Thanks to the incredible generosity of other members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available.   These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year.   I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment.   Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected].   In your email, please:   1)        Let me know your situation and 2)        Provide me with the following information: a)    Your first and last name. b)     Your preferred personal email. c)     Your preferred user name (no spaces). d)    Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces).   The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks for such kind and generous donations [...]

  As many of you know, thanks to a couple of generous donors, I was able to give out some free memberships to people who very much wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees.   I put out the offer on my facebook page, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so otherwise.  I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as I made it.   This has made me suspect that there are a lot more people out there like that. And so an idea has hit me.   Why not do more of the same?  Would any of you be willing to donate one or more memberships during this holiday season?   Each new (year-long) membership would cost $24.95 – so let’s just say $25.      You could donate to the blog any increment of $25 that you want – so if you want to give one [...]

  I very much regret to report that all the free memberships that have been available by a generous donor have already been given out.   So please do not send in a request if you have not received one.  Hopefully we will be able to make more available in the future. Thanks again to the anonymous donor: and to the recipients, I hope you enjoy the blog!!

  Thanks to the incredible generosity of a member of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available.   These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year.   I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment.   Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected].   In your email, let me know your situation and provide me with the following information: 1)      Your first and last name. 2)      Your preferred personal email. 3)      Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4)      Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces).   The donor wishes to remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks for such a kind and generous donation to help [...]

  As many of you know, the charity that this blog supports more than any other is the Urban Ministries of Durham, which deals with issues of hunger and homelessness in my city of Durham – or rather, deals with people who are experiencing problems of hunger and homelessness. Urban Ministries (which, despite its name, is not a religious organization) does amazing work. And one of the most amazing things about it is that it does not simply put a band-aid on the problem, e.g., with its soup kitchen and overnight housing. They do have both, of course! But more than that, it works hard at ending homelessness for people, by getting them into permanent housing and employment to pay for it. It is a model organization that I am very proud to be associated with. They have just started an incredibly innovative fund-raising effort that is rather amusing and potentially ground-breaking. Here is the website:  https://www.namesforchange.org/Intro  Check it out, and tell me what you think. And feel free to name the toilet paper after [...]

My assistant and computer guru Steve Ray noticed yesterday (Saturday, November 16) that comments were not getting posted on the site.   There was a technical malfunction, unrelated to him, me, or the CIA (the real one or the secondary one in D.C., so far as I know....). This is the note he posted on my facebook page.  Please ... take note! Greetings Blog Members. Technical Notice. There was a database corruption on the blog server today due to JetPack, one that did not allow comments to record. If you left a comment between 6am to 6pm EST, please consider submitting it again. If any member notes that their account is not working properly (cannot access membership content), please email your password to [email protected] and it will be manually reset. Sorry for any inconvenience. S. E. Ray, Bart's Assistant. Additionally, the inbound links still result in membership access issues, even after logging in. Developers are looking into this and will not get back to us until Monday, 11/18/2013. However, if you login directly at https://ehrmanblog.org/login/ member posts are [...]

I’ve spent the past day or so thinking about the Blog.   By many standards I think it is going very well.   As I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions, we managed to raise $37,000 last year for the charities that the blog supports, all of them dealing with hunger and homelessness.  If we do that for a number of years – we’re talking some serious money!  Most of that amount came from membership fees; a good chunk came from extra donations, some of them extraordinarily generous.  I anticipate that we will have an even higher total this year, although it is yet to be seen.  In any event, we are slightly ahead of where we were last year at this point. But I never seem satisfied!  Maybe it’s my driven personality.  But I wonder how we can do better.   Much better. Some things we simply can’t do *more* of.   I already post about six times a week, and I try to mix up what I do: some posts are “public interest” items (like O’Reilly or that  [...]