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Polar Blair's Den Menu PageBy Blair Whipple
The Story of "Polar
Blair's Den"
Written May, 2004
Annually Updated
What Came First? The "Polar Blair" or the "Den"?
Events That Lead to Polar Blair's Den.
Why "Polar Blair's Den"?
The Igloo Logo
The Fans
Problems
The First Hiatus
Early Days on the Web and the Second Hiatus
Back on the Scene
2005
Click Here To Buy New Lenta Shane Book!
Click Here To Buy New Lenta Shane Book!
Written May, 2004
Annually Updated
What Came First? The "Polar Blair" or the "Den"?
Events That Lead to Polar Blair's Den.
Why "Polar Blair's Den"?
The Igloo Logo
The Fans
Problems
The First Hiatus
Early Days on the Web and the Second Hiatus
Back on the Scene
2005
Click Here To Buy New Lenta Shane Book!
Click Here To Buy New Lenta Shane Book!
What Came
First? The "Polar
Blair" or the "Den"?
For some who ask, it's kind of like the old chicken and the egg question. You know: "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" My nickname of "Polar Blair" came long before "Polar Blair's Den"...by a slip of the tongue on my part. I was 11 years old, talking to my mom about my favorite wild animal, the polar bear, when "Polar Blair" just slipped out. Usually, people don't give themselves their own nickname, but I did and it stuck. However, it wasn't until 1997 with Polar Blair's Den that people outside of my family knew about my nickname.
Events That Lead to Polar Blair's Den.
It was 1997, my senior year of high school, and our new English teacher was starting up a school newspaper. Our school never had a school newspaper before. If we did, Polar Blair's Den would've come out much sooner. Mrs. Teresa Martin had a good idea of starting up a school newspaper. The problem was that she found very few students who wanted to write for the newspaper. Let me stop right there to tell you a little more about Mrs. Martin. That was her first year of teaching anywhere (before this she was a housewife). She was a good teacher, nice, thoughtful, and attractive. Still, most students in her classes didn't treat her very nice. I did, but most of the kids in my high school were real "stink-heads" to put it lightly. She left our high school after one year. From what I hear, she started teaching in Cedar Falls, Iowa. I don't know what happened to her after that. She started "The Knight Page", in which Polar Blair's Den appeared, and it went under that name for a part of the next school year after she left, but without her guidance it just didn't last that much longer. I don't think anyone after her had much of a desire to run the school newspaper. Plus, there really were never that many contributors, which was sad. In our area, there simply weren't that many high school kids who wanted to write. Since that time, a few students from various classes had an article placed in the local newspapers, but nothing much has developed for a school newspaper at the time of this writing.
Mrs. Martin liked the essays I wrote and sought me out, asking me specifically to write for what she was calling "The Knight Page". It wasn't a newspaper by itself, but a section of the town's newspaper named after our team "The Knights". I was an "A" student who loved to write, and it's the only extracurricular activity I ever participated in throughout my entire school career.
I wanted to write a weekly column. Something intelligent, but fun. Mainly, I just wanted to get people interested in SOMETHING...anything. There were just too many people in society, as there are today, who don't have an interest in anything. I don't know such a widely-held attitude came into place, but I still want it to change. I in no way wanted to write a commentary. One person's opinion on something just isn't that important. I wanted to speak to everyone, not just an exclusive audience. Since I was old enough to read I was infatuated with trivia books and just about anything with facts and figures. "Ripley's Believe it or Not" cartoons are still a big hit with me. I developed a weekly column full of interesting tidbits of information. Now I just needed a name.
Why "Polar Blair's Den"?
It wasn't that hard to come up with the name of Polar Blair's Den. Polar Blair was already my "home" nickname, and since I already knew a lot about my favorite wild animal, I knew that polar bears lived in dens. Hence "Polar Blair's Den".
The Igloo Logo
I wanted something that would draw attention to my column right away. People would look for this logo every week and know that they would find Polar Blair's Den. I imagined a flashy-looking igloo that would welcome visitors by its very appearance. The igloo has an open door with a red carpet leading up to it lined with runway lights. The night sky in the background brought the whole scene together, giving the "Den" that nightclub look. I was going for that Las Vegas type of look.
At first I wanted the logo to be in color. Back then, our local newspapers did not have color. In recent years (at the time of this writing), all of our local newspapers in Eastern Iowa have color. I drew it in black-and-white and was later glad that I did this. You can make out everything in the picture much better because it's black-and-white. In this case, color would've ruined it. It the very same logo I use throughout the Polar Blair's Den website.
