And The Digressors Shall Inherit The Earth

WhenHoldenMetShirley
DucksOnThePondVille


One of my favourite parts of 'Catcher In The Rye' is a bit of a weird one.

And in an even weirder sort of way, it kind of defines my world view (on the non-science-geek side, of course).

It's that part of the book where young Mr. Caulfield is explaining how one of the things that drives him crazy is when the phonies won't let people digress on any and all matters that strike their fancy....

"....It's nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father's farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle. I mean it's dirty to keep yelling 'Digression!' at him when he's all nice and excited. I don't know. It's hard to explain....."

Hard to explain, indeed.

But here's the crazy part.....

While the only time my hit-rates really climb is when I hammer on something very narrow and specific for a long time (which is what the science-geek side of me does in my real job as well), what gets the most interesting responses, and often invokes the best discussions, are the weird digressions I sometimes engage in 'round here.

Like the recent piece about staying at an Emeryville California hotel on the marsh between Berkeley and Oakland, for example.

(eva was here)

(Hey! where the heckfire did that come from?)

Now.

Usually, this kind of stuff does not really get noted by anybody but me.

But.....

In a recent comment thread that erupted over the critically important issue of line spacing between paragraphs or, more precisely, the lack thereof, Paul Willcocks said something that, in retrospect, made me feel pretty darned......

Good.

Here's what Paul had to say.......

I just paste a txt file into blogger. Maybe there's a better way.

I created the blog in 2000 because I thought the technology was interesting after I read a New Yorker article about the company.

I started posting columns as in 2002, thinking that if the e-mailed versions to subscribing newspapers went astray, they could find the columns here instead of trying to track me down. And perhaps a few people would stumble on them.

I almost never posted anything but the columns.

That reflected my ethos as a freelancer. I wrote for a living, paid by the piece or the word.

So spending time each day writing for free about the same kind of things wasn't appealing. There were other things I would rather write and other ways I could contribute my time.

Spending time formatting was even less appealing, and remains so.

I have broadened my posting in the last two years, encouraged by the Gazeteer's example.

I am most pleased with the amount of searchable information on the blog.

There are about 1,000 posts, almost all columns and a lot of useful quotes and numbers. (The Campbell comments on government advertising in this column were from a 2003 piece on a health ad campaign.)

Is there an automatic way to signal paragraphs more effectively in documents pasted into blogger?
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(oh, and by the way, the paragraph spacing above is all mine)


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So, we're walking the streets of the Haight yesterday, (well, OK, we're walking up and down one street) ostensibly shopping in junk stores, and I get lured into a T-shirt shop....I come out with a really cool SanFrancisco Sea Lions T-Shirt.....Now, I know all about the SanFrancisco Seals, which is the old Pacific Coast League team that the DiMaggio brothers played for back in the '30's....As for the Sea Lions?....Well, they were one of the West Coast Negro League teams that, after the league's demise, apparently became barnstorming legends....Imagine that!


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