Welcome! to The Billy Lee Pontificator,
or as the ancient Egyptians might have phrased it;
EE EE OOH EE ER ANEE EE (welcome to my writing tablet!)
I have no idea what I’m doing, but I hope my blog-site can be a place where family and friends will visit to pontificate freely about whatever is on our minds.
My vision is one where contemplation, reflection, and carefully crafted logic will live side by side with wild ideas and misspelled verbal excesses.
I hope my posts will get the brain juices flowing and inspire folks to add comments to befuddle, enrage and confuse anyone who reads them.
And while we’re on the subject, if some reader writes an article and wants to post it somewhere, please consider e-mailing it to me to post here, on my blog. What I’m saying is, people have an outlet to post more than 142 words if they need it — where they won’t be crowding out pictures of babies and birthday parties.
If you have something short and sweet, but longer than a tweet, consider posting it in the Speedos section. I’ll add a graphic to spice it up if you want. Or mosey on over to the Message Board and make an appeal or announcement to our readers.
Visit often. Please post long-winded comments on anything you find here. My writing tablet has a readership of two people and has the potential to grow beyond that. Make your voice heard. Pontificate!
Billy Lee (Jan. 17, 2014)
Random Reads:
Images & Pics Policy
It is the policy of TheBillyLeePontificator.com to place in articles and pages only those images and pictures which belong to Billy Lee or are in the public domain.
When Billy Lee started his blog on January 17, 2014, he used the blog as a kind of personal scrapbook. For most of the first year he illustrated his articles with images he downloaded during Google Internet searches. Since Google didn't identify which images were proprietary and which were public, it is possible some images on this web-site may belong to individuals who might not want them used by Billy Lee.
The Editorial Board is asking any individual who finds a proprietary image on this blog-site to contact us through the Reader's Comments section at the end of the article where the image appears, so that we may identify and remove it. Comments referring to an image will be read by Billy Lee but not published.
TheBillyLeePontificator.com...
The Billy Lee SEO Policy
It is the policy of the Billy Lee Pontificator to not pay SEO fees (bribes?) for the "privilege" to appear in the search results of a web-service like Google.
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is deployed, it seems to me, like hacker ransom-ware to try to force blog-site administrators to pay fees. Unless they pay fees, administrators can sometimes experience a drop in viewer hits on their sites.
For sites like the Pontificator, these fee demands are a good thing. By ignoring them, the Billy Lee Pontificator takes advantage of the machinations of search-engine companies like Traffic Power -- now banned by Google -- to make it unnecessary to password-protect our content.
Anyone who knows us and our site location still has the unencumbered access demanded by our readers. But pervasive SEO subscriptions by other blog-sites overwhelm malicious web-surfers who might visit our site by chance. We don't have to password-protect...
The Billy Lee Privacy Policy
Since going live in January 2014, theBillyLeePontificator blog-site has been successfully attacked three times -- once by bots representing, ostensibly, disgruntled gays; once by people upset about some essays we posted which defended gay marriage (protestors intimidated Billy Lee into shutting down his site for six weeks -- it's a complicated story); and again during the 2016 presidential contest after Billy Lee endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Hackers took down the site and an anonymous person threatened Billy Lee's life in a private video message forwarded through Twitter. Site stats suggest that the threat originated somewhere inside the Ukraine.
Despite fear, we hardened our site and continued publishing. Our intention is to keep theBillyLeePontificator.com website public. Anyone should be able to read an article or post a comment on our blog.
That's the fun of open discussion, isn't it? We can argue with one another in a safe place, where we are respected&...
FINAL THOUGHTS
TIME TO DIE
I sinned against the man I loved who died.
I thought I'd have more time to sigh;
Delay the time when silence became the lie.
Time passed us by---an ally to our crime
That lives inside when all loves die
to make us cry and cry and cry.
Who knows why?
Love makes time for us to die.
I've failed at everything in life. What I learned is that it is possible to fail at everything and still find some happiness from time to time. I blame many failures on my own incompetence and bad choices. But also, people hate me.
It doesn't matter how much a person knows or how capable they are; unpopular people don't do well. People have pulled the rug out from under me many times; I never seem to be alert enough to anticipate what bad thing is coming next and how to avoid it. I've never been able to tell who my friends are, or who those folks are whose kindness is a mask they wear to disarm and humiliate me.
At age twelve, I found myself one weekend-day carefully sweeping out the...
Message Board
This space is for messages, announcements and appeals. It's for everyone. Scroll to the end of the messages to put your message in the comments box at the bottom of this page. After approval, your message will appear first in the list.
Reminder: messages are reviewed before they are posted to make sure they are from real people, not bots. If you are a real person, it is the official policy of the Billy Lee Pontificator to post your message or comment.
Editorial Board
Who is Billy Lee?
Billy Lee is a former machine design engineer, career Navy kid, anti-War activist, Francophile, amateur Egyptologist, math/physics hobbyist, and university grad.
He loves British-style Blues guitarists (like Joe Bonamassa & Jean-Pierre von Dach).
Whenever possible, he fights the good fight to not consume mass quantities of Kroger cherry pies or their chocolate chip cookies; Philadelphia cream cheese glop-spread on any crackers he can find; Little Caesar's $6 pizzas---slathered with Crazy Sauce; also, Crazy Richard's nutty peanut butter on brown bread soaked in Bonne Maman cherry preserves; and low-fat cottage cheese made crunchy with lightly-salted Lay's Potato Chips smashed in.
Married to Bevy Mae, Billy Lee is father to six adult children---three bio and three in-grafted---and grandpa to thirteen grandkids, including two born in Ethiopia.
Billy Lee is a Christian who loves Joe, Hillary, and Brittney.
Billy Lee is a lifelong pontificator who believes that civilizatio...
I enjoy your blog very much!
Love,
Your favorite cousin,
Marcia