the blog quebecois

I don't know what goes through the mind of the typical reader of this blog . . . no, let me amend that.

Inasmuch as the typical reader is one of only two in the world, for a total of three page-views, averaging 22 seconds per, probably what he/she (I like to think I cover the demographic spectrum) is thinking is: Ick.

Where are the Flash animations? Where's the nice formatting? You heard of color, pal?

Yes, dear reader(s); I know of these things, but I consciously abjure them, and for good reasons.

Readability. I've seen websites that make my eyes bleed. Some might think it's a powerful artistic statement to have 8-point pale green text on a light purple background, but I'm not one of them.

Purity. My work is best savored without the clutter of banner ads, strange links, and cutsie-pie pleas for cash competing for your attention. Read, and contemplate in silence, gwashoppah.

Also, I've never seen a Flash animation that was even slightly funny. Have you? You have? No, I don't want a link to it. Begone!

Intimacy. My unadorned words, from my (figurative) lips to your (figurative) ears. It reminds me of the Leonard Cohen lyric: "I need to see you naked, in your body, and your thoughts." Though if we're going to be strictly consistent here, that should be: "You need to see me naked, in my body, and my thoughts."

Euww. Please ignore the preceding two points.

No, the truth is that I'm hopeless at HTML, let alone XML, CSS, CGI scripts or MySQL databases.

But look at it this way: Every moment that I don't spend researching the esoteric jargon of metatags and templates is a moment that I can spend bringing you quality, rib-tickling, lo-cost (I suspect that if I ever get that PayPal thingagummy up and running, I'll discover just how lo-cost it is) humor for your one-stop comedy shopping.

I remember reading some years ago an interview with the developers of one of the then-new trends in food sales, the warehouse bulk-buy discounters. As one said, (I paraphrase) "We spent $30,000 ripping out a perfectly good linoleum floor so that customers could scuff around on bare concrete and get the impression that a company that would spend so little on floor-covering must surely pass those savings along."

Well, they don't; and I won't; but if you only read 22 seconds per page, you likely haven't gotten this far, anyway.

Well, the test of a good blog is thinking up a name for it. I just googled "Blog Quebecois," and I'm the first on the bloc, as it were.

I'm hoping it leads to a messy and embarrassing lawsuit, or at least some confused francophone readers.

One final touch -- the blog is now "The Blog Québécois." Soon I hope to be regaling you with the tedious minutae of my day-to-day existence, which even I find boring.

Or maybe I'll just make everything up.

"Dear Blog,

It's like a major bummer, man."

OK, I admit it. I'm lousy at writing comedy. I do better with titles. "The Blog Quebecois" will have no resonance beyond Canada's borders; but at least within, it'll get a few phlegmy chuckles from old Scotsmen in Westmount, who are, as far as I can tell, my main audience at this moment.

For the others who might not appreciate the incredible pun that I've cooked up, the Bloc Quebecois is the Quebec-based separatist party. The Blog Quebecois is, like, an exceptionally clever take on that.

Oh, yeah? Well, fuck you, too.

Besides, I googled it, and nobody else seems to have come up with the idea.

I actually had planned to run a blog with that name, but this project and some others have sidetracked me at the moment, so I decided to recycle it into here.

Any writer worth his salt knows the value of the "hook," the initial paragraph -- ideally, the first sentence -- that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go until you lose him on the second sentence.

Or ideally, the second paragraph.

I think it's a combination of two things. One would be the overload of the Information Age. I don't read a hundredth of the things I'd like to read on the Internet any day. It's like being stuck forever in an infinitely-wending Borges landscape.

I love it.

The other, related issue is our attenuated attention span. click I'm at the New York Times click I'm researching Russian military equipment in 1941 click I'm, uh, let's not go there.

The title is the "come hither" glance across the room that screws up your courage to approach a beautiful woman.

That hook is in that smoky dark velvety rasp of a voice that bubbles over into girlish laughter and soon enough tunes to a note of hysteria beyond human hearing before morphing into the braying of a jackass underlain with the hideous cackle of the hyena.

OK, I admit it. I'm lousy at love, or at least writing about it.

But that's a new column.

Eh. Still mulling over this blogging business. In or Out? Part of it is that most of my attention goes to notalexironix, which is a more ambitious thing. But I'm torn at times about what it should be -- humor? commentary? both? neither?

I think that I'm eventually going to split it into two. I think it's unfair to prospective readers to go to a site expecting comedy to be subjected to a rant on one of my obscure political passions. And vice versa.

That's liberating in several ways. There are some nights that I couldn't sweat laughter out of a stone, but want to write something -- anything -- all the same.

The blog format versus the e-zine works better in that regard.

So I might be showing up here more often.

I awoke on the morning of May 23 and did my ritual ablutions and fired up the computer and checked the stats for this blog.

5 hits.

No. Wrong category. More coffee!

11 hits.

Something suspicious was going on. I consider it a good day when I get one hit.

So I checked back to where they were coming from. Colby Cosh.

He'd put me in his blogroll a couple of weeks ago, and I'd had three or four hits off it.

Then the deluge. All of 30 glorious hits.

The proximate cause, as near as I can figure, was Colby Cosh deciding to call attention to one of my pieces.

You stupid sheeple! You'll click through on anything that Colby Cosh recommends!

Which is why I must pay him reciprocal attention. If you've somehow stumbled in here from some other search, leave immediately, and go to Colby Cosh.

Yes, his picture in the header is, ah, somewhat goofy.

Nevertheless he's a terrific writer who will get you interested in things you had no idea you could be interested about.

Also I got a hit from Moxie. Moxie!.

gnotalex and Moxie
sitting in a tree
kayeiiessseyeengee!

Cough. She's a glittering LA photographer who has a very stylish blog and I am hopelessly in love with her.

She hasn't returned.

I fear that Moxie has fallen under the malign spell of Ken Layne or Instapundit. Or Tim Blair, that sawed-off Aussie.

My only hope is to outsmart them, outwrite them, and swoop down on Moxie and sweep her to safety and wedded bliss.

