Remember how excited I was to find that Uncle Crappy had been listed on Google?

Imagine what a bummer it was to find out, JUST NOW, that my listing has been removed.

I suppose it could have something to do with not posting an update for nearly three weeks. It had been so long since I’ve even looked at anything related to Uncle Crappy that when I called up Blogger to try to remedy this situation, Blogger didn’t even remember me … I never call, I never write, etc., etc….

It’s going to get better from this point, folks. All those projects I’ve been talking about? Done. Two of them have even run already, although the third — the story about Pittsburgh’s colored-dot beltways, may not run for a while. See, that story was intended for our magazine section — longer, more in-depth, with lots of nifty art with award-winning potential, and all that shit.

And then, the week it was filed, we killed the magazine section. Its days were numbered, to be sure … our editor of a couple years — Mr. Yankee, we’ll call him — had always wondered why we buried what he felt was the newsroom’s best product deep inside a Sunday pull-out section that probably got pitched with the ad inserts by a lot of folks every week. Add that to the fact that the bidness folks put together a re-designed classified section that required a bigger chunk of the Sunday paper, and you’re kicking the magazine out the door.

What does this mean for the beltway story? Um, it means our editors have to find a place in the regular paper — which has been noticeably tight in recent days — for about 85 inches of copy and accompanying art. If you know something about the newspaper bidness, at this very moment you’re thinking, “Ooooo — that’s a bitch-and-a-half.” If you’re not, let me tell you: It’s going to be a bitch-and-a-half. I’ll probably be lucky if it runs before the Fourth of July.

Back to the original point … or one of them, anyway … which was a huge chunk of work is now done and well past the point where I have to worry about it. And I’ll have more time to spend being Uncle Crappy.

Hope the Googlists notice.