Sun., August 15, 1999
The ride I was expecting to come this morning and whisk me off to a new life has been delayed a bit, so I thought I'd spend the last few minutes of my old life describing how I've historically gone about making one of these entries. Please try to keep your irritation and disappointment safely inside the bounds of this table at all times so as not to ruin the day of those who might be happily reading or doing something worthwhile. All entries have been created on Netscape Composer for reasons that now escape me. My main page was written on a special sub-program of Corel WordPerfect 8, but some now-forgotten glitch prompted me to switch. I've toyed with Hot Dog and a few other web page programs before finally concluding that I'm just too stupid and /or impatient to use 'em. Looking back, it's a wonder I didn't take one look at kindergarten, exclaim "The hell with this complicated mess!" and devout my life to trying to get that nursery school thing down pat. I would've eventually made quite the adequate Block Major, I think, with a minor in Medieval Napping Techniques.
Once the decision to launch a new entry has been made and the liquid hydrogen
tanks topped off with whatever is handy (usually yesterday's coffee), I
activate Netscape Composer and decide on a background. This usually
takes some time as I have to check my email first, and that always starts
now with Netscape taking me to its home page exactly as if that's the first
and most important thing I need to see everyday. This is about as
annoying as the new Time Warner cable box I have now which always starts
off telling me about today's pay-per-view specials before I can get my
Weather Channel radar fix. I can't imagine what it must be like to
have one of those "free" computers that have ads on the screen all the
time....
Background. Usually blue. Blue is pretty, no?
Once the background has been properly interred it's time to slap on a centered table with a white tablecloth and decide what date to smear across the top. This usually requires some research as my inner clock seems to have gotten stuck about 4:17 a.m. on May 12, 1968. In an attempt to guarantee that something about every entry is accurate, I never put any date at the top unless it has been confirmed by two independent sources.
The date is usually in the font style known as Chicago. It constitutes
my one attempt at having some stylistic consistency between my home page
and my entries. I chose Chicago because it's one of the few fonts
that looks older than I do. And I like the sense of stability a font
named after a big city provides. I might have used the font known
as Cleveland if it hadn't accidentally caught on fire a few years ago.
I shudder just thinking about what a Toledo font might look like....
After the date I often try to put a quote so that there's some kind of
buffer between the hard, unpleasant reality of our place in time and the
inevitable neuron-suffocating quicksand of my writing. That these
quotes are usually total fabrications doesn't seem to matter much thanks
to the placebo effect.
Linus: "There are three things I've learned never to discuss - religion,
politics, and the bowel problems of a friend's family pet."
- Sample dialogue from the never rebroadcast CBS special, "Your Dog Has Worms, Charlie Brown!"
Quite often (as is the case here) these "quotes" are as repulsive and/or
disgusting as possible as the result of a sophomoric attempt to make what
follows seem a tad less so.
Most of the quotes appear in 14 point Arial Black for contractual reasons demanded by their union reps and/or agents. Most of the rest of my entries appear to be written in 14 point Arial plain, which I've been told is Pepsi's version of Coke's Helvetica. Anyone who thinks they can tell the difference is welcome to take the blindfold read test and send me the results.
This finally brings us to the heart of each entry, which tends to consist
of a very few, undersized ideas painfully attempting to bring a spark of
life to a vast fatty mass of rapidly aging verbiage. No one has yet
asked me, "Where do you get your fatty masses of verbiage?" Many
have asked me, "Where do you get your ideas?" Go figure.
But enough for now - I think my ride is here!
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(All Lies, Slanders, Fantasies, Half-Assed Confessions And Hideously Crippled Insights ©1999 by Dan Birtcher for reasons beyond the ken of Man) |
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