Or failing that, she might throw me a pity fuck.

I am torn by guilt.

I just edited the previous post two days later because I was uncomfortable with some of it.

Not the content -- just a few phrases that seemed awkward.

For some reason I'm troubled by this.

Which is laughable. I'm the world's worst nitpicker and rewriter. I mentioned earlier that I'd put one piece through 57 drafts (a good portion of those on a typewriter) and I'm still not sure if it's ready to go out into the big bad world.

Still, revising one's work in full view of the public leaves me feeling queasy.

I drunkenly wrote a piece on the Great White concert fire in Rhode Island back in February and yanked it off the next morning, disgusted with my glib and shallow words.

I put it up again when I'd written a coda that covered my ass to some degree. (Not that it mattered -- no one's hit the original, nor the emendation.)

I'm not sure if I'm trying to protect the public's sensibilities or mine.

To quote (sort of, I think) Vladimir Nabokov:

Showing the first drafts of your work is like showing the contents of your handkerchief.

Wow. I . . .

These are busy guys, and it took some doing, but I eventually got them all in the same place at the same time and switched on the tape recorder:

notalex: Let's start with a general question. What was the impetus for this change? Let's go around the table.

knotalex: The blog had become . . . stale.

pnotalex: Predictable. Time to shake things up.

notalex: Was there a pivotal . . . no, . . . a tipping point?

gnotalex: When you stuck your head in the office and yelled, "MAKE IT SO!"

[laughter]

notalex: What changes can the average reader expect to see?

pnotalex: It's quite dramatic. Whereas the previous blog was very, uh . . .

gnotalex: Brown. It was brown.

knotalex: More of a reddish-brown. Something like Red Ochre.

gnotalex: Then you've got the brightness on your monitor turned up too high.

pnotalex: I thought it was green!

[laughter]

notalex: And now?

knotalex: Definitely, uh, bluer.

gnotalex: Don't forget the grey. There's dark grey, and light grey.

knotalex: How do you remember how to spell "grey"? I'm always getting it mixed up with the American spelling, you know, "g-r-a-y."

gnotalex: The best way that I've found is to think of the Grey Cup. I mean, the "Gray" Cup just doesn't look right, does it?

pnotalex: I thought it was green!

[laughter]

notalex: How difficult were the technological challenges?

knotalex: Whew! [laughter] At some points we were working with raw HTML code.

pnotalex: There were a lot of heated arguments, and on one occasion --

knotalex: an actual fistfight. [laughter]

pnotalex: More of a shoving match. But it was intense.

notalex: For the benefit of the people too stupid to figure out how to read this on their computers, HTML is . . .?

knotalex: It's like a different language or something. I just know that it's unforgiving. You miss an angle bracket here or there and all of a sudden the page looks like shit.

gnotalex: I've just gotta say something here. I don't know anything about this computer mumbo-jumbo. I just know that what they do makes it possible for me to do my work. [singing] All the little people, where do they all belong?

knotalex: Listen, you pompous a--

notalex: Speaking of the little people, where do you see your audience, and how do you hope to expand it?

knotalex: I guess I should take this one. We've done extensive research that indicates we've got a crucial foothold in the 34-50 male demographic. We've further isolated it down to Arthur Rutkowski (Artyman the Partyman!) of Vegreville, Alberta, a 35-year-old unemployed man who lives in his parents' basement and consumes reckless amounts of beer and Quaaludes.

gnotalex: Which is a critical detail. Beer and 'ludes, he's got a maximum of --

pnotalex: Five minutes, tops, of viable blogreading. That's a very narrow window we're shooting for.

notalex: Has there been any discussion on how to break out to other depressive pharmaceuticals?

gnotalex: Xanax.

knotalex: We did look at Xanax. We still see possibilities there.

pnotalex: There was a lot of discussion about Valium.

knotalex: But that's a girly drug. Valium and white wine. [laughter]

pnotalex: And we realized that gnotalex would have to get more in touch with his "sensitive" side to hold any female readers.

knotalex: Now that's a creepy prospect.

gnotalex: Heh.

notalex: Any thoughts about hallucinogenics? Peyote, mushrooms, LSD?

pnotalex: Nah, we figure that Warren Kinsella's got that crowd locked up.

notalex: So where from here?

knotalex: Onward and upward, man. The die is cast. This is the new paradigm.

pnotalex: Unless someone complains. Then we'd change it all back.

gnotalex: He's only got five minutes. What are the odds?

As you can no doubt tell, I've been spending the weekend mucking around with HTML, with mixed results.

I like the blue date header, but it kind of screws up the top of the page.

Adding to my woes is that both Sitemeter and my Enetation comments are MIA, causing the blog to reenact the dear old days of dialup.

Crimsonblog is a pretty good free site -- immensely better than Blogspot [no link available], to name one -- but I still dream hopelessly of a Movable Type setup.

And someone to setup the setup.

And someone to setup the server costs, and the domain name. Also I wouldn't mind a Fender Stratocaster of any vintage if you could see your way to that...

I overreach, but,

A boy can dream, can't he?

I know that when Jay Leno comes on and I still haven't an idea what to babble about I'm in trouble.

I beg your indulgence. I'm working on a longer piece that I hope to post in the next couple of days and it's sort of sucking up whatever comedic oxygen I've got.

And it could be worse. Consider this effort, from some unnamed contributor to my blogroll, soon to be deleted therefrom:

it's close to 26 degrees & very pleasant. what's even more pleasant is that we may get a new toilet.

No. I will never sink this low. I will stick a plunger in it before the crap hits the waterline. I will bidet you adieu.

The day I start blogging about toilets is the day you should find more productive activities, and me too.

Well, I must thank The Meatriarchy for adding me to (his? her? its?) blogroll and also these kind words:

I have added two excellent blogs to my skimpy blog list (apparently the secret to a successful blog is to have lots of links to other bloggers).

The Blog Quebecois - (which I presume is in Quebec -I'm smart like that) and I share something in common - we like racing simulation games. I'm counting the days till I get a house big enough to slap a giant screen TV somewhere and turn some virtual hot laps on Suzuka or Leguna Seca. He is also bang-on about Radiohead and record company copyright silliness.

