I finally had to do it. My Bible collection, at the last count before today, had grown to about 310 volumes. So today I bit the bullet, and did a purge. I set aside Bibles I really don't need, traded some to McKay Used Books, and I have another five boxes of them, ready to take to McKay next time I get a chance. The current count, if my spreadsheet is accurate, is...205. Now, I know for most people, that's still a LOT of Bibles. But that means I have purged over 100 books from my shelves! That's not a bad start...
Below is a picture of the shelves where the majority of my Bibles currently reside. You can't see every Bible I own in this picture, but it gives you a little glimpse of my...let's just call it a sickness, shall we?

Awhile back, while we were watching the excellent British comedy Rev., on Hulu, we used to see trailers for a Candian comedy called Little Mosque on the Prairie (or as it's called on Hulu, simply Little Mosque). I watched a couple episodes back then, and then some other show came up for us to binge watch, and I forgot about it. Recently I started watching it again, and it's quite funny, in a quaint, Canadian sort of way. The premise is the story of a mosque that rents space at a little Anglican church in a small town on the prairie of Saskatchewan. Of course, there are little culture clashes, and a fair amount of hilarity. The great strength of the show, to my way of thinking, is of the various characters: the progressive young imam, the equally progressive (but somewhat more cynical) Anglican priest, the traditionalist African immigrant, the educated ultra-conservative Muslim who is always shouting at people, the opportunistic Muslim businessman with the former-Anglican wife (who isn't really very good at the whole Islam thing), and several other enjoyable (if somewhat stereotypical) characters.

The writing is pretty good, the situations are humorous, and the nice thing is, in general, even when they disagree, all these different people get along. In this crazy time in which we live, especially when it comes to friction between various cultures, it's nice to see a comedy that posits the idea, however idealistic it may seem, that things wouldn't be so bad if we could just come to grips with the idea that we're all pretty much the same. ​ I also think the fact that it's set in Canada, instead of the United States, makes it a bit easier to digest, for some reason. (If it were in the US, I feel like it might hit a little to close to home, literally.) Anyway, I'm enjoying it, and I'm almost to the end of the first season (out of six). 

I've been back and forth on ideas to simplify my blogging, and I'm pretty sure I've hit on the best method now. Once again, I'm shutting down my old individually themed blogs: Baker Street Babble, Bible Bookshelf, and Willy Wigglestick. Any future posts on Sherlock Holmes, the Bible, or Shakespeare (or whatever other subjects come to mind) will be shared right here, at the Corybanter Blog. 
I'm keeping my blog Dallas: the Poetry of Alice K. Howell separate from everything else, because I want to keep all my Grandma Howell's poetry in one place, without a bunch of other stuff cluttering it up. And for right now, I'm keeping my "mini-blogs" at Medium.com. (I may decide to close those down at a later date).
And now, for your enjoyment, here's a picture of my daughters having fun at the recent Greek Festival, here in Nashville, TN!

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​I haven't checked into my "main blog" here for quite some time, so I thought I'd rectify the situation a bit this morning. I'm sitting at Star Bagel, finishing up my second cup of coffee, and it seemed like a good time to catch up on my blogging activities. 
I remember when the word "blog" was a strange, new, unfamiliar word to me. I think I read an article in a print magazine (I don't remember which one, honestly) about this new Internet trend: the "weblog," or "blog," for short.  And I thought, "Hm, that sounds interesting." And then I promptly went on with whatever I was doing at the time. I think it may have been a few years later that my brother Toby started his first blog. Again, I thought, "Hm, maybe I should give that a try." And I did.
I seem to remember my first attempt at a Corybanter blog happened on Tumblr. (That first blog still exists, even though it's inactive.) Then Toby introduced me to Posterous: don't look for it, it doesn't exist any more. But, boy, did I love blogging on Posterous. It was so easy! I maintained a blog there for a couple of years, I think, before Posterous went belly up. After that, it took me awhile to find another blogging platform that I liked: I tried Tumblr (again), Wordpress, and a couple others, before I finally more or less settled on Weebly. 
I guess it was last year that I tried consolidating all of my blogs into one blog (to rule them all), and then almost immediately decided to keep my separate blogs, and maintain this one (with the domain name coryhowell.net) as a sort of central place to link to them all.  Has that worked?

NO.

I almost never check in here, and I still have several of those other blogs: Willy Wigglestick (my Shakespeare blog), Baker Street Babble (my Sherlock Holmes blog), Bible Bookshelf (a blog about Bible versions and such), this small collection of stuff at Medium, the blog of my Grandma Howell's poetry, and maybe a couple others that I'm forgetting. Still, I keep coming back to the idea of an online home for all my various blogs to live, here at CoryHowell.net. And I keep hearing the siren song calling to me, "Come and blog! Share your thoughts online!" From time to time, I actually respond. Thanks for reading.