The first Polar Blair's Den article was the only one that didn't feature the igloo at top. I had the artwork completed just one day after the deadline (I was misinformed about the deadline, or it would have been done sooner). Every PBD article afterwards had the soon-to-be-famous logo.
The Fans
I was the ONLY contributing editor to the Knight Page that wrote for that school year's newspaper every single week. When I was writing the column, I didn't want to reach out to just the students of my high school or my age group. I wanted all ages of people to read Polar Blair's Den. I succeeded. For the entire run of Polar Blair's Den I heard from fans of both genders and of all ages ranging from 6 to senior citizen.
What I didn't expect was that Polar Blair's Den would have such a far reach. The article came out in the La Porte City, Iowa newspaper. However, I heard from regular readers from a 50-mile radius. Pretty good for a small-town school newspaper journalist! Some of the towns that I know I had readers in were La Porte, Dysart, Vinton, Reinbeck, Waterloo, and Cedar Rapids (among others).
Another interesting fact is that La Porte City's "The Progress Review" newspaper had always been a thin newspaper before Polar Blair's Den. After Polar Blair's Den was out for a few weeks, the paper became three times thicker. After Polar Blair's Den ended, "The Progress Review" shrunk to its previous size and has stayed that thickness ever since. At the end of my senior year of high school, I received a free subscription from "The Progress Review" because I increased their circulation. The free subscription was only supposed to last a year, but I ended up getting it for almost two years.
Problems
I really enjoyed writing for a newspaper. If I would've had the time to do it in college, I might have continued "Polar Blair's Den" in a campus newspaper. However, there are certain limitations with newspapers that PBD faced on a weekly basis. I had to keep my articles short so they wouldn't take up too much space. The biggest drawback for me was the fact that I couldn't have more pictures. Illustrations take up a lot of space in the newspaper, especially if you want them to be big enough to see clearly.
There were other problems I had specifically with "The Progress Review" newspaper. The person in charge of putting my articles in the newspapers almost always made mistakes. After a while I was starting to think it was intentional. Since PBD was the only real exciting thing in that paper, I reckon that person was jealous and wanted to make me look foolish. I proofread every single article I turned in 7-8 times. Just about every week I would look in the paper and find spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, parts of my article repeated, and sometimes words with extra letters added in to make it look like profanity. I was really upset about the profanity words, and I gave notes to Mrs. Martin, the chief editor for us high school kids, that asked the "Progress Review" staff to carefully look over their work. They had little to no effect.
If high school didn't end for me, I probably would have stopped writing for "The Progress Review" newspaper anyway. I wasn't at all pleased with all the incompetence. Polar Blair's Den was always meant to be professional, and someone tried to take the polish off of my hard work. I hope this doesn't sound critical (because I'm not a critical person by any means), but when you work hard on something to make it look right you should have the full cooperation of others you're working with to make it so. I don't feel I received that cooperation.
On a good note, the "errors" didn't drive off any of my regular readers. In fact, I kept getting more readers all the time and found out that most of them didn't even notice the newspaper's "mistakes". Still, when things like that happened I always kind of held my breath like "Oh, man! I'm gonna hear it now!".
The First Hiatus
For two years after high school I wanted to continue Polar Blair's Den, but didn't know how. College got in the way, and even if I had time I didn't want to write for a newspaper again. Problems with "The Progress Review" days aside, a newspaper was just very limiting. I didn't have my own computer until 1999. We got a free website service from our local Internet provider and I thought about a Polar Blair's Den website for awhile before starting work on it in early 2000.
Early Days on the Web and the Second Hiatus
In early 2000 I started work on the website. I did it all by HTML language which is very time-consuming and difficult to do. Updates weren't very frequent because HTML is so tedious. After all, I had college. I made three major updates in 2000, then I stopped working on it for almost four years. In 2000, I signed up for all sorts of webrings, made links on my website to other websites, and had links on other people's websites to mine. I also suggested my site to many search engines. These were all very good for awhile, and they helped the PBD site to get noticed, but eventually almost all of the webrings and links died off. Some websites just don't last very long so I learned not to make links to anything that I don't feel will stay on the Web for a long time. The site could still be found through many search engines, though.