Shux. One quick thing -- I'm not in Quebec, but rather, Alberta, where I've lived most of my life. The French side of me is Acadian. And I barely speak French, apart from what I remember from high school. It just seemed like a funny name. (And a play, for non-Canadians, on the Bloc Quebecois, the federal separatist party, if that isn't too much of an oxymoron.)

I'm sure The Meatriarchy knows this deep down, but I'll echo and amplify his (her? its?) remark on blogrolls and how they affect traffic for the benefit of new bloggers or those thinking about getting started.

I started this blog in earnest about mid-March. I registered it with every blog-listing service I could find, and I had about 11 hits over the next two months.

So out of boredom as much as anything else, I put in a blogroll (blogrolling.com, etc. are free and easy to install) and started tagging blogs that I liked to read. It's much easier than trying to find them in your bookmark file.

There are two types of bloggers: Those who obsessively track their counter logs, and those who lie about it.

Excuse me, I have to check something...

It's surprising who does come calling. In the last week I've had hits from Natalie Solent, Ken Layne and (I think) Tim Blair. I'm not gaming them, either -- I read them each just once or twice a day. But I do it from my blogroll, and when they see that same address popping up in their logs, they're sometimes curious (or bored) enough to click to whence it came.

No guarentee that they'll link to you -- but if one of them does...

About the second biggest thrill I've had lately was when Colby Cosh added me to his blogroll. The biggest was when he pointed out something I'd written, and my traffic went through the roof. (OK, from 3 hits a day to 30.)

More importantly, I got another couple of good sites linking to me because of it. Quality sites = psychic satisfaction + much quicker indexing in search engines.

So, class, what have we learned? 1) Link to people that you like reading. They just might link back. 2) Do not be metaphorically clipping your toenails or picking your nose when Rachel Lucas or Moxie rings the doorbell -- do you want to dance with the beautiful babes? Or do you, uh, not?

I'm running out of useful advice, and it is getting late.

John Hawkins has a useful FAQ on blogging here.

One final thing. Always be polite and grateful for the help you get from others.

So go visit The Meatriarchy now. Right now. Or I will shoot you.

It's getting to be a bit overwhelming.

The very stylish Ghost Of A Flea linked to me (pardon the accidental rhyme) today as well as, uh, I didn't quite get the name, so I'll call him A Disgruntled American In Belgium. (Not that I can blame him. Heh. That sort of rhymes, too.)

I feel an odd sense of responsibility. There are literally dozens of people scattered around the world (Domo arigato, Japan!) waiting with bated breath on my latest effusion.

I just want to say: Mommmmy! Hellllllp meeeee!

Actually, it's probably the kick in the ass that I needed. The thought that people are actually reading what I write -- and this is somehow different than journalism or fiction writing, at which I've had (very) minor success -- is invigorating.

When I go to sleep knowing that the big old world is rolling over and that some Spaniard will soon turn on his computer and laugh and laugh -- well, it makes it all worthwhile.

Even if he isn't reading me. A laughing Spaniard is worthy in and of itself.

A tip o' the hat to Damian Penny and to Sofia Sideshow for linking to me. Also to Dodgeblogium, which is the Andrew of Sasha and Andrew's Roundtable.

I am unworthy of these fine folks, and one of these days I'll write something to prove it.

Arrrgggh. Netscape.

I spent most of last evening working, working, working to reward my loyal readers with a little bit of eye-candy.

To wit: I converted the title to a .gif file so that I could do some tasteful Photoshop modifications of it, like, say . . .

C'est magnifique, non?

No? Consider it the beta version, then.

The problem came up when I tried to plug it into the main template. In Explorer, it worked just fine, but in Netscape it somehow interferes with the dateheader, forcing the datestamp over to the left margin.

So after some hours of futzing around with this little problem, I've decided to declare victory and claim that I planned it this way all along.

"Willya look at this, Marge! This feller's somehow managed to put the current date way over on the left, and then it automagically shifts over to the right the very next day!" (My readers are kind of quaintly rustic, salt-of-the-earth types, I think. Which would explain their devotion to Netscape.)

However, Netscape did make me happy in one big way. I just installed vers. 7.1, and it seems that they've solved one big problem, which I've discussed here.

That was the bug where it randomly sprinkled question marks throughout text, but especially at the end of sentences.? Like this??

?????Especially bad when I'd insert soft spaces.?

Making me sound like a Valley Girl.?

Well, whether that was Netscape's bug, Microsoft's or a combination of both, it looks like it's been squashed.

So if you've been bothered by this, you should probably upgrade. (Minimum specs are something like Windows 98, Pentium 233/Mac OS 10.x)

Every now and then (like, every five minutes) I check my referrer logs just in case somebody's stumbled into the place.

Occasionally I'll track their IP number back to see what city their ISP is located in. Far flung, exotic locations like Duluth, Minn., or Penticton, BC. God, the romance of it . . .

I wonder, too, when one of the "regulars," like 24.201.189.# of Montreal doesn't show. Was it something I said? What if he's fallen and can't get up? Maybe I should phone the police?

Why do I do this? Because this is The Blog That Cares.™

Also, my traffic is paltry enough that I can afford to memorize every hit and what I was wearing at the time. You won't see, say, Glenn Reynolds offering this level of attention to detail. Is it because he gets 50,000 hits a day? Or is it because his is The Blog That Doesn't Care ™ ?

I leave it to the reader to decide.

There is one Google search string, though, that turns up in my logs about once every two or three weeks, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

It's "Wendy +Mesley +nude".

For the benefit of American and overseas readers, I should explain that Wendy Mesley is a CBC television infobabe, who sometimes anchors the national news.

This is what she looks like:

Really, it's not a great picture, but it was the only one I could find on the CBC website. She's actually quite vivaciously pretty, in a Diane Chambers/Shelley Long sort of way, for those who remember the Cheers sitcom.

