Okay, this Sunday afternoon post is an indulgence and a bit of self-promotion. It is about a missed opportunity I had to, putting it bluntly, get more people to subscribe to my Substack. My title here is, of course, a version of the well known philosophical question “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It can be answered differently depending on how one defines sound. It could be a physical event like a tree falling or something you percieve like the message of a Substack.
I am writing this as a follow-up to an addendum I posted on this morning’s Substack under the topic:
This is what I posted:
I just came across this from something I posted on Twitter in August:
I don’t know how Gov. Newsom found it. It was in response to my tweet:
Amazingly over 58,000 people viewed it. I rarely post on X. I never looked at how many people viewed that tweet.
Here are the replies to the X tweet from August.
This may not seem like a lot, but it is probably a record number for anything I ever tweeted.
While I was really pleased so many people saw my image and that Gavin Newsom was one of them, and of course that he saw fit to quote it with his own comment, I wish in retrospect that I’d included this magic link:
I have no way of knowing how many, if any, new subcribers, and eventually how many regular readers I would have gotten if I’d done this. After all, of 58,000 people who saw my tweet I’d assume a few of them would have been curious enough to check it out and maybe liked what they saw enough to both subscribe and read what I wrote on a regular basis. Who knows? I may have gotten 10 regular readers, 100, or none. Since many people subscribe to 50, 100, or more Substacks I doubt they read them all.
Looking back, had I known how many people, including Gov. Newsom, would have seen that tweet I would have done a better job with the illustration of Pam Bondi. For one thing I would have used the hat from a real Washington, DC police chief instead of a regular police officers hat.
I might have embellished her jacket with a badge too.
After all, why not? If anyone is full of themselves it is Chief Pam Bondi. If she decided to wear a unform it might look like these:
The Honorable Pamela Jo Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General who is the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government and who oversees the Department of Justice which includes the FBI, and who also serve as the principal legal advisor to the President of the United States, hasn’t gotten my attention since she visted my (supposedly burning) city of Portland earlier this month and afterwards said “I was in Portland and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon and also the mayor there in town, and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”
Who knows what tomrrow will bring? She competes with Pete Hegseth, who actually has a much larger contingent of people with guns he can order around, for the limelight so it’s anybody’s guess what she’ll do to outdo the guy who can bomb boats in the Caribbean.
...
