I am a fan of the old ?Star Trek? series that ran from 1966-1969. No, I am not stuck in a time warp and I do not attend Trekkie conventions, but I do remember what I saw, helped by an occasional rerun, so they must have had an impact on me.
Looking at Numismatic News these days reminds me of one of the episodes.
This one featured a library that was used to send the people of a doomed planet back in time to escape their world?s destruction.
The intrepid Capt. Kirk, Spock and McCoy arrived to warn the inhabitants only to find that they were gone. Only Mr. Atoz remained. He thought he was saving their lives when he sent them back in time. The rest of the plot hinged on getting the three back to the present and safely away.
Well, there was more than one Mr. Atoz. There were multiples. They were clones. They appeared at one point in the episode to maximum effect.
Readers might have that sense when they turn from this page and go to the jump pages that feature letters to the editor and responses to our e-newsletter weekly poll. There on that last page is Mr. Atoz, oops, no its me again, with a Buzz column.
What?s going on? Don?t I get enough attention the way it is? Well, yes and no. If the world existed as it did in the past, this column would be quite enough. However, with the ongoing evolution of business online, I have a blog. That blog appears on www.numismaticnews.net. I write it five times a week. It began in April.
I posted my 145th blog commentary this morning. I thought I should write something here to mark the occasion. It is fun to write a blog. It is interesting. Sometimes I feel as if I have kicked a ball through the goal posts. Krause Publications, which publishes Numismatic News, wants the blog to succeed and wants readers of Numismatic News to know it exists. Hence the decision to pick one of the five weekly online installments to appear here in the paper every week.
Just call me Mr. Atoz.
Krause Publications knows that not everyone has online capability, so it is figured that my handling a second topic in the paper is not a bad thing, even if there is no possibility of some of the readers ever going online and reading the four commentaries that didn?t make it into print in a given week.
My online topics are many and varied. Most of them I would be proud to see in this paper, but even the strongest proponents of putting some online content into this paper each week would choke at giving me six columns a week within these pages.
So think of me as Mr. Atoz. Always here. Always helpful. Always more than one of me.
Of course, the danger is that with six topics a week, I might repeat myself. I might repeat myself. Let me know if that happens, if that happens.
So far so good, but you never know. Tomorrow I must post my 146th blog commentary online. That is a lot to try to remember, but you don?t really have to. If something seems familiar, you can always turn the page or click away. No matter where I am, it is still your choice to read.