My old website service, NetINS (an Iowa-based provider), started changing their service and e-mail addresses. There were a few times I thought Polar Blair's Den was gone for good! Luckily, I was able to retrieve it and keep what I had online. I also had most of it saved on disks. Since I had the free Showcase account, I wasn't given that much space to display my site. I wanted to make Polar Blair's Den bigger (whenever I had time) and I wanted to have my own ".com". I tried to get one of their more expanded Showcase account packages, but they were making it too difficult so I decided to just keep my free account, but get a bigger Showcase account from another website provider. Sometime in 2002 I purchased a bigger Showcase account from HostSave. Although I didn't have time to move or work on my website until early 2004, I still kept the service.
Back on the Scene
A lot of water is under the bridge now. My high school and college days have been over for some time. My dreams of getting a book published have come true (see the "Lenta Shane, the Tiger-Woman" website). Now I finally have time to make regular updates to Polar Blair's Den once again. I'm always building to the site and will continue to do so. In the four years that this website has existed (this being written in May, 2004), I've had visitors from all over the world with many different interests. I would like to hear from anyone who finds any part of this website interesting or useful. There may be times when I get too busy to update the Den regularly, but there will never again be a four-year lapse. Now that I'm using Netscape Composer to update my website, I don't have to type in every single HTML tag known to man. I'll always be making updates small or large, so check back regularly. As always, I appreciate all the support readers have given me. Thank you very much!
2005
If there has ever been or will ever be a definitive year for "Polar Blair's Den", 2005 is it! Not only did the website grow by leaps and bounds, but the number of visitors and visitor response blew me away! At the time of this writing (September, 2005) "Polar Blair's Den" gets 1,000 visitors every 2-3 days. Sometimes it's received 1,000 hits in one day, although that is not always typical. It took me awhile, but I finally decided to put the same counter on every page of the site sometime earlier in the summer. I wonder how much higher the counters would read had I added them to the website much earlier, like say in 2004?
I've heard from many fans and made many wonderful friends. What's really exciting for me is that I've become great friends with celebrities that I've admired for years. Some of these include Gayle Caldwell, Ingeborg Kjeldsen, Quinn O'Hara, and Jeff Silver to name a few. I have also come into contact with other celebrities such as actors, musicians, professional lady-wrestlers, models...all kinds of people! It's been exciting for me and at this point 2006 looks even brighter!
And for the first time in my life, I've started a Christmas card list! I've never known too many people that I was good enough friends with to send cards. I'm a private person...to an extent...but am thrilled to now know SO many great people to wish holiday greetings! This is what the popularity of "Polar Blair's Den"...with the help from its fans...has done for me! My eternal thanks to all of those I'm talking about (you know who you are) and to YOU for reading this! If you're new to "Polar Blair's Den", browse around and enjoy the party!
Articles 1 Articles 2 Articles 3 Articles 4 Articles 5
Polar Blair's Den Illustrated
Story of Polar Blair's Den
2000-2004, Blair Whipple
For some who ask, it's kind of like the old chicken and the egg question. You know: "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" My nickname of "Polar Blair" came long before "Polar Blair's Den"...by a slip of the tongue on my part. I was 11 years old, talking to my mom about my favorite wild animal, the polar bear, when "Polar Blair" just slipped out. Usually, people don't give themselves their own nickname, but I did and it stuck. However, it wasn't until 1997 with Polar Blair's Den that people outside of my family knew about my nickname.
Events That Lead to Polar Blair's Den.
It was 1997, my senior year of high school, and our new English teacher was starting up a school newspaper. Our school never had a school newspaper before. If we did, Polar Blair's Den would've come out much sooner. Mrs. Teresa Martin had a good idea of starting up a school newspaper. The problem was that she found very few students who wanted to write for the newspaper. Let me stop right there to tell you a little more about Mrs. Martin. That was her first year of teaching anywhere (before this she was a housewife). She was a good teacher, nice, thoughtful, and attractive. Still, most students in her classes didn't treat her very nice. I did, but most of the kids in my high school were real "stink-heads" to put it lightly. She left our high school after one year. From what I hear, she started teaching in Cedar Falls, Iowa. I don't know what happened to her after that. She started "The Knight Page", in which Polar Blair's Den appeared, and it went under that name for a part of the next school year after she left, but without her guidance it just didn't last that much longer. I don't think anyone after her had much of a desire to run the school newspaper. Plus, there really were never that many contributors, which was sad. In our area, there simply weren't that many high school kids who wanted to write. Since that time, a few students from various classes had an article placed in the local newspapers, but nothing much has developed for a school newspaper at the time of this writing.
