Our first post in a while

I’m probably overdue to update this weblog since the last update was, let’s see, November 20, 1999!

Yeah, I tried this weblogging thing two years ago. But it’s not how I like to write. I like to let things sit before I show them to people. Yes, I recently finished writing a book in public, posting each day’s draft at a public web site (www.smallpieces.com). But I was very uncomfortable doing it. The feedback made it worthwhile, but showing people what I’d written but not revised made me feel as good as getting a rectal exam in a Macy’s store window. So, we’ll see how this second attempt at blogging goes.
Let’s try this. Here’s the beginning of a column that should be showing up tomorrow in Darwin Online.

So, You Go
So, you can already tell I’m a webby type of guy. The giveaway was in the very first word of this paragraph. "So," I began, thus taking up an affectation of speech that is to web entrepreneurs what "what-ev-er" is to Valley girls and "On the other hand" is to philosophers.
It began on the West Coast, in Silicon Valley, but now is thoroughly transcontinental. Here in Boston, if you ask one of my neighbors — a software guy — if he’s going to the kid’s soccer game, he’ll say, "So, I’m going to drive Rosie and Mark…" Ask him if he’s read any good books lately and he’ll reply, "So, I was reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay…" Ask him what he’s going to do about the button hanging from his shirt by a thread, and he’ll say, "So … sew."
So, what are we to make of this, of this fake continuity as if your reply is picking up a thread already being sewn? There’s a reason that some affectations propagate themselves and others don’t. I know about this first hand. Nobody believes me, but it is the Lord’s honest truth that I’m the one who started the ironic gesture of twice slapping the back of one’s hand against the palm of another. I made this gesture up in 1986 … more

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