The Penultimate GeniusThe Penultimate Genius

For whatever reason, political lightweight Arianna Huffington decided to merge the blogosphere with the e-tabloid, creating what can only be called a tablog. In advance of the lever-pulling that delivered electricity to that site, bloggers everywhere sharpened their knives, eager for an easy kill when the for-sure hubris-scented site went live. And then it went live and all the assassins shrugged and essentially pronounced it too lame to murder, sheathed their daggers and wondered silently why the site couldn't have been as obviously traffic-hungry as hyper-lefty James Wolcott's site. People were looking for an easy kill like Wolcott, and instead they got something like soft porn.

I mean: it was just too lame.

Yesterday, Lileks attempted to swing a bat at the site and found his target to be that foam material they're making mattresses out of now. Today, he finds M*A*S*H writer Larry Gelbart trying his hand at "blogging," and failing. Lileks says to imagine Hawkeye walking around and saying these things, but I would urge you to imagine Rodney Dangerfield at a microphone in front of a brick wall. And then determine if they're funny.[Not]

Yeah: it's ultra-lame shtick. And I'm pretty sure most of the contributors are sick to death of their deadlines already, wondering what they're going to possibly write about for The Blog! How many nights do you think Gelbart spent polishing that piece? More than five, you think? [Wouldn't your last The Joke's On Me piece have been funnier if you'd spent a little more time on it? - Ed. You were here. You know what happened. Oh, right, browser failure. - Ed] Don't expect anything else from him soon. Or John Cusack.

But another thing about "blogging" I hate is the occasional "hints" piece so-called establishment bloggers like to reel out every so often. You've seen them before, they're the infoblogercials telling you how to become a successful, popular and RICH blogger. Just follow these steps.

[Real Time Empircal Observation: All of the songs played on VH-1 from the new Gwen Stefani album SUCK. Proof that hotness and talent are not necessarily co-existent]

There are no formulas for blogging. Everyone should not aspire to be Glenn Reynolds, posting 49 times a day on widely divergent topics with very short posts that show familiarity with but not necessarily mastery of the subject. Everyone should not wield a flamethrower and attempt to burn down the arguments and positions of your political opposition a la Atrios. Everyone should not attempt to write food-based right-leaning humor snippets just nearly obscure enough to confuse 51 percent of your readership but make them come back for more, anyway, like Goldstein.

Of course, there are formulas for becoming a popular blogger, and if that's why your out here in cyberspace, then you should definitely copy someone else's style and slowly modify it to your own voice, and see what happens. Might work, might not. But if you're only doing this to be popular, then, well, why are you doing it?

Me? I do it because it's something to do and I like writing. I write about me and stuff that interests me. Nobody reads me (well, not many people), and this has not deterred me. It is not "fun" to blog for me, but it is not "work," either.

Anyway, I had two odd exchanges with women today that made me scratch my head. The first was with a playgroup mom during lunch at the park, the typical post-Tottercize activity. She just started talking about her vegan lifestyle, her continued breast feeding of her 2+ year-old son, and the difficulties she had while pregnant with him. Me, I had been talking about the weather up until that point, and other standard "I really don't know you that well" conversation topics. All I could do was listen, because I wasn't interested in talking about any of that stuff. But I thought it odd that her default conversation mode is to inform people of certain things about herself she thinks are defining articles of her personhood.

I refer to these people as special-needs adults, because they don't adhere to the normal protocols of polite conversation, but try and figure out if they're in like company or not so they can figure out if they like you. I always take the silent Fifth in such situations. You know the adage: Listen twice, speak once. Whatever.

And then at work tonight, one of the women on the overnight crew started talking to me out of the blue, which is weird, since we on the freight team have little interaction with anybody else in the store. First, she asked my name, seeing as she's seen me there for many months now and figured she might as well know it, and then asked me what music was on my mp3 player, nodded in agreement that the computer-selected mix of Nine Inch Nails, Texas, The The, New Order, Grandaddy, Etc... sounded cool, and told me she used to have a great music collection with her first husband before he died in a motorcycle crash. Then stuff about her daughter.

And I thought: hunh? Once again, not the kind of information I think I need to be told during a first conversation, but doubly weird that I'd had two of them in the same day. That's the kind of stuff you save until you kinda know the person as a person. That's just me, though.

I mean, should I have told either of them I'm doing my personal contest? I mean, it's apparently national pleasure yourself month. How would that have sounded?

Playgroup Mom: I'm a Vegan. I started not eating meat 7 years ago and it's been great.

Me: I've given up masturbating for the month of May because May is masturbation month and I'm protesting it.

or

Co-worker: My first husband died in a motorcycle accident.

Me: I'm not pulling my tool during my morning shower as a protest against the inanity of naming a month National Masturbation Month. That'll teach them.

On second thought, maybe that would've made for some great conversations...

The Penultimate Genius

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Wednesday, May 11, 2005

"The Only Way Out Is Through"