Confessions of a Know-it-all

Strange Fascination now available as a PDF -- Picture by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter
About a month ago, I was at Starbucks typing away. I was on the blogger.com web site and one of my friends must’ve distracted me. I‘d filtered all my articles by topic and when I clicked to see them all again, they were gone. There was a moment of stark panic and my clothes were soaked with sweat. Had I just killed off 5 years worth of writing -- 415 entries? I knew from previous trials that deleted blogs are next-to-impossible to restore.

It turns out that I simply did a “suppress all” instead of a “view all”. It was still foolhardy of me to trust any single service up to this time with so much vital material – time to back it all up. The next day I went to another site, blog2print, and requested PDF files, as well as printed copies of the blogs. I saved and printed off all the blog articles but then I had to ponder (and still am pondering) … what exactly have I saved?

blogSpotter, aka Robert, is not a sought-after expert on any particular topic. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Masters in Business Administration. I’ve tagged my articles by topic and only 34 are tagged as technology. Most of those are product reviews – nothing to do with hash code algorithms or quick sort. A paltry 17 articles are tagged as business. These are primarily aimed as political barbs and not really too concerned with the most-preferred mutual fund or the value of Chinese currency. In essence, I like to run on (and on) :-). 106 articles have been tagged as politics and 56 tagged as cinema. Maybe my real passion is political science or performing arts? But if you look at the topic list on http://strange-fascination.blogspot.com, you’ll notice that my observations are all over the map – even linguistics and health.

The one topic you won't see is sports. For some reason, my creator deemed that Robert – an adult, male Dallasite, should have no interest or involvement in sports whatsoever. And so it is. The only time I’ve ever found sports interesting is when there’s a story-behind-the-story such as with Tiger Woods’ marriage or Lance Armstrong dating Sheryl Crow. Let me add that I sincerely wish I had a sports interest but it’s not something you can fake.

blogSpotter has submitted his articles to publications like Slate a few times, only to be told “not at this time”. When I compare my silly 3-paragraph blurbs to the carefully researched and lengthy articles of George Will or Froma Harrop, I have to admit there’s a Q problem (that is, in the areas of quality and quantity). Great things have been said efficiently before. “Veni, vidi vici,” for instance. But everything is context and I’m not Julius Caesar.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I devoured The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. He made some excellent points which I promptly ignored… “Don’t be wordy and complex when a simple phrase suffices”. Rules are made to be broken and I figured that people need my pregnant, pedagogical paragraphs. As I’ve gone back and reread (and winced at) some entries, I have to admit that we have rules for a reason. Another rule from Style: “Murder your pets”. Don’t use favorite words or idioms to death. (In fact, don’t have favorites).

I have a virtual menagerie of pets that need strangling. Here are some words that have cropped up repeatedly in my blog articles:

Cultural touchstone
Mind-boggling
Postulation
Proposition
Screed
Sepia hues
Speculation

Can I help it that so many movies use subdued colors and “sepia hued” is so descriptive of that? I need to help it if I don’t want to seem like a retread. I’ll make one more remark before wrapping this up – brevity is the soul of wit as well as good communication. I’ve written a few too many “book reports” – carefully researched stories that are devoid of any revelation or personality. They tend to drone on without any stimulus so to speak. I won’t say which, because I want you to read them all… :-). I’ve also written a couple that might be punched up a little and make it to a publisher somewhere. See if you can find the needles in the haystack. And thanks to anyone and everyone who reads Strange Fascination with any regularity. The know-it-all who writes of himself in 3rd person might occasionally know at least something.

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