Now it is true that "Wendy Mesley" and "nude" appear on a page of this blog, but they were in separate entries and had nothing to do with each other. That's not the way Google sees it, though, and so I'm one of five or six Wendy +Mesley +nude pages that it records.

Yet this poor fellow (it could be a woman, I suppose -- not that there's anything wrong with that!) returns again and again to his (or her!) quest for Wendy +Mesley +nude.

This is either a case of severe infatuation or of severe short-term memory problems. There is no naked Wendy Mesley flesh here.

Sure, I'd thought of running this blog as the exclusive Wendy Mesley Nude Pix! site, but then I'd need to install popups to help pay for the increased bandwidth, and I'd have to disable my comments because they'd fill up with stuff like, "Woohoo! Wendy rocks!" and "do u know wendys email addy?" and "I am Wendy Mesley, and if this site isn't taken down by tomorrow, you'll be hearing from my lawyer."

There seems to be, too, a shortage of nude Wendy Mesley pictures. You would think that most young, attractive, ambitious female journos would have a nude pornofolio, just in case the big TV deal fell through. Alas, there doesn't seem to be one of Wendy's.

Maybe she's saving it for Playboy. Or maybe she just hates men. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

But dammit, one of my readers really really wants this, and who am I to judge the contours of the human heart or the lusts that beat therein?

So I called in some favors from unsavory players, and I eventually dug up this more-or-less authentic picture, which dates from Wendy's earlier days as a Japanese schoolgirl (safely over the age of sixteen, I think).

Now because some of you are reading this at work (you know who you are), I will not scandalize your office by loading it automatically. It isn't too risqué, but one can't be too careful these days. You may view it here once the boss or Ms Grundy has left the room.

All I can say is that the girl has quite the head on her shoulders.

We'll get back to the ethical problems about reading blogs at work some other day. In the meantime, continue to do so, because I can use the traffic.

In fact, if you stop reading this blog at work, I will tell your boss. Remember, I know where you are, or at least where your ISP is.

Why do I do this? Because this is The Blog That Cares.™

Necessities...an ALN reader competition to come up with a neologism to replace "blog"—surely one of the least attractive terms to (dis)grace the language in quite a while. Sounds more like a condition related to flatulence than anything as consistently fascinating and engaging as this journal. (Where would MGM have gotten with BLOG GRATIA ARTIS, and would Hippocrates [and Goethe] have struck such a resonating chord with "Blog longa, vita brevis"? Now, really!)

Email to Terry Teachout, in ArtsJournal.com
A valid criticism, I suppose, but ultimately pointless.

The great genius of English is that it shamelessly swipes whatever words and phrases it finds useful -- wherever -- and chucks them into the lingua franca.

Q.E.D.

At the height of their fame, The Beatles could have barked out any nonsense word they liked, and it would have been spray-painted all over London by the next fortnight.

But John Lennon (or Jesus) never had the reach or the weight of the Internet, and what once was propagated by monks or Ed Sullivan is now flashing through networks at unimaginable speed.

Like caveat emptor or kindergarten: "Blog" is here to stay whether we like it or not. Sorry, Terry (or rather, his correspondent), but you're playing King Canute on this one.

---

A belated thankyou to A Fearful Symmetry for linking to me.

The William Blake allusion caught my eye and his writing caught my ear.

My New Year's resolution was to avoid procrastination, and I am finally implementing it this very week. Or maybe next week. Definitely by October at the latest.

Right. I'm spinning my wheels here. So let's consult the Blogger's Checklist for topics that I might have neglected this week.

Whining about traffic. Check.

More whining about traffic. Check.

Incoherent rambling about things I don't know about. Check.

Pathos-choked plea for donations. Check.

Bad Cat Poetry. Check.

Discourses Upon The Nature Of Bloggery . . .

----

Oh. Yikes.

I just got a hit from Terry Teachout, the heavyweight U.S. (I think he's British, originally) arts critic.

This is what I meant in an earlier post when I warned against being caught figuratively picking your nose or clipping your toenails when company comes to call.

True, usually it's Jehovah Witnesses or Amway salesmen, but sometimes it's the voluptuous divorceé next door, with a martini in one hand and the other wandering in your pants.

Ooo-la-la! You, you -- ick! -- you don't get out much, do you?

As I wandered through this familiar reverie, I was thinking, hell, let's shut this puppy down and go looking for dirty pictures. I understand that there might be some on this Internet thing I've been hearing so much about.

But no, I am disciplined (Mmm -- discipline!) enough to ignore these baser impulses and get back on topic.

Which was . . . yeah, Terry Teachout.

I reexamined the front page of my blog with a lot of trepidation, through the eyes of a very busy, very smart, very influential person and I think I came up short.

Nothing really offensive or really badly written, but nothing really outstanding, either.

If you offer your thoughts to the public and you want to be taken seriously, then just imagine that Terry Teachout's reading over your shoulder and adjust your efforts accordingly.

Discourses Upon the Nature Of Bloggery?

. . . check!

Lileks seems to be incommunicado these past few days, so I thought as a public service I'd write one of his Bleats:

Thunder is rolling in off the Rockies. Strings of rain sting the windows.

That's as far as I've gotten today. Tomorrow I'll start earlier and I hope to have three or four sentences lined up and ready to march.

I love reading James' stuff, but he's in danger of becoming a quiet, stilled voice.

Crimsonzine went out of commission again today, and it's damned frustrating. Not as damned frustrating as Blogspot [no link available] but I've finally captured ten or twenty people appreciative (or desperate) enough to read me on a regular basis and I can't afford to lose them.

To be fair to Crimsonzine, this is only the third time (the first was a doozy, for about a week) that it's gone down, and I still recommend it to anyone interested in starting a blog. It's free, for starters; it doesn't have a big bloody banner ad, and it's usually reliable.

Still I'm going to have to bite the bullet and install a blog on my home server. Without CSS or Perl permissions. (I have no idea what it means, either, but it sounds impressive.)

So come along -- no, evolve -- along with me. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll roar as I navigate the treacherous shoals of HTML. You'll www.weep as I juggle with XML and RSS, whatever they are. You will possibly email me with advice.

