You learn something new every day, if you aren't careful. Yet again.

My other blog, It's News 2 Them™, is now essentially equal to this blog in terms of daily hits, reaching that level of Internet popularity in 10 months while this blog has taken 42 months to get to the same place.

They grow up so fast.

Because the Other Blog is tacky, I decided to put ads on it, and those ads are working pretty well. If things go as expected, some time this month I will have made my first $100 in ad revenue, which means Google will send me my first check.

Yes, I am netting $10 a month. Soon I will have my feet up, watching a big screen TV and eating bon-bons as the free money just rolls in.

I bring up The Other Blog and the ads because I clicked on one last night for a book entitled The Deeds of My Fathers by Paul David Pope. Pope's grandfather Generoso was an Italian immigrant who started with nothing and formed an empire in the building trades in New York, as well as an influential Italian-American newspaper. Pope's father Gene was his father's favorite son, but his family forced him out of the inheritance and he was left with next to nothing, except the good graces of his godfather, mobster Frank Costello.

Really, Frank Costello was this guy's godfather.

The Pope family is not mob, but they are mob adjacent. It's hard to get anywhere in the cement business in New York without connections to guys with broken noses. Young Gene buys the New York Enquirer and turns it into the National Enquirer. The blurb to the book makes him sound like the Boss From Hell, and the story of how the newspaper got into every supermarket in the country sounds like it includes some mob adjacency, but it definitely counts as an American success story. The author of the book worked at the newspaper until it was bought out in 1988.

It does not make me think more of The National Enquirer or the company that now owns it, American Media Inc. Readers of the Other Blog will know I refer to "the AMI kennel". Still, it helps explain why the Enquirer and its related rags are as seedy as they are.


By contrast, my family is not mob adjacent. I have no godfather with a colorful background, and we have no connections to the construction industry. My father, pictured here, is still alive and in good health, and he has always been generous with his son in the dispensing of words of wisdom.

For example, to the best of my knowledge, the Gosh Darned Pater Familias is the originator of the phrase used in the title of this post, a gem that bears repeating.

"You learn something new every day, if you aren't careful."

Truer words were never spoken.