Daily Blague

Last week's infusion of Remicade worked so well that when, on Saturday, dinner guests asked me about my aches and pains, I'd forgotten all about them. (Dinner guests! Aside from family, the first dinner guests of 2005!) The only ongoing botheration was rhinorrhea. Or was it? Evidence in the handkerchief suggested that something else might also be the matter. No, not tuberculosis. Just a cold. My head feels as though it's marinating in a nage of oatmeal and fermented glue. There are boxes of Kleenex all over the apartment, and I drag a Hefty bag for the used ones wherever I go.

Right on schedule, the Daily Blague sustained a comment-spam attack on Sunday afternoon. The fourth weekly barrage in a row. That seemed to be the only thing that happened on the Web all weekend. There were no new posts to read. Did everybody go out to play in the warm May weather? Surely it can't be a warm May everywhere. Perhaps it's becoming official: Web loggers take the weekend off.

In between hacking and blowing my nose, I pondered the remarks of David Greenberg, who wrote in the Times about guest-blogging for Daniel Drezner - an experience that he found less than pleasant.

As I checked other sites for ideas, I now realized that I didn't need only new information. I needed a gimmick - a motif or a running joke that would keep the blog rolling all week. All of a sudden, I was reading other blogs, not for what they had to say, but for how they said it.

The best bloggers develop hobbyhorses, shticks and catchphrases that they put into wider circulation. Creating your own idiosyncratic set of villains to skewer and theories to promote - while keeping readers interested - requires as much talent as sculpting a magazine feature or a taut op-ed piece.

If this blog stands for anything, it's for steering clear of hobbyhorses, shticks and catchphrases. I was chided not long ago by a friend for not exploiting the Daily Blague as a platform for my philosophy. My philosophy? I didn't know that I had one. Aside from understanding that murder, theft, and lying are wrong, my philosophy is an unsystematic accumulation of reactions to current events - and that's what I think it ought to be. (There, that's my philosophy.) It's the military that requires a TPFDL, not I. Working out my philosophy would take up hours that are better spent suffering from the most prosaic of maladies, the common code.