Feeding The Blog

I have a whole ritual with the Sunday paper. Naturally, I read the comics first. But before that I sort all the ads that come wrapped with the comics. My wife reads Parade, so I set that aside. I also pull out the Best Buy and CompUSA ads so I can indulge in a little technolust. I usually set aside for later reading the Book Reviews and the Washington Post Magazine section to read after I finish the main paper. Articles in the magazine tend to be very long and more than I want to tackle on Sunday morning.

Lately though I have had to at least skim through it first. I have become a regular reader of Gene Weingarten’s Chatological Humor (Tuesdays With Moron) chat that appropriately enough happens Tuesdays at noon. Gene also writes a humor column in the back of the magazine and this weekly column is now syndicated trying to get it’s share of the Dave-Barry-is-on-hiatus-and-we-need-to-fill-that-newshole-cheap market.

As such, his column is frequently mentioned in the chat. To be current, I’ll quickly read the column on the back page of the WaPo Magazine before setting it aside and returning to the comics. The WPM is also where they hide the Sunday Dilbert, so I have to fan through the magazine to find that.

Yesterday I ran across a headline with the word blog in the title so I stopped and read that too. Joel Achenbach is another WaPo staff writer who keeps an honest to God blog called, either unoriginally or cleverly, depending on your viewpoint, the Achenblog. His article titled The Tail That Wags The Blog, which since it really saw print and thus technically narrowly avoids being a meta-blog post, is the funniest and truest thing I have ever read about blogging.

Keeping a blog current is insanely harder than I thought. At any given time, I have a half-dozen or more good ideas, but finding the time and energy to actually execute the concept can be exhausting. A blog is a ravenous beast that needs to be kept current or it falls into neglect.

I read a lot of magazines lately instead of books. It’s not that I think of magazines as being better than books; they just have a greater sense of urgency. You might as well not read a month old Time magazine, but that 800 page Neal Stephenson novel isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I probably post to my blog rather than other needed cyberchores out a sense of duty and compulsion. The Achenblog gets thousands of hits daily and regularly collects over 200 comments per post. Thank goodness I don’t have that sort of pressure. How about them sour grapes?

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