With that said, good night and sweet dreams.

Bleagh. I have nothing of import to impart tonight, so I direct you to Sofia Sideshow, which is well worth reading for its insights into the movie industry, from Bulgaria, no less.

Oh, and I've meant to acknowledge this for some days running, but my thanks to Frozen in Montreal for linking to me. He's worth a visit, too.

That is all. Move along folks, nothing to see here, nothing to see.

I've been getting a lot of hits on the pizza-bomb guy. Depending on the search phrases I rank from 1 to 5 on Google, Yahoo, etc.

It seems that everyone's looking for pictures. Well, I did link to the CNN site, which has the FBI-released pictures of the collar and the locking device, but I sense that people are looking for darker stuff; either the actual explosion or autopsy photos.

Sorry to disappoint -- but, hey, I'll take traffic anyway I can get it. And sometimes you'll get someone coming in on a search and sticking around to read three or four pages, and occasionally a new regular out of it.

It's a crapshoot.

Back in January I was the first person (At least as far as I know. I've haven't seen an earlier reference than mine), to blog the "Going to war without the French is like going deerhunting without an accordion player" quote.

It was from Jed Babbin on CBC's The National (he also used it on Chris Matthews' Hardball the same night), and I thought -- now that's funny, and sent it up to the blog a couple of minutes later and promptly forgot about it.

About a week later my hit counter started lighting up, and it continued at a good pace for the next month. I probably killed a good many false attributions to the likes of Ross Perot and Norman Schwarzkopf.

It's here if'n you don't believe me. You might want to also take a look at the two quotations below.

If you think that George Bush is an inarticulate boob, you should see what Canadians have been stuck with for the last 11 years.

And no, he's not much better in French.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

What to blog about? What to blog about?

That's good. That's eleven words now.

No! Counting the last two sentences, that's seventeen words now!

No! Counting the previous sentences, that's . . .

Well, you get the picture.

But dammit, I owe my readers a good, funny post; or failing that, one of at least . . . 45 words.

Or more! (47 . . .)

Some nights you just fall flat, and all the reliable stimuli (wine, women, song) fail to inspire. If I was attracting, say, 1,000 hits a day I would feel confident enough to blow it all off for more wine, women, song.

But I don't have that cushion, so I must slog on, until my PayPal contributions finally enable me to buy wine, women, etc.

By the way, is anyone getting tired of me whining about how little traffic I get? Well, tough.

That's what I do, and I'm damned good at it.

139 words.

Scratch that. 143 words.

Wait a minute. 146 words.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I have discovered the secret of perpetual motion!

157 words. But who's counting?

I'm in the middle of a mini-Instalanche. My ersatz nude Wendy Mesley post seems to have caught the attention of Metafilter, a message board, which is directing a steady stream of traffic my way.

It's a nailbiter, folks. Can I get eight more hits in the next half hour to surpass my previous daily record?

This might seem like a petty little achievement to you; but then, I have sort of a petty little life. And I wouldn't trade it for all the tea in China.

Or maybe I would. Anyone got any idea as to how much tea there is in China?

Woohoo! Another hit!

Update: Two hits short. I have failed. I am a rotting heap of garbage along the silver rails of the Success Express. Stupid, stupid, you BIG STUPID!

All I want for my birthday (which is coming up in a couple of weeks, hint, hint) is a set of those fancy Ginsu knives that you see advertised on TV.

So that I can RITUALLY DISEMBOWEL myself!!!

God, I'm such a loser. Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow.

G'night!

I have good news, and I have bad news.

The bad news is that I've written a long, "funny" post.

The good news is that I'm not publishing it here tonight. That's because I already posted it here; and tonight I sent it to Dodgeblogium.

I probably should explain. I've got a few things buried in my archives that I'm unreasonably proud of. Andrew invited me to post at Dodgeblogium about a month ago, so some of this stuff I send his way from time to time. (Incidentally, you might want to bookmark his site. Crimsonblog has been stable for a good while now, but if it goes down again, I'll just continue publishing there. That is, if you're masochistic enough to keep on reading me.)

These pieces were written long, long ago, when I fancied myself a writer and was actively trying to earn a living at it.

Heh.

Still, I think they're worth seeing, and there's only a couple (maybe three or four, with rewriting) more of 'em. My style's changed considerably since then, and I'm less likely to fuss over beautiful sentences and, you know, try to make the damn thing work.

I figure I've got about twenty regular readers by now. Not too impressive, but it's at least nineteen more than the editorial assistant in charge of the slush pile at The New Yorker.

Come to think of it, twenty regulars is impressive. I just hope that I'm bringing you value for your time. And maybe, just maybe . . .

Maybe . . . a little joy to the world.

Ma? MA! He's inta the likker agin!

Everytime I think I'm getting ahead in this blogging game I stumble across someone who makes me take to my bed for weeks on end, weeping with covetousness and envy.

Not that I am bitter.

I herewith nominate Evan Kirchhoff's 101-280 (no, I have no idea what it means, either).

I've added it to my blogroll and you might to yours once you look it over.

Happy Birthday to me . . . sob!

Happy Berfday to me . . . hic!

Happy Birthday dear . . . gnotalex

Happy Birth . . . day

To . . . youuuuuuuuu . . . sob!

Damn. Didn't even buy anything for myself. (Not quite true -- I did buy beer.)

I will repair this oversight tomorrow. I have decided on a Mad Catz steering wheel for my Xbox and maybe a game or two.

Working on the piece I'll post tomorrow. Then I think I'll take a couple of days off. I haven't bothered to count, but this is probably the longest stretch of daily bloggage I've yet accomplished. And it's accomplished bloggage, too.

Or accloggage, as I refer to it.

On second thought, maybe not. It sounds like some kind of intestinal obstruction.

From an interesting study on blogs (link courtesy of Natalie Solent):

Nanoaudiences are the logical outcome of continued growth in blogs. Assume for a moment that one day 100 million people regularly read blogs and that they each read 50 other peoples’ blogs. That translates into 5 billion subscriptions (50 * 100 million). Now assume on that same day there are 20 million active bloggers. That translates into 250 readers per blog (5 billion / 20 million) - far smaller audiences than any traditional one-to-many communication method. And this is just an average; in practice many blogs have no more than two dozen readers.

