Where’s the love? I actually have some vague memory of Mike Kinsley, when he was my (inspirational) boss at The New Republic, having a single key on his keyboard that would convert all semi-colons into a period, followed by a capital letter.
WALTER ON BLOGGING: I missed this but Walter Kirn wrote a short piece for Time on his experience as a novice blogger on this site last month. It’s a hoot. Money quote:
I didn’t eat that day and barely stood up. The following morning I read through what I’d written but I couldn’t remember writing it. Nor, upon deep reflection, did I agree with it. But who had time for deep reflection? I hadn’t blogged yet and it was 7 a.m., which meant that the commuters two time zones east of me had reached their offices already and were about to go online. The rotation of the earth and the rhythmic movements of the masses didn’t matter when I wrote for magazines, but I was working at the speed of light now, even if I wasn’t thinking at it. Knowing that an empty website would prompt a hundred nasty e-mails, I blazed through a blog entry about the state of journalism, repeating arguments that I’d made at dinner parties and illustrating them with stories that I’d rehearsed in barrooms. I finished the piece in twenty minutes, a record, and twenty minutes later, via e-mail, a producer from C-SPAN asked me if I’d be free to talk about it on the air that Friday.
Yep, that’s pretty much how it is. Then do it most days for five years and … I have to take a nap now.
The Dish 