Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog, 13 days after the eighth anniversary of this blog’s predecessor. (Which also is the approximate anniversary of when I started pontificating from the right side on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review, about which I wrote earlier today.)

According to my blog software, I have written more than 4,000 posts read (however the software defines that) more than 219,000 times by more than 91,000 visitors. (I say “about” because the number will change as you read this.) I have, among Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com and email subscribers, about 2,900 readers each day worldwide. The most popular day to read, apparently, is Monday, and the most popular time is at 10 p.m. Central time (I assume).

(At five years old this blog is more mature than Donald Trump’s tweets, to quote Anderson Cooper earlier this week.)

Regular readers will recall I started this blog to maintain the daily discipline of writing immediately after my employer of the time decided to stop paying me. I now have to fit this in with my employers, parenting and other commitments. (I have at least three different public personas — newspaper editor, right-wing blogger and sports announcer — and I try not to mix them, though that’s not always possible.) To quote one of my least favorite Chicago songs, after five or eight years it’s a hard habit to break.

Thanks to all my readers, even the ones who disagree (except for those who are asses about it, and you know who you are). As I wrote eight years ago, the worst thing you can ever say to a columnist, or blogger, or opinionmonger, or whatever I am is not “I hated your column”; it’s “You write a column? Never heard of it.”