This initially appeared in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge newsletter, clearly a cheap knockoff of Knowledge@Wharton. However, I cribbed these off Corante's Premium Blend, without which I never would have known they existed. These missteps were like already way insightful, but I updated them for the blogging side of The Industry. Never hurts to take a few tips from the Big Boys...

1. Delaying decisions that will improve the long-term health of your blog for fear of offending readers' inflated sense of their near-term self-importance.
2. Assuming that the smart way to gear back up is always cautiously and incrementally.
3. Trying to bulletproof your blog by moving into recession-resistant rhetoric.
4. Trying to broaden your Weltanschauung now. Fuggedaboutit!
5. Assuming that a recovery is based on what the hosers think, not what they buy.

Wow. How do these guys know this kinda shit? By phoning up God, that's how!

Tom Matrullo writes about nervous publishers, humorless lawyers, bloggers, punsters, parody and play, all with with his usual anti-pedantic panache. Some samples:

...what's at stake here in the journalistic self-image is a proper understanding of the Difference between The Serious and The Not Serious, i.e., a model of play, which apparently is always the thing.

and...

Parody is one of the more seriously difficult modes of meaning to rigorously control precisely because it involves the use of mimicry - drawing acute attention to conventions of discourse - as an essential element to explore and usually to explode the very thing it is imitating. (It is seriously playful shit, and any simply binary effort to create law differentiating it from Serious Journalism is likely to suffer the slings and arrows of an infinite succession of meta-parodies, at the very least.)

and...

If you look, for example, at the fertile exploits of Gary Turner, or at the amazing in-depth interviews by Frank Paynter (which have reached a point at which we do not know whether the person being interviewed even exists), or at the dicey, polyvocal screeds of Mike Golby, or at RageBoy, you might sense something complex at work which, for want of a better word, I would call play.

Yes, yes! Precisely. This ties in with what I've been trying to say all along...

Speaking of el dia de los muertos, when my daughter Selene was first born, I bought a papier-mâché Haitian skeleton and hung it over her crib. The in-laws were, needless to say, gassed. Metaphorically, more's the pity. Anyway, it seems to have worked. The rest of my life may be fucked up beyond repair, but at least I know I brought my kid up right. Selene is now twelve (and a half). Tomorrow after school she's taking her Mom to the opening of 8 Mile. Bigtime fan. She signs her mail:

*selene mirage - proud eminem luver*

The body text of that one said: "you didn't blog it you imbecile! grr."

What Selene is referring to involves last night. We went to this restaurant, and as we were going in, she sees a boy who goes to her school. Worse, when we get seated, it seems he's only two tables away.

So Selene says, "You got a pen?"

As it turns out, I do. I give it to her. "You got any paper?" she asks.

I look. "Yeah, here's a Starbucks brochure." Don't ask. "Will that work?"

Here's what she writes:

THINGS TO NOT DO AROUND PEOPLE I KNOW

1. DO NOT talk about anyone from school.
2. DO NOT talk about when I was a little kid.
3. DO NOT talk about drugs, alcohol, or anything you can get high off.
4. DO NOT talk about sex.
5. DO NOT use excessive bad language.
6. DO NOT use any bad language.
7. DO NOT flirt.
8. DO NOT talk in an accent.
9. DO NOT act gay.
10. DO NOT imitate wild animals.
11. DO NOT ask me to foretell the future.

So yo, Selene Mirage: I want to go to that 4 o'clock show with you guys. Grab another ticket off the web.

look, if you had one shot, one opportunity
to seize everything you ever wanted
one moment
would you capture it or just let it slip?



you better lose yourself in the music, the moment
you own it, you better never let it go
you only get one shot, do not
miss your chance to blow
this opportunity comes once in a lifetime yo...


thanks to my main nigger
Eric Norlin
for sending the
soundtrack.

Googlism for: rageboy