Don’t worry–Terry is not in the hospital again! His heart is in perfect condition.
We occasionally get e-mails asking why the chronological order of this blog’s postings appears to have melted down, but the frequency of those e-mails has gone up sharply in the past couple of days, and here’s the reason: what you’re seeing, if you’re seeing it, are last year’s postings about Terry’s illness.
So what’s the problem? Whenever you visit the main page of “About Last Night,” what you see are the last seven days’ worth of postings, and nothing else.
If, however, you come to “About Last Night” via a link to a specific posting, the first thing you’ll see on your screen is the posting in question. Above and below it are all of the other postings for that week, in reverse chronological order.
Clear so far? Hang on–this is where it gets tricky. Start scrolling down and you’ll find all of the “About Last Night” postings for the same week last year, in reverse chronological order. Keep on scrolling down and you’ll find all of the postings for the same week in preceding years…and on and on ad infinitum, or at least all the way back to 2003, when “About Last Night” was launched.
This is how “About Last Night”‘s archives are set up, and it’s been causing a good deal of understandable reader confusion in the past few days. If, for instance, somebody sent you a link to Monday’s posting about Terry’s Christmas tree, you would have seen, not far below it, Our Girl’s posting from December of 2005 announcing that Terry was in the hospital. Result: alarms and confusions.
Alas, there’s nothing we can do about this peculiarity–it’s an immutable quirk of the software that generates our archives. So forgive us (and artsjournal.com) for giving you a scare, and please be assured that Terry is not–repeat, not–back in the hospital.