The Cardinal Sin of Blogging
I took the Power Squadron test last night and passed with only two questions wrong. Hooray for me, I've learned the basics of boating.
I read an interesting article on blogging the other day in the Seattle weekly. It was a funny, well-written article about the pitfalls of writing so public a diary. She makes the point that people have gotten fired and relationships have ended for what was written in blogs, and that a writer should always be careful. I am, but I don't think anyone reads this, anyway. She made a good point also about the cardinal sin of blogging is writing about not writing--she said it's like announcing very loudly at a cocktail party that you've got nothing to say. Maybe it's also like being at a bar and talking about how drunk you are--it disturbs the brittle good cheer the other patrons are feeling and makes them confront the fact that their newfound confidence and ease is the product of chemical ingestion and not a sudden onset of charm. So, new rule: no more writing about not writing and only limited writing about writing.
We're just passing a boat laying out crab traps at the end of Eagle Harbor. There must be about 50 of them out there, some sticking into the channel. I heard a guy behind me comment to someone else, "That's the tribes. They'll clean out a whole bay."
A guy came over the loudspeaker: "For your safety, we will be accompanied this morning by a U.S. Coast Guard escort as we make our way to Seattle." Escort is sort of a funny name for it, if you think about it within the senior prom context. Aren't they more like chaperones?
Yesterday my brother sent me a heavily-forwarded e-mail about the dangers a high-school chemestry student found in microwaving plastics. According to the mail, when the plastics heat up in the microwave, they dump a shitload of poisons onto the food, which can be linked to low sperm counts, cancer, and badness of many other kinds. I read it and quickly forwarded it to others I know, and thus broke two of my own e-mail rules:
I read an interesting article on blogging the other day in the Seattle weekly. It was a funny, well-written article about the pitfalls of writing so public a diary. She makes the point that people have gotten fired and relationships have ended for what was written in blogs, and that a writer should always be careful. I am, but I don't think anyone reads this, anyway. She made a good point also about the cardinal sin of blogging is writing about not writing--she said it's like announcing very loudly at a cocktail party that you've got nothing to say. Maybe it's also like being at a bar and talking about how drunk you are--it disturbs the brittle good cheer the other patrons are feeling and makes them confront the fact that their newfound confidence and ease is the product of chemical ingestion and not a sudden onset of charm. So, new rule: no more writing about not writing and only limited writing about writing.
We're just passing a boat laying out crab traps at the end of Eagle Harbor. There must be about 50 of them out there, some sticking into the channel. I heard a guy behind me comment to someone else, "That's the tribes. They'll clean out a whole bay."
A guy came over the loudspeaker: "For your safety, we will be accompanied this morning by a U.S. Coast Guard escort as we make our way to Seattle." Escort is sort of a funny name for it, if you think about it within the senior prom context. Aren't they more like chaperones?
Yesterday my brother sent me a heavily-forwarded e-mail about the dangers a high-school chemestry student found in microwaving plastics. According to the mail, when the plastics heat up in the microwave, they dump a shitload of poisons onto the food, which can be linked to low sperm counts, cancer, and badness of many other kinds. I read it and quickly forwarded it to others I know, and thus broke two of my own e-mail rules:
- Never believe uncorroborated statements forwarded to you over the Internet.
- Don't forward e-mail chains to people.
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