I proudly wear this t-shirt

First the big news: The NEW and IMPROVED Not Now Silly Newsroom will open to the general public on January 1, 2017. Check out the teaser.

Yes, folks, we’re going the dot com route.

Excitement and trepidation fills the newsroom as we finally get our own domain name. As longtime readers of NNS can attest, this has been a long time coming, with some speed bumps and roadblocks along the way. Over the last few weeks the dedicated and underpaid NNS staff has been busy preparing for the move to our shiny new digs. We’ve carefully bubble-wrapped all of the 952 published posts (and the 45 stories still in draft form) from our vast archives to ensure they do not break during shipping. They were lovingly packed into boxes to await the moving men, expected any day now.

One of the things NNS will lose when we abandon this joint are the stats, so let’s take what may be our last look at one of the numbers we’ve run up over here. It amazes me that almost a half a million people have traipsed across the NNS threshold to read what I have to say. Unless it was 1 person visiting 472,851 times. I’m gratified and just a little intimidated. The more people who trust my writing, the more NNS feels the responsibility to publish the truth (as we see it). I understand there are posts here that don’t really merit serious attention. The Monday Musical Appreciation and Throwback Thursday, f’rinstance. They’re kind of filler between the important stories.

District 2 Commissioner Ken Russell at tent city Pic shared by Nene MainMarri Coats on Facebook

However, there are NNS posts that I not only want people to take seriously, but to also share all over the innertubes. My recent post, Intense Intents in Tents about the Housing for All Miami protest in Coconut Grove, is one of them. It’s the third post in the Unpacking Grand Avenue series, with several more in the works. I was thrilled that Commissioner Russell felt my post was worthy of sharing with his constituents. I was also thrilled to learn that he slept in one of the protest tents on Sunday night.

Not only is Grand Avenue a slow-motion humanitarian crisis, it is Exhibit A in my prosecution of rapacious developers who are only interested in lining their own pockets at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised folk, who are about to be gentrified out of the historic Bahamian enclave that was unique in this country because it had, at one time, the highest percentage of Black home ownership that anywhere else in the country.

Which brings me to why this post is titled Making Friends Wherever I Go. That’s sarcasm, folks.

In the last several days I’ve managed to piss off a lot of people, beginning with some of the folks who attended the Grove 2030 charrette on Saturday who seem to think I called them racist. I’m having a polite dialogue with one gent on Commissioner Russell’s facebookery, but I’m in no mood to be polite.

That’s because of the fight I am still having with the City of Miami’s Public Records Office. It was all I could do not to respond to the latest outrage with every 4-letter word I know. I’ve been CCing the entire world on our email chain, so I’m not sure how many of them will continue to take my calls.

This month’s Top Five

Then there’s Tom Falco of the Coconut Grove Grapevine. I had no doubt he’d be angry over Coconut Grove Grapevine, Stop the Lies! I’m just surprised he told so many people because he must know, by now, that people talk to me. He should have spent some of that time correcting his lie and changing his mendacious slogan.

None of that can really spoil the good mood I’m in because my post on the Housing for All protest has become the fastest growing post of all time in the Not Now Silly Newsroom. Closing in on 600 hits in just 3 days makes me hopeful that moving to our own domain is the right thing to do.

Something I’ve always maintained about the Not Now Silly Newsroom since the very beginning: I don’t know what people want. Therefore, I really don’t write to please anyone but myself. I go with the philosophy that what is of interest to me will be of interest to others, and some more than others. Not every post here will please everybody, but that’s never been the point. The point is to share knowledge, shine light on neglected and forgotten topics, and learn. Hopefully, that will bring the eyeballs that will make going dot com worth it.