Charles's Wacky World of Fun |
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Sunday, March 31, 2002
<evolve><I work a Sunday morning shift in the news division of WOR, a talk radio station in New York, and I have at best loosely monitored Internet access1 and a lot of free time so I look at a lot of Web sites. First stop: My Messy Bedroom, a sex-advice site from Canada. I read a book Josey Voegels wrote on dating a few years back, and when I started working here I Googled for her and found her column online. If I still have more than an hour and a half left in my shift, and I'm still bored, I'll look at CustomersSuck even though I've never held a retail job I learned about Scoobie Davis's blog from Tom Tomorrow's. I often find Tom Tomorrow2 self-righteous and irritating, but much, much more so in his cartoon than in his journal. 1I haven't gotten in trouble yet, but I haven't made any sort of effort to. I'm not going to try looking at porn or anything. Exciting New Improvement!!!The article (in Wired? The New York Times? The Times Magazine is always fascinated with this shit) that introduced me to blogs and Blogger.Com described it largely as a way for a user to make their list of bookmarks public. In that spirit, I now have a brief list of unadorned links rotated at arbitrary times. Given the likely audience for these writings (if any -- see below), I may well regret this. Hmmm. . . .I seem to be having trouble publishing this. I think I've solved it (which is not the same as figuring out what it is); in fact, if you can read this, I obviously have. I just realized the main reason I stopped keeping all my journals. Impatience and poor organization is a major part of it, but another factor is how boring my life is. I never did anything interesting enough to write about, and I spotted almost immediately the inherent contradiction in writing down my Deep Thoughts in an ostensibly private place. I was worried that my posthumous readers1 would find me obnoxious and irritating2. For instance: I'm not sure she'd see it that way. Let's see if I can find her take on it. 1I may have been4 a little arrogant, I suppose. I was overcompensating for a minimal social life. Hello? Is this thing on?An apropos title, since I'm posting this from the station. Anyway, since I refuse on principle to have a counter,1 I'll never know if anyone's reading this unless they contact me, although I may not reply. I believe I still owe a response to the nice lady from Barbie Army who e-mailed me a few years ago. And now, more of the music you wanna hear. 1The principle being that it increments every time I visit my own page, and I am unfathomably self-obsessed. Friday, March 29, 2002
About that introductory postI'm not going to be able to reproduce my poor departed introduction, but I think I can capture the general gist. I was trying to explain why I joined the herd and started a vanity blog. Frankly, I'm not sure. My girlfriend has one1 where she displays a picture of me that I find . . . doesn't capture the real me (who's thinner than that). I'll put up a picture I like when I, um, find one I like. Maybe I was inspired by reading Dumbth, wherein Steve Allen ordered -- I mean, advised the reader to keep a journal. I'm reading The Noonday Demon, and I think Andrew Solomon suggests doing2 the same thing. I never had the patience to keep it up when I tried to keep private journals, and I'm hoping the knowledge my legions of adoring fans are on tenterhooks3, breathlessly awaiting my next pearl of wisdom, will motivate me to stick with it. My private journal entries always read like I were writing for an audience4 anyway; at least now I won't feel self-conscious about it. In an effort to curb my tendencies towards what I would call perfectionism, I am provisionally imposing a rule that I will not edit entries more than 12 hours old except to correct errors of fact or erroneous information when it is likely that people will be misled with highly unfortunate consequences5. I'll post a "who am I"-type message when I feel you deserve it. 1That's not it, however. That's definitely her -- I remember the guy she's talking about -- but it's not even close to current, and she may not remember it's there. The one with the offending picture is here. I had to tell you before I forgotI just found this while looking for something else, and I think it's cool because I am so lazy. Thursday, March 28, 2002
My second attempt to post was more successful, but I ran into a snag when I tried to "publish." For those following along at home, "posting" is taking a post and putting in your own little folder the blog people have, while "publishing" is actually taking the stuff in that folder and putting it out on the Web for everyone to see. I keep thinking the button needs ". . . and be damned" after it. Anyway, it turned out I haven't done anything to my old vanity site in so long I forgot my Tripod password, and once I had them tell me and passed the information on to Blogger.Com, Netscape crashed. I think the trouble with my first go at posting -- the one that got swallowed -- may have been my attempt to include links. I'm going to include one here as an experiment -- don't worry, I'm backing everything up now, unless my computer explodes everything should be safe, Anyhow, if you can read this it must have worked. That's (going to be) my girlfriend's Liz Phair website, by the way. Don't rush her on it, she's a junior at Columbia and she's a little busy just now. Why doesn't ISO 8859-1 have an en-dash? My first attempt to create a sort of introductory post didn't work because of a bug which can undoubtedly be traced to the fact that I'm using Netscape because the only reason MSIE doesn't completely suck is that millions of idiot programmers write stuff under the assumption that everyone in the world uses MSIE and other browsers be damned. Soon I expect to recover my composure enough to attempt to recreate it, although of course I'll never again achieve the Hemmingwayan heights of brilliance found in the one swallowed by Pyra. |