The Shadow Knows

•  Shadow Ban Ends
• We Jam With "Best In World" Harp Player
  

The Shadow banning of this blog has apparently been lifted, making me wish that I had been putting more effort into the writing that has gone into it.

At one point, right before the 2020 presidential election, Google had throttled the readership down to less than a dozen "views" on a typical day. After all, I was a vaccine skeptic, a global warming skeptic, and a non death-wisher of Donald Trump.

January of 2015: "Before"

That put me in the position of having to try to write about more timeless topics; as if the blog was to be put in a time capsule, to be dug up at some point in the future. This kind of shed a different light on what I had for breakfast that morning being fodder for a blog post. Instead of writing about watching "the game" the night before, I had to be more specific and mention "the Superbowl between the Rams and the Chiefs" just to jog the memory of anyone reading the post well into the future.

Now, I feel like I have to go back and edit a lot of posts that were done when I was locked down in the apartment, swilling brandy and pissed off at the shadow banning. 

May of 2022: "After"

Rather than "disappearing" the posts (which would draw attention to the censorship that was going on, and flood the Google help forum with "what happened to my post?" inquiries) the algorithm allowed me to write whatever counter-to-the-mainstream-narrative things I wanted, but then just disappeared the whole darned blog to the search engine, so that only the people who already had the link bookmarked or were "subscribed" would ever see them. (Or people who randomly typed "daniels-new-blog.blogspot.com" in the search box of their browser -there were 0 of them, over the course of the past year).

As far as the algorithm was concerned, I would be quarantined into a special room in cyberspace, and kept with other like-minded individuals, where our thoughts would stay amongst ourselves, without there being any risk of us infecting anyone else on the worldwide web.

That way, millions of people could maintain things like: "Everyone thinks we need a new president, just look on Facebook or Youtube or Instagram or Tik Tok; it's everyone!" or would be ready to get right in the face of anyone who hadn't taken the "experimental" vaccine (close enough that they could smell their breaths) and give them hell over their selfish attitudes. And these people would have never even heard of any contrary opinions, nor read about the foibles of Street Musician Daniel...

But, now that I am back to getting about 600 views a day, I feel a bit embarrassed over what any of them might dig up, should they go back into the archives and catch me on one of my bad days.

I guess I have some self censorship to do.

Our Friend Gurvan

Last Saturday night, Jacob and I were visited by one of the members of the best blues band in the world, in the form of Gurvan Leroy, who jammed along with us on harmonica for a couple songs. One of them I will link here as soon as I upload it to Youtube or Soundcloud.

Gurvan is the guy on the far left, whose band "The Whacky Jugs" beat out 3 thousand other bands at some festival which culminated in Nashville, the night after we met him; if our understanding of his broken English was correct. I was glad to find out that he is one of the best harmonica players in the world because he definitely impressed me with his playing  

Daniel McKenna III · I Feel Fine (cover)(w Special Guest Gurvan Leray From The Wacky Jugs)