smoker’.

According to the Urban Dictionary, golb is ‘kinda like gold but then black’. I think there’s a point that I’m impressively missing there.

And as you scroll faithfully down through Google, old Norm pops up regularly. For a Ludwig Rosenberger Professor in Jewish History and Civilization, he certainly gets around.

But how much do you really want to scroll through Google? And why? Isn’t it enough to have a golb site without wanting to research its ancestry? I’m proud of its golbiness. But, of course, this is all part of the good intention, and we all know that it won’t last.

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