Daily Blague

Well, Ms NOLA has a blog. She's sharing it with the friend who actually did the setting up. It's all I can do to keep from posting a gorgeous picture of the lovely young lady, looking her best at a recent wedding, but discretion stays my hand. (I will be happy to send her the file, in case she'd like to use it as her profile photo.) And to think she was here only a couple of hours ago, stopping by on her not the way home, to pick up some of the odds and ends that I am perpetually casting off. In the event, my supply of the desired odds and ends was short, and I'm afraid my conversation wasn't very bright, but I was much cheered to hear about Crazy Eights, and no sooner had I washed the dishes than there was a ding in my mailbox. I made my first martini of the evening (it's nearly eleven) and sat down at the piano. (Metamorphosism readers: piano~computer :: truss~cello. Très musical.)

If I didn't have this Web log, and all of the chores that surround it, to occupy my intelligence, I'd plunge flaming into the East River. Having begun this project during an Era of Good Feelings, meaning health, I am loath to break the spell with reports of my eruptive maladies, but they do weigh upon me, particularly because it is never clear whether they are serious or just irritating. I am certainly very tired of playing Stump the Doctor, not a game often played by patients at New York Hospital.

Édouard at Sale Bête has been the source of innumerable links over the years - well, it feels like years - but Joe.My.God is in a different class. Why Joe Jervis isn't being paid but plenty for his work (and with a little practice, he could do rueful autobiographical stand-up with the best of them) is beyond me. He is an immensely talented storyteller. But he's also a clear thinker. The following excerpt from a recent post has me thinking hard.

I've often considered the point of enabling comments at all. I never know if it's just a shamelessly transparent vehicle for continuous validation, an effective means of judging what works and what doesn't, or a simple way to engender a sense of community among my readers. Probably a little of all three, of course. But still I wonder if it's no small coincidence that some of the writers I admire most do not allow comments.

I happen to believe that comments are the heart of any blog. We've done the book thing. Which was always sort of an Ozymandias thing, don't you think? The difference between writer and reader was comparably adamantine but brittle. I know of only one blog that would fit the last sentence of Mr Jervis's observation, and that's, of course kottke.org, and even then the prohibition is intermittent. And understandable; if I've fought the impulse to ask Jason Kottke for help on a dozen perplexities, I'll bet there are dozens who have lost the battle. As I say, though, I'm thinking hard.

The sabbatical so far has yielded somewhat subpar results. I have not begun the very serious work on my blog roster that really must be done right away. (Memo to Movable Type: develop a plugin that treats blog rosters as image files, so that the roster can be changed without opening the Template of Horror.) I did upgrade the Audience branch of Portico, although, as always, my capacities evolved as I went along, and much remains to be re-done about menus and target frames. I am looking for a graphic to use as the branch's background; like the Pennell etching that haunts Portico's index page, it must be hanging on some wall or other here. Perhaps I might explain why the Pennell is so blurred - an effect that I don't think I should ever have managed to coax from PhotoShop. The etching is in a frame, and the depth of the frame spaced the graphic at a distance from the scanner plate. Serendipity for Dummies.