Hey! I resemble that remark!

How to build traffic, how to build traffic . . .

I've got it! By relentlessly scouring the Internet (OK, the blogosphere) and posting links that will provide quality (OK, free) entertainment!

Plus I don't have to do so much writing! This is easy! And I get to use a lot of exclamation marks!

You must see this! It's a North Korean propaganda video! It's actually quite catchy! At least you could dance to it, unlike Saddam's retro tributes to 1958 Albania! Warning! Language!

Thanks to A Fearful Symmetry for the link!

After that, you might want to exterminate some vermin! So go here!

No, don't thank me! Thank Ghost of a Flea!

Tomorrow! Question marks???

I don't want to blog
I want to bang on the drum all day...

I thought of writing a parody of the song, but then I downloaded the lyrics (who knew it had other lyrics?) and I'd be hard pressed to do anything with them. And I'd feel stupid just repeating the chorus over and over. (Not half as stupid as you'd feel reading it, though.)

I don't want to work
I want to bang on the drum all day
I don't want to play
I just want to bang on the drum all day

I can bang that drum
Hey, you wanna take a bang at it?
I can do this all day

Yeah, well maybe you can, Mister-Fancy-Pants-Recording-Artist-Todd-Rundgren, but some of us have more important things to do, like blog.

Or in my case, play with the new game I bought today, Rise of Nations.

Yes, it's about a year old, but I always wait until they go on sale. It'd be nice to be a beta-tester for Microsoft, but only if I'm being paid for it.

Anyway, it looks interesting -- sort of a cross between Age Of Empires and Civilization.

Duty calls, dear readers, so I must reluctantly attend to it.

If you've thought of starting a blog, or if you're posting on a site like Blogspot or Crimsonzine, there's a wonderful opportunity to get your own Movable Type setup and three years on a quality host, all for free.

1&1 Internet (part of United Internet) is offering a 36-month no-strings-attatched tryout of their Professional Package account (normally $30 per month), with 500MB webspace and 5GB/month transfer capability.

This is a big, solid company, with 3500 employees and 2.5 million customers.

Like I said, there are no strings attatched. You don't even need a credit card, unless you want to buy a domain name. 1&1 will register that for you for $6 US a year. No advertising, no popups, no selling your address to spammers. Go to their site and check it out.

Installing Movable Type is way beyond my geek chops, but there are people who will set it up for you no charge. Go here or here.

The kind-hearted King of Fools set up mine. For which he has earned eternal pride of place in my blogroll.

I'd give you the address, but there's nothing really to look at yet, and it'll take me a while to figure out how to edit the templates, etc.

Really, this is a terrific offer. Even if you don't want to run a blog, 500MB will store a lot of pictures of your cat.

Now this is just pathetic. Matthew Stinson (formerly known as A Fearful Symmetry -- no wonder he changed his name) is attempting to draw traffic with gratuitous references to Britney Spears, Kobe Bryant, Anna Kournikova. etc.

Whereas I try to boost the number of visitors here the old-fashioned way -- with hard work, good writing, and the threat of deadly force.

When someone says "blog," I reach for my revolver.

Via Damian Penny, a sobering lesson on the dangers of the blogosphere.

Scandal rocks the blogosphere!

Well, sort of. Truth Laid Bear, who runs the Ecosystem, posted this notice today:

Effective immediately, six weblogs are being put on notice that they are about to be suspended from the Ecosystem. If suspended, their entries will not be displayed on any Ecosystem pages (either by traffic ranking or by links); their links will not count to other weblogs, and their votes will not count in the New Weblog Showcase.

This concerns an effort by the League of Liberals (a.k.a. Blogs I Never Read) to game the system to push their ratings higher by installing multiple Sitemeter accounts on their blogs so that a hit on one registers on all the others.

How devious. How dumb. If you want to artificially inflate your Sitemeter readings, just disable the IP blocking and hit your site a hundred -- nay, a thousand -- times a day. Watch your stats rocket up! You are like, so sick! (I mean, like, in the Biblical sense.)

I think it's rich that someone like Rush Limbaughtomy is at the centre of this little nest of corruption. Mr. Limbaughtomy, as you might guess, devotes a lot of time and effort to denouncing Rush Limbaugh's sins, real or perceived. Indeed it seems to be something of an obsession with him.

By my count, though, Limbaugh is guilty of only two of the Seven Deadlies: Gluttony and Lust. (Loosely encompassing the pleasures of the Body.)

Whereas Limbaughtomy would seem to trip the wire on the remaining five: Pride, Greed, Anger, Envy and Sloth, all crimes of the Mind. For some stupid blogging bragging rights.

So who's the hypocrite now?

Well, it looks as if the season is upon me full force, so I'll take your leave for a few days.

I'll be back soon -- probably around the 27th or so, depending on when I can get the time to replace one of the hard drives in this infernal machine. (I knew I should have asked Santa for a new computer!)

My thanks for visiting the site, and I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Last year at this time, I noted the growing phenomenon of "blogs" on the Internet. Blog is short for Web log, a site or page established by one or more individuals to comment on the issues of the day or whatever else they choose to write about.

Bruce Bartlett surveys the blogosphere in the Washington Times.

Incredibly, the blog québécois is not mentioned. An inadvertent error, no doubt.

About 3 months ago, the great Blogspot Exodus of '03 began - thanks to a special offer from 1&1 Internet. They are offering free website hosting for 3 years. You don't need a credit card, just a valid phone number which they use to send a PIN number. More information on this offer is available here. They will also register a Domain Name for you for a mere $5.99 (per year).

There are only a few days left on this offer, so I suggest that if you're interested in g
etting a Movable Type blog, you read this. http://king-of-fools.com/archives/000522.php

Ladies and Gentlemen and those of indeterminate persuasion.

