After decades of meeting deadlines for broadcast and print it is nice to throw off such commitments and write these things called “blogs.” The online Webster definition of such things is: “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.”
For those not keeping track (or giving a damn) the origin of the term "weblog" was coined by one Jorn Barger in December 1997. Wow—that was all of fifteen years ago. The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who, in 1999, broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog. Let’s ask Google, “How many blogs are there on the Internet?”
(Returns to keyboard after ninety-minute ‘net search for this statistic. Data is either outdated or wildly conflicting. If you know the answer please let me know. But from reading many reports and studies just now it is safe to assume that someone somewhere is blogging about something. Who those people are and what they blog about has been probed by intensive studies. And to me these cross-tabbed data dumps based on who-knows-what-kind-of-sample? or questionable methodology add up to nothing but confusion. Let’s just say that more people are blogging by the minute. But unlike library books that can be discarded, the blogosphere apparently can handle an unlimited mass of this stuff and of all society’s major problems, over-blogging ain’t one of them, like burned out dead space hardware dropping from orbit into your swimming pool or Yankee Stadium.)
My admiration is limitless for those pioneering and persistent bloggers who crank out a new posting each and every day. Interesting. Most all the studies I checked reveal that the majority of these folks do so without pay or any kind of monetary compensation. Once upon a time a “diary” was a closely held book (some came with locks and keys); a place to stash private thoughts and feelings. But with the advent of all this electronic connectivity these once solitary thoughts have become public domain in the most literal sense.
Blogs are like a mega-amped Speakers' Corner, which is located at the north-east corner of London’s Hyde Park. Outdoor public rants, debate and discussion are allowed. Speakers there may rattle on about any subject, as long as the police consider their speeches within lawful boundaries. Years ago, when I visited the spot many of the ravers accompanied their pleas and tirades with hand-made placards announcing the Main Point of the oration, which was usually something about the world coming to end in the immediate future.
Putting aside commercial blogs, which are merely the newest forms of advertising, PR, bulletin boards, etc., sponsored by business entities of all types. People who track this stuff say commercial blogs comprise about 50% of what is spamming out of monitors globally. The other half are posted by individuals who blog about virtually every subject known to (and yet to be discovered by) mankind.
I started this blog after urging the Scribe For All Seasons, Ken Levine, to offer his clever unscheduled emails to friends. Ken, who I think was born typing, had already made his rep as a screenwriter and beyond. He was a “Hollywood hyphenate” back when most folks thought the term referred to some form of sexual deviation. Meanwhile Ken was expanding into sports broadcasting. (In a Walter Mitty universe Ken Levine would be deliriously happy to be legendary sportscaster Vince Scully or a rockin’ Boss deejay like the inimitable Robert W. Morgan.
He quickly transitioned from sitting in the Dodger Stadium bleachers doing play-by-play games—into a small cassette tape recorder. This is how he honed yet another talent. And one of those cassettes landed him a job in a Major League Baseball radio booth. Since the team was located in Baltimore, about 2300 miles away from his home in West LA, Ken’s “travelogue” reports expanded beyond his dispatches about family vacations, usually spent in Hawaii and described in his well-honed style of observations punctuated with punch lines. I’m certain that I wasn’t the only one urging him to present his hilarious highlights in the form of the then-still new form of a blog. What matters is that he officially became an online scribe in November 2005. His first entry contained commentary on everything but key elements of home plumbing (and further examination might indeed find concealed, covert, coded messages about the kitchen sink itself given Ken’s facile use of multiple entendre and his consistently cool POV.) Basically a humorist by trade, Ken sums it up in this question from one of his recent posts: “Who needs to write satire when stuff like this actually occurs?”
But even as impressive as the content of his entries—named one of the “Best 25 Blogs of 2011” by TIME Magazine—it is Ken Levine’s ’ that continues to impress. Doing it daily for more than six “Internet Years” is a long time. The blogs tar were started and since abandoned in that period number in the mega-digits. Shit, unless and until the Internet crashes all these time pellets of trivia will be, like, out there…subject to recall at any moment. This will result in a rainbow of consequences. Folks whose electronic epigrams like Ken Levine’s are a true body of work deserve all the space required on the digital shelf or whatever the metaphor is for The Cloud, quickly replacing the trusty old library. Gone are Borders and Barnes & Noble and cheers for the “small independent booksellers” like the kind often featured on CSPAN’s “Booknotes”—which is my personal method of filling the TV void created at the end of the football season. Nothing beats the NFL for us junkies locked and loaded into it but “Booknotes” dwells in the nonfiction world and is methadone for pro football addicts on when post-Super Bowl Cold Turkey sets in. And it can be watched with one’s eyes closed, know what I mean?
Of course such programming deals with “serious” writers who may have or still blog but that is not at the top of their resume. Blogs are still somewhat the back alley of “literature.” But then again punctual pasquinades like those of Ken Levine and countless others may be “books in the making before our very eyes.”
Jack Kerouac’s monumental “one roll” approach to his masterwork “One The Road” was a Blog-A-Thon in its own way. In 1951 Jack Kerouac took a continuous 120-foot roll of paper, threaded it into his manual typewriter and began to write his masterpiece, which he did, fueled by whatever version of the legend one believes and punched the thing out. Or, how about what in my opinion is the most amazing chapter on sports ever written, “Ice,” from David Maraniss’ classic, “When Pride Still Mattered”—a/k/a “The Lombardi book” that spawned the Broadway play— was written by him, fueled on coffee, in a day and night marathon. If you not read the book, then dig up a copy of this fantastic work. It is also a great way to fill those non-football hours looming up on us.
So throw a random “something”-blog into your browser and play Internet roulette. And if this happens to pop up do let me know. Even if by the old school way: a note in a bottle that will someday wash up here on Oahu’s North Shore.
I have thus fulfilled my ulterior motive in putting this down in approaching 1300 words. That is to get rid of the last damn NFL-related blog. It was time-specific and I gotta get something up by kickoff Sunday or I will be awash in guilt and even more jealous of Ken Levine and all the others like him who pound out good stuff with the consistency of the changing of the Royal Guard at Buckingham Palace in London.
Speaking of which, to add an incorrigible blab of limited interest: In a precedent-setting move the St. Louis Rams of the National Football League have just announced that they will be playing one game per year—for the next three seasons—in London’s Wembley Stadium. It is superior in every way to the team’s home dome, one of the oldest and dilapidated in pro football. If only you could drive there from St. Louis. Not THAT would be some kind of tunnel.
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