2004: The end of my second year in college. Republicans ruled Congress. The typical PC had only 512 MB of RAM. Numa Numa was sweeping the nation. And my website was last updated.
Many things have changed since then. There are the obvious shifts in the political and social landscape. There’s my move to New York, and, with it, the shift from Green Line to Q Train as my preferred mode of transportation.
Now, I humbly submit another change to that list: I have a new website. My old one, at home.uchicago.edu, is leaving the figurative dormitory in which it has lived for the last four years, and is standing on its own feet with its own address, www.jebruner.com.
I noticed a few things as I began to reëvaluate my website to prepare for its move. First of all, it was no longer at the top of the Google hit list for “Jon Bruner,” having been replaced in that spot by a website belonging to a North Carolina real estate agent named Jon Bruner. He promotes himself with this slogan: “Every community has at least one realtor like Jon Bruner. In ours……..it’s Jon Bruner!” This is embarrassing.
Then there was the fact that, since I last paid attention in aught four, my fake abstract on Queen had become something of an Internet micro-phenomenon, with as many as thirty people a day following links from obscure newsgroup posts (and, in one case, an alternative weekly in Mississippi) to read it. Most of the visits to my site were coming in via Google searches for “fat bottom girls,” “rockin’ world,” “fat bottoms,” and the like. Obviously, the abstract, and its frighteningly well-reasoned rebuttal, will remain on this site, as will other favorites from Dodd-Mead like The Thelmiad.
As for new content, I’ve decided to turn towards a particularly vexing phenomenon that I observe every time that I’m in Midtown: tourists, many of whom have spent thousands of dollars to travel to and stay in New York, flock to the Olive Garden on Times Square and The Gap on Fifth Avenue. I’ll be producing a short guide, to appear here soon, that will help tourists keep their attention on things that they can’t do in a mall in Des Moines.
In the meantime, take a look at the old favorites (only a few old favorites are here for now, but more will come) and help me beat out that North Carolina realtor by linking to my page and by searching for “Jon Bruner” and clicking on this website in the results. And tell people about this website; there’s a whole bright world of obscure newsgroups to conquer.