Mrs. Martin liked the essays I wrote and sought me out, asking me specifically to write for what she was calling "The Knight Page". It wasn't a newspaper by itself, but a section of the town's newspaper named after our team "The Knights". I was an "A" student who loved to write, and it's the only extracurricular activity I ever participated in throughout my entire school career.
I wanted to write a weekly column. Something intelligent, but fun. Mainly, I just wanted to get people interested in SOMETHING...anything. There were just too many people in society, as there are today, who don't have an interest in anything. I don't know such a widely-held attitude came into place, but I still want it to change. I in no way wanted to write a commentary. One person's opinion on something just isn't that important. I wanted to speak to everyone, not just an exclusive audience. Since I was old enough to read I was infatuated with trivia books and just about anything with facts and figures. "Ripley's Believe it or Not" cartoons are still a big hit with me. I developed a weekly column full of interesting tidbits of information. Now I just needed a name.
Why "Polar Blair's Den"?
It wasn't that hard to come up with the name of Polar Blair's Den. Polar Blair was already my "home" nickname, and since I already knew a lot about my favorite wild animal, I knew that polar bears lived in dens. Hence "Polar Blair's Den".
The Igloo Logo
I wanted something that would draw attention to my column right away. People would look for this logo every week and know that they would find Polar Blair's Den. I imagined a flashy-looking igloo that would welcome visitors by its very appearance. The igloo has an open door with a red carpet leading up to it lined with runway lights. The night sky in the background brought the whole scene together, giving the "Den" that nightclub look. I was going for that Las Vegas type of look.
At first I wanted the logo to be in color. Back then, our local newspapers did not have color. In recent years (at the time of this writing), all of our local newspapers in Eastern Iowa have color. I drew it in black-and-white and was later glad that I did this. You can make out everything in the picture much better because it's black-and-white. In this case, color would've ruined it. It the very same logo I use throughout the Polar Blair's Den website.
The first Polar Blair's Den article was the only one that didn't feature the igloo at top. I had the artwork completed just one day after the deadline (I was misinformed about the deadline, or it would have been done sooner). Every PBD article afterwards had the soon-to-be-famous logo.
The Fans
I was the ONLY contributing editor to the Knight Page that wrote for that school year's newspaper every single week. When I was writing the column, I didn't want to reach out to just the students of my high school or my age group. I wanted all ages of people to read Polar Blair's Den. I succeeded. For the entire run of Polar Blair's Den I heard from fans of both genders and of all ages ranging from 6 to senior citizen.
What I didn't expect was that Polar Blair's Den would have such a far reach. The article came out in the La Porte City, Iowa newspaper. However, I heard from regular readers from a 50-mile radius. Pretty good for a small-town school newspaper journalist! Some of the towns that I know I had readers in were La Porte, Dysart, Vinton, Reinbeck, Waterloo, and Cedar Rapids (among others).
Another interesting fact is that La Porte City's "The Progress Review" newspaper had always been a thin newspaper before Polar Blair's Den. After Polar Blair's Den was out for a few weeks, the paper became three times thicker. After Polar Blair's Den ended, "The Progress Review" shrunk to its previous size and has stayed that thickness ever since. At the end of my senior year of high school, I received a free subscription from "The Progress Review" because I increased their circulation. The free subscription was only supposed to last a year, but I ended up getting it for almost two years.
Problems
I really enjoyed writing for a newspaper. If I would've had the time to do it in college, I might have continued "Polar Blair's Den" in a campus newspaper. However, there are certain limitations with newspapers that PBD faced on a weekly basis. I had to keep my articles short so they wouldn't take up too much space. The biggest drawback for me was the fact that I couldn't have more pictures. Illustrations take up a lot of space in the newspaper, especially if you want them to be big enough to see clearly.
There were other problems I had specifically with "The Progress Review" newspaper. The person in charge of putting my articles in the newspapers almost always made mistakes. After a while I was starting to think it was intentional. Since PBD was the only real exciting thing in that paper, I reckon that person was jealous and wanted to make me look foolish. I proofread every single article I turned in 7-8 times. Just about every week I would look in the paper and find spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, parts of my article repeated, and sometimes words with extra letters added in to make it look like profanity. I was really upset about the profanity words, and I gave notes to Mrs. Martin, the chief editor for us high school kids, that asked the "Progress Review" staff to carefully look over their work. They had little to no effect.
