Daily Blague

¶ Getting to yesterday's Times a day late, I discover two new blogs in the Arts section. Two celebrity blogs. These aren't hoaxes, like Bill Clinton's Diary or the fake Nick Nolte site that was pulled down by the actor's attorneys shortly after it was reported by kottke.org. And not only are these blogs what they say they are, but they accept comments, too.

formerlyROSIE is Rosie O'Donnell's Web log. It is written in free verse. It is also quirkily candid.

then p town
6 months after tv
saw a painting at a tiny gallery
that moved me
i never bought a piece of art b4
the guy in the place said it was 6000 dollars
and even though i am rich
it seemed insane

The last two lines won me over. But reading a few entries at one go wasn't a good idea, because of the distorting sheen of celebritude. Ms O'Donnell is a very well-known woman, and she can have few truly spontaneous encounters; they're spontaneous for her, perhaps, but her interlocutors, as Henry James would have put it, are all at least slightly dazzled.

Even though I can't remember seeing Ms O'Donnell in anything but Another Stakeout (1993), her personal and professional lives were much in the news. Until today, however, I had never heard of Wil Wheaton, whose blog, WIL WHEATON dot NET, has apparently been going on for years, although I can't find the archives and have to take John Schwartz's word for it. Mr Wheaton is an actor, formerly a former child actor who spent his teens on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Guess who never saw that. Mr Wheaton appears to be a genial man with an interesting path, and he is perhaps as well-known now as a blogger as he is as an actor.

¶ Patricia Storms discovers that hers is not the only BookLust in town. It is my understanding that, while what you write has copyright protection, the label that you slap on it when you're done does not. And a good thing, too, or there could only be one of The Four Seasons. The only way to lock up a title is to register it as a trademark, a process that, unlike automatic copyright, is anything but convenient. I recently saved myself some trouble in this department with a spot of prudent Googling.