I have arrived. As the totally unretouched Ecosystem screen capture below

indicates, I have at long last surpassed RuPaul, the noted, uh, celebrity, who has much less traffic than me, but apparently a much more active social life:

last saturday night, a surprise birthday dinner was arranged for my friend MICHAEL ROURKE at BARRY DILLER’S house. the party consisted of just under 20 people, including the whole ROURKE family, RICKI LAKE, LIZA PERSKY, the GOVERNOR and FIRST LADY of CALIFORNIA, and some of MICHAEL’s other close personal friends, who also happened to be big HOLLYWOOD high-rollers. everyone was lovely and the food was great, but i couldn’t help but feel really inadequate. monday, i spent the entire session with my therapist working it out.

It sounds like more fun than I had last Saturday, anyway. I'd work it out with my therapist, but I can't afford one.

I came across this while looking for some new blogs:

"What's Ambush Makeover?" the girl - excuse me, womyn - said.

"They grab people off the street and make them over on their lunch hour," I said.

"Why would they call here?" she said, still puzzled.

"I have no idea," the guy said.

I figured they saw the name "Wooden Shoe," and assumed it was a shoe store. I said as much to Cos.

"What if they did political makeovers?" Cos said. "What if they emptied their brains and reeducated them, and by the end of the show, they had to fill out a voter registration form and promise to vote Democratic?"

Ah. A girl can dream, can't she?

Of North Korean brainwashing techniques, it would seem. Whatever turns your crank, cupcake.

Update:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The people have spoken, and delivered a landslide (88%) victory for the "Hell, yes" side.

OK, so only nine people voted. But the trend is clear, and I will work tirelessly (sort of) to have Hell, yes, many more polls in the future.

I will also try to figure out why the "View" button -- by which the common citizen (that's you) can track the thrilling returns minute-by-minute -- didn't show up on the form. Also why there's so much leading space (there might be some kind of issue with placing it inside a post, instead of on the sidebar).

No need to thank me. It's why I get the big bucks, to do what I do.

Thank you, goodnight, and may God Bless this Blog.

Hmmm. I can see having fun with this. Stay tuned.

As you may or may not know, Movable Type weblogs by default send out update emails to people participating in a comment thread. I'm thinking of switching it off, if only because I don't need any more clutter in my inbox.

But I put it to you, my stalwart readers:

We've all had the difficulty of explaining to people exactly what blogs are. Fortunately the press is riding to the rescue!

The following is a meticulously detailed recap of a news segment that appeared on the Chicago FOX news affiliate on Wednesday, May 5th, 2004.

The topic was weblogs and it was called "Blah Blah Blogging." No, really.

Robin Robinson is here to tell us all about this nutty blogging business.
Earlier in the newscast they ran a teaser about the "latest cyber craze!"

A very funny piece. You can read the rest here.

Via INDC Journal

i work for the newspapers
any news is good news, I always say
but I don’t write no daily column
talk is cheap, and so’s my pay

-- stan ridgway

Update: I originally posted this back in April, but took it down after getting an email asking me to keep it secret for the time being. But now that the cat is out of the blog, as it were, I have decided to publish it -- the consequences be damned!

Also, I haven't written anything else today, so I might as well use it. Recycling is good, yes?

I really must check my junk mail folder more often.

Spam at my Hotmail account was becoming a problem, so I activated the filter and thought no more of it. Then last Sunday I clicked on the folder to see how much was being caught, and there was an email from Adam Daifallah, who's on the National Post's editorial board. It might have been the penis pills he was trying to sell me, or the time-share condo deal or something, but Hotmail flagged it as spam and tossed it.

An egregious mistake. I could use many of those penis pills and the condo deal sounds mighty tempting, too.

Adam also mentioned that the Post was working on something and he'd like to talk to me.

Aha! I thought. They're offering me the Mark Steyn spot. About bloody time.

Well, maybe not that. What they want to do is run a recurring feature on Canadian blogs, publishing from an assortment of them. There's no money involved, just the prestige of appearing in the Post.

I said -- sure. There's been a difference of opinion with some bloggers. Nicholas Packwood and Jay Currie are adamant that newspapers should pay for contributors.

Fair enough; but from my perspective it makes more sense to boost my traffic by whatever (legal) means possible. If I gain some regular readers from it, then it's worth more to me in the long run than a few dollars here or there.

None of this is set in stone. Adam says they're thinking of starting it up next month, so I'll let you know what, if anything, is happening.

I was kind of curious about them choosing me -- I don't often really write about politics, and humor that depends on links or pictures is obviously not going to translate very well to a print medium, but Adam assured me that the blog was "funny" and "well-designed." So there.

I suppose I have a niche of sorts. I like to think of myself as the perky Entertainment Director on a doomed, second-rate Mediterranean cruise ship, bullying the sullen cargo into "fun" activities like, say, pilates.

I can see it now . . .

You know what pilates is, don't you? It's the famous exercise regime developed by the Roman procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate (? - 38 A.D.).

Pontius. P-O-N-T-I-U-S. Like in The Passion Of The Christ? That's the one!

OK, all together now:

One, two
Who is this Jew?
Three, four
Wash your hands some more

Oy.

Upupdate: The Post started their Blogger's Corner (no link, unfortunately) yesterday, with posts by The Meatriarchy and Gene Smith at Atomiq.

For some reason, my typically thoughtful essay on wanting to hit Jack Layton with a shovel (scroll down a few posts) didn't make the grade. It's censorship, I tell you.

Welcome, Binh of The Right Thinking to my blogroll.

I'm fairly ecumenical about this -- link to me, and I'll link to you. (With some exceptions. I won't link back to, say, a neo-Nazi or Communist website; nor do I want to be known as your one-stop portal for pr0n. I'm not objecting to it on moral grounds so much, but I got a comment a while back from someone who thanked me for pointing to a game that had become his 4-year-old daughter's new favorite. So I try to keep things clean, or at least offer ample warning if there's something unsuitable for children.)

Incidentally, if you have linked to me and I haven't picked up on it, drop me an email (scroll down for the address). I check my Technorati and Truth Laid Bear accounts regularly, but sometimes they miss links. I only caught Binh's site while looking at my Sitemeter referral logs.

