"La France est blessée. Et, pour nombre de Français, humiliée." --Jean-Marie Colombani

 

<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. Then I check my e-mail, which includes Randy Cassingham's This Is True. Now that I have a paid subscription, however, it won't be on the server anymore come Sunday. I've just added Meredith's LiveJournal to the rotation, because she says I don't snoop on her enough. Sometimes I go to Google Groups to see if anyone's responded to anything I wrote, because I'm vain (if I weren't, you wouldn't be reading this). Next is Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope column from The Chicago Reader. Then This Modern World. I usually see the cartoon in the Voice, so I don't bother with it, but the journal is informative, even if the information imparted isn't always very interesting. After that, I go to The Onion if I haven't read the paper version.
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.

2What do you do with an obvious or playful pseudonym on second reference? I read in the old, Laurence Urdang-edited Verbatim magazine that Sholom Alechem3 and Mark Twain, because they came from set phrases (secondhand in the latter case), should not be shortened to "Alechem" or "Twain" further on. I haven't noticed anyone observing this, but neither have I noticed anyone not observing it.

3I don't think that's spelled right. I'm not going to check it, however, because again, do you transliterate it however it seems right, or use the standard English rendering of the phrase? And who decides what that is? And why should I listen to them, anyway?

posted by Charles Lieberman at 2:05 PM

 

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.
posted by Charles Lieberman at 12:03 PM

 

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); but that doesn't seem to be the case.
posted by Charles Lieberman at 11:30 AM

 

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: Yesterday, Meredith and I rented movies³ and then I got a cut on my finger and she was unsympathetic.

I'm not sure she'd see it that way. Let's see if I can find her take on it.
Ah. Her take on it is that it's too trivial to mention.

1I may have been4 a little arrogant, I suppose. I was overcompensating for a minimal social life.

2Not that I'm sure prehumous readers won't.

3 Zoolander and Lisa Picard is Famous and Donnie Darko

4I know, I know: "may have been?"

posted by Charles Lieberman at 10:47 AM

 

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.
(Who wants to hear that? I don't wanna hear that!)

1The principle being that it increments every time I visit my own page, and I am unfathomably self-obsessed.

posted by Charles Lieberman at 8:14 AM

 

About that introductory post

I'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.
Innocuous errors of fact and erroneous information will be dealt with by subsequent entries, as will changes of opinion. Falling out of love with the wording is something I'll have to live with.

I'll post a "who am I"-type message when I feel you deserve it.

1There's an earlier, dead one, which I have delinked under the "misleading" exception to the 12-Hour Rule. Here's the offending picture.

2or possibly avoiding

3The upholstery of the anxious seat.

4I almost wrote "an audience of strangers," but I felt that was probably overly ambitious.

5The well-known www.whitehouse.com for www.whitehouse.gov, for example.

posted by Charles Lieberman at 3:39 PM

 

I had to tell you before I forgot

I just found this while looking for something else, and I think it's cool because I am so lazy.
posted by Charles Lieberman at 11:56 AM

 
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 my girlfriend's Liz Phair website, by the way. Why doesn't ISO 8859-1 have an en-dash?
posted by Charles Lieberman at 2:11 PM

 
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.
posted by Charles Lieberman at 1:32 PM