If high school didn't end for me, I probably would have stopped writing for "The Progress Review" newspaper anyway. I wasn't at all pleased with all the incompetence. Polar Blair's Den was always meant to be professional, and someone tried to take the polish off of my hard work. I hope this doesn't sound critical (because I'm not a critical person by any means), but when you work hard on something to make it look right you should have the full cooperation of others you're working with to make it so. I don't feel I received that cooperation.
On a good note, the "errors" didn't drive off any of my regular readers. In fact, I kept getting more readers all the time and found out that most of them didn't even notice the newspaper's "mistakes". Still, when things like that happened I always kind of held my breath like "Oh, man! I'm gonna hear it now!".
The First Hiatus
For two years after high school I wanted to continue Polar Blair's Den, but didn't know how. College got in the way, and even if I had time I didn't want to write for a newspaper again. Problems with "The Progress Review" days aside, a newspaper was just very limiting. I didn't have my own computer until 1999. We got a free website service from our local Internet provider and I thought about a Polar Blair's Den website for awhile before starting work on it in early 2000.
Early Days on the Web and the Second Hiatus
In early 2000 I started work on the website. I did it all by HTML language which is very time-consuming and difficult to do. Updates weren't very frequent because HTML is so tedious. After all, I had college. I made three major updates in 2000, then I stopped working on it for almost four years. In 2000, I signed up for all sorts of webrings, made links on my website to other websites, and had links on other people's websites to mine. I also suggested my site to many search engines. These were all very good for awhile, and they helped the PBD site to get noticed, but eventually almost all of the webrings and links died off. Some websites just don't last very long so I learned not to make links to anything that I don't feel will stay on the Web for a long time. The site could still be found through many search engines, though.
My old website service, NetINS (an Iowa-based provider), started changing their service and e-mail addresses. There were a few times I thought Polar Blair's Den was gone for good! Luckily, I was able to retrieve it and keep what I had online. I also had most of it saved on disks. Since I had the free Showcase account, I wasn't given that much space to display my site. I wanted to make Polar Blair's Den bigger (whenever I had time) and I wanted to have my own ".com". I tried to get one of their more expanded Showcase account packages, but they were making it too difficult so I decided to just keep my free account, but get a bigger Showcase account from another website provider. Sometime in 2002 I purchased a bigger Showcase account from HostSave. Although I didn't have time to move or work on my website until early 2004, I still kept the service.
Back on the Scene
A lot of water is under the bridge now. My high school and college days have been over for some time. My dreams of getting a book published have come true (see the "Lenta Shane, the Tiger-Woman" website). Now I finally have time to make regular updates to Polar Blair's Den once again. I'm always building to the site and will continue to do so. In the four years that this website has existed (this being written in May, 2004), I've had visitors from all over the world with many different interests. I would like to hear from anyone who finds any part of this website interesting or useful. There may be times when I get too busy to update the Den regularly, but there will never again be a four-year lapse. Now that I'm using Netscape Composer to update my website, I don't have to type in every single HTML tag known to man. I'll always be making updates small or large, so check back regularly. As always, I appreciate all the support readers have given me. Thank you very much!
2005
If there has ever been or will ever be a definitive year for "Polar Blair's Den", 2005 is it! Not only did the website grow by leaps and bounds, but the number of visitors and visitor response blew me away! At the time of this writing (September, 2005) "Polar Blair's Den" gets 1,000 visitors every 2-3 days. Sometimes it's received 1,000 hits in one day, although that is not always typical. It took me awhile, but I finally decided to put the same counter on every page of the site sometime earlier in the summer. I wonder how much higher the counters would read had I added them to the website much earlier, like say in 2004?
I've heard from many fans and made many wonderful friends. What's really exciting for me is that I've become great friends with celebrities that I've admired for years. Some of these include Gayle Caldwell, Ingeborg Kjeldsen, Quinn O'Hara, and Jeff Silver to name a few. I have also come into contact with other celebrities such as actors, musicians, professional lady-wrestlers, models...all kinds of people! It's been exciting for me and at this point 2006 looks even brighter!
And for the first time in my life, I've started a Christmas card list! I've never known too many people that I was good enough friends with to send cards. I'm a private person...to an extent...but am thrilled to now know SO many great people to wish holiday greetings! This is what the popularity of "Polar Blair's Den"...with the help from its fans...has done for me! My eternal thanks to all of those I'm talking about (you know who you are) and to YOU for reading this! If you're new to "Polar Blair's Den", browse around and enjoy the party!
Articles 1 Articles 2 Articles 3 Articles 4 Articles 5
Polar Blair's Den Illustrated
Story of Polar Blair's Den
2000-2004, Blair Whipple