Happy Anniversary, SHAMblog!

I'm probably going to put some more stuff up today (for one thing, we're not quite finished with Hawai'ian Week), but for now I wanted to alert y'all to the fact that today, July 17, marks the two-year anniversary of Steve Salerno's SHAMblog. Steve is the author of SHAM: How The Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, and he began SHAMblog around the same time that the book was initially published.


I only discovered Steve's writing, and SHAMblog, a little over a year ago, and I think it is fair to say that Steve gets most of the credit (or the blame, depending upon your point of view) for inspiring me to begin my own blog. At that point, my "cosmic" snarkiness – which up till then had found the pinnacle (or nadir) of its expression via my book-like product, Cosmic Relief *– had been dormant for years. But somehow, reading SHAMblog sparked the snark in me. While Steve takes a serious journalistic approach to self-help/pop psychology matters as well as some new-age stuff, I decided to go the (mostly) humorous route with Whirled Musings.

Now I'm coming up on my own one-year anniversary (July 27). Thank you, Steve, for your continued support of my efforts on this blog. More than that, thank you for SHAMblog. Not only do you offer information and thoughtful commentary, but you have provided a lively forum for discussion of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the self-help movement. Happy anniversary!

* You will see, if you follow the link, that the numbers for Cosmic Relief are impressive: #4,133,361 in Books as I write this. I like big numbers! Also, in the interests of full disclosure, the single five-star review was written by a friend of mine. I didn't ask her to do it, though; she volunteered.