This is yet another new series for the 2019 spring/summer edition of MBIP.
I have a lot of things here in the MBIP World Headquarters that I’ve collected over the years that bring back memories to me and I thought I’d spotlight some of them over the next few months, so let’s take a little look around and find something for this week’s Casual Friday post.
Here we are at the front of the MBIP World Headquarters.
I think I see an old friend over there on top of the bookshelves over there...
It’s the 365 bars camera! Well this camera certainly brings back a barrel full of memories and I’ll share them in the next picture’s caption area!
I bought this camera at the Best Buy on 14th Street in New York City back in December of 2009.
That’s when I was hatching the plan for the blog, A Guy Walks Into 365 Bars. Back then I was trying to transition from the world of print to trying my hand at blogging. I had done one blog, The Marty Wombacher Show and it was a dismal failure. I realized after months of working on that blog that it was too scattered and I was trying to do a blog with a magazine mind that had too many departments that no one knew when it was updated.
I decided to have a blog with a single focus that would be updated daily with the post on the “front page” of the blog that people could easily find.
One thing that had gotten a lot of hits on The Marty Wombacher Show blog was the section I called, the Photoblog. Basically it was a section where I went somewhere in New York and took a bunch of photos and had some interaction with people.
I decided that I would do a blog styled on this idea and then I decided it might be fun to go to bars in New York City and take photos of the nightlife in Manhattan and people who were out and about.
Then I decided that it might be a fun hook to do this for 365 days in a row and document the whole thing on a blog. I had a gut feeling this might be an interesting thing to do and so I went to the Best Buy on 14th Street to get a brand new camera to use for this project.
This is the camera and the blog ended up going kind of crazy! During my travels I met Simone Weichselbaum who wrote a feature story for the New York Daily News and then the blog blew up on the internet! I was written up on blogs and newspapers all over the world and it was kind of nuts for a while.
After the 365 bars blog ended I did two other blogs that were successful in New York City, Marty After Dark and then Tripping With Marty. I used this camera for both of those blogs as well.
Then in 2012 I decided to move back to Peoria after my job in New York moved to New Jersey and I couldn’t find another job and decided that I had enough of New York City after 19 years of living there.
I moved back and the 365 camera promptly broke. I wondered if this was a sign of a new chapter in life and went to the Best Buy in Peoria and bought the camera I now refer to as the MBIP Camera to start my blog here in Peoria. At the time I wondered what would happen during this new chapter in my life.
Well, after seven years doing the MBIP blog it’s been going great and if you’re still reading this, thank you for being part of the MBIP audience!
Cheers to the memory of the 365 Bars Camera and have a great weekend everybody!
Related Posts: Otto’s Shrunken Head and Welcome To My New Blog, Everybody!