My Bad Idea For 2016

Show of hands. Who remembers The Meat Sheet?

Back in January of 2011 I had the bad idea to start cataloging my unhappy meat consumption. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the daily updating of it became burdensome. Soon I started to dread the project. And after three months I finally gave it up.

This is the time of resolutions. And while there have been resolutions I’ve kept over the years, all the ones that stuck were stupid idea. Most notable was the one where I decided to limit myself to just one hamburger per month, which I wrote about all the way back in 2009.

Since the FLB started back in May 2009, I’ve written a lot of posts. Today’s is post 1943, if I trust the WordPress dashboard to keep an accurate count. And while for years, I was able to maintain a catalog in my head of everything that I had written, those days are now gone. It’s hard to tell how much is my advancing age, and how much is the expanding archive of posts.

Anyway, there’s been a side project that I’ve wanted to take on for a while. I figure it’s only fair to give you warning about what I plan to unleash upon you in the upcoming year.

Starting this week, I’m going to begin indexing the FLB.

Perhaps I should have spoken to an archivist before making this announcement. Maybe one will chime in and help me improve the project, for it’s set to begin this Thursday. Yep. We’re doing a Throw Back Thursday, FLB-style.

While I’m thrilled that the FLB proves to be a useful resource to some people, I’ve always written it for my own amusement/mental sanity. One of my great joys is in writing headlines for posts. I also really enjoy telling stories.

Looking back, these two things make it difficult to navigate the archive.

Take, for example, the post Burger Time from February 2011. The headline makes me smile because it reminds me of a table top video game machine I used to play as a kid in Miami. But it’s not about the game. It’s a rambling story of 633 words that touches on my first experience with Five Guys and my love for the Swifty’s deep fried buffalo burger. But the core of the post can really be summed up in a sentence or two:

If the grossly overpriced cafeteria at the D.C. Museum of Natural History can sell a grassfed burger for $5.25 (with meat that comes all the way from Maine), we should be able to get something of similar quality and value locally.

See? That wasn’t so hard. The hard part is going to be cataloging the close to two thousand posts in the archive. And that is why I plan to tackle one month every week. That feels ambitious, and we may have to see how it goes. But going through one year every twelve weeks seems like the only way I’ll be able to get this done in under two years.

Remember, I’ve always taken the long view when it comes to the blog. We’ve got at least another couple years on the cider donut tours too.

My hope is that by going through the old posts, I’ll be able to pick up on threads that may have dropped, rediscover stories that remain relevant today, and track the evolution of the blog from its early days to today.

It’s probably a bad idea. But so was The Best Dozen donut thing, and I did it anyway. We’ll try it out and see where it goes.