Sign #1154 that blogging is taking up too much of your mental existence: I had a dream last night that, disturbingly, featured Warren Kinsella. Even more disturbingly, he exists mainly as a disembodied voice.

He wanted to discuss something I'd supposedly written (about attending some interminably boring event up North, I think), so I went over to see him.

You'll not be surprised to learn that he (or at least his disembodied voice) lives in a cavernous loft-like building. There's nothing on the first floor but crudely roughed-in framing.

I guess the consulting fees aren't rolling in so great these days, because it lacked certain amenities, like a staircase. I hate dreams without staircases, because it means I'm going to have to climb up some rickety structure that I'll later be afraid to climb down. Which of course is what happened, at which point I woke up.

In the interim, Warren was a charming (if ethereal) host, showing me around the place. I don't remember too much of it, but I can at least report that there's one large room with a quite-impressive waterfall.

Keep your Freudian theories to yourself. I have enough problems as it is.

I was contacted last week by the good folks at CrispAds, inquiring as to whether I'd be interested in having them place ads on this site. I was frankly a little surprised -- I'm averaging about 4,000 page views per month, which is more than I would have dreamt of when I started the blog -- but apparently there might be people interested in advertising to my paltry readership. (By "paltry" I mean of course the first definition, small, negligible, trifling, rather than the second: cheap, shoddy, contemptible. Not that they're mutually exclusive.)

So I agreed. Scroll down and on the left sidebar you will see 160x600px worth of prime blog real estate just begging to be filled, for the low, low price of $20 (US) per month.

It is a downright bargain, you cheap, shoddy, contemptible potential advertisers. For I have, in the grand capitalist tradition, undercut my nearest rival by $5.

Then when I have crushed the competition and driven them from the field, I will . . . raise my prices. Bwahahahahaha.

That's the medium-to-long-term plan. In the meantime, I'm going to have to convert this site to a three-column display with the ads on the right. I don't want to breakup the look of the left sidebar, and it's only fair to advertisers (and also to my financial interest) that the ads are as high up on the page as possible.

I have a very limited aptitude for working with HTML and CSS, though, so it could be a while until I figure it out. Otherwise, that 160x600px blue monolith will probably sit unsold, silently mocking me. Maybe I could make it blink or something.

One thing that nearly all bloggers have in common is that they like to know when another blog links to them. Using a variety of sources, I think I have a pretty good handle on finding other blogs that link to J-Walk Blog. In fact, I think I find about 90% of them -- but I may be wrong.

This is an experiment to see how "findable" blog references are. Put me to the the test, fellow bloggers.

All you have to do is post a link to this particular blog item (i.e., the one you're reading now). Just call it J-Walk Blog Link Experiment or something like that. After a few days, I'll post a list of every blog I found that linked to this item. If you're not on the list, I'll invite you to send me the link to your entry. I'll post these unfound links, and we'll try to figure out why I didn't find you.

By the way, this is not just a cheap way to get some linkage (although it won't hurt). I really think it will be a useful experiment. I'll reveal all of my sources and, hopefully, learn about some new ones. I think other bloggers and the blog tracking sites may benefit from the results.

J-Walk is a popular über-blogger (and Excel guru) who finds interesting stuff to link to. It's usually one of the first sites I check in the day, looking for, um, interesting stuff to link to.

Here you go, John. We'll consider it a seminal moment in the science of blogging. (Blogopology? Blogatrics? Blogetics?)

Attn staff:

Henceforth, the word "blog" shall not appear on this, er, blog. It will be replaced with "bl0g" and its various permutations, such as "bl0gging," "bl0gger," and "bl0galicious bl0gadacious bl0gbabe."

Not that we have anything inherently against the word "bl0g," but if we use it too often, as we tend to do, then we get rewarded by Google's AdSense by exclusively targeting us with ads for free bl0gs. Which, to put it mildly, don't pay that great, a few pennies at best per click.

There are people who are making acceptable money off AdSense. They tend to focus on things like digital cameras, mp3 players, etc., for which advertisers pay much more for a slot. (It makes sense -- the people looking at those bl0gs are usually thinking about a purchase or are actively comparing prices.)

So begone with bl0gs. Hello, mesothelioma attorneys! Or if you prefer, asbestos lawyers!

the claim is on you
the sights are on me
so what do you do
that's guaranteed?

ac/dc

Steve Maich last week in Macleans:

Will blogs fundamentally change the media business, or any business for that matter? Well, did do-it-yourself wine kits change the wine industry? Think about all the homemade plonk you've had to drink over the years. Sure, everybody thinks the merlot they stirred up in a plastic bucket in their basement tastes fantastic. But try selling it.

An interesting piece, throwing a bit of cold water on the bl0guphoria (If I may coin a word: I googled it [using an "o" instead of "0"] and turned up one reference, which appears to be a dead link. So I claim it for my own.) that seems to be ramping up again. No, bl0gs are not going to displace the MSM, not for a very long time, if ever. That doesn't mean that things aren't changing.

Perhaps tellingly, Maich's tagline:

Read Steve Maich's weblog, All Business

Hedging our bets, are we?

Following the money is always instructive, and serious amounts of it are being sloshed around.

From Instapundit:

Julie Roehm has more than $2 billion to spend this year, and the way she's been spending it worries executives at News Corp., the Washington Post Co., and virtually every other media company on the planet. As Chrysler's director of marketing communications, Roehm, 34, oversees a budget that Advertising Age ranks as the sixth-largest pool of ad dollars in the nation. . . .

Roehm rarely misses a chance to talk about how delighted she is with online advertising. Last year she spent 10% of the budget online; this year she is allotting closer to 18%; next year, she says, she will allocate more than 20%. Do the math: In 2006 roughly $400 million of Chrysler's money that used to go into TV, newspaper, and magazine ads will be spent on the Internet. Says Roehm: "I hate to sound like such a marketing geek, but we like to fish where the fish are."

Most of that won't be going to bl0gs, of course; there are plenty of places on the Internet that attract way more eyeballs than even the