Who Am I?

I thought Jacqueline Wolven raised some good questions in her post a few days ago, which I happened upon a few days later after taking a look at the weekly roundup of UU blogs.

This post isn't exactly a direct response to her questions, but it is inspired by them.

Up to now, I have run this blog semi-anonymously. At least for the foreseeable future, I expect to keep doing so.

"Semi," in that I've been upfront with various friends in and out of the blog-UU-sphere about my identity here. "Anonymous" in that I don't sign posts with my name and for the most part don't comment on other blogs except under the DSD identity.

So...why the secrecy at all?

The main reason is to separate what I write here from my public identity as a journalist. In that capacity I write for a variety of outlets, and I am not constrained from having a point of view. Nonetheless, I am inclined to believe I will feel a little freer about what I write here if it is not connected with my public journalistic self.

Now, a bit paradoxically, even in this semi-anonymous guise, I tend to be circumspect.

I publicly identify here the various churches with which I have an ongoing relationship: My own church, DairyStateMom's church, and my "church away from home" that I frequent when visiting family in the East.

For that reason -- and because my blogging ID here is only semi-anonymous -- I choose not to air dirty laundry (not that there really is any to air) about any of these places.

In other words, I have not chosen to use this space to work out personal differences I might have with one or another specific institution. I might speak more broadly, but leave it at that. In this regard I am following my instinct, but I bring it up to emphasize that my choice of a masked identity is not motivated by any desire to be more personal, particularly about criticism.

From time to time I think about casting the mask off entirely, and I think Jacqueline Wolven has worthwhile things to say about that approach. For now, however, I choose not to. I thought that it might be useful, for myself and for my two-and-a-half readers, to reflect on why.

Where I've been (Updated)

May has just been an especially hectic and exhausting month for me. Mostly that's been about work, which is more or less a good thing. Additionally, when I have had leisure time, I've been concentrating a lot of that on a hobby that I've been on the fringes of all my life but lately have decided to get more involved in. (You can find out what that is by seeing the other blog on my profile.)

Anyway, I've been half-writing lots of posts in my head and I hope that at some point I'll be able to take some time to put some of them down here, or maybe even some other ones that I haven't even thought of yet.

So, bottom line, I will be back, but I'm not exactly sure how soon... Until then, have a happy late spring day, everyone.

Update:
I meant to add:

A few weeks back I wrote about engaging in a spiritual discipline and got several helpful and generous responses, for which I thank everyone who commented.

I have, since then, dipped a toe in those waters. Every morning I am trying to take time to simply read a bit from various sources (currently I'm re-reading Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art; I also plan reading from Thich Nhat Hanh and from Forrest Church among others in the future), spend some quiet time reflecting and summoning my highest, best self, and as the mood suits, either listening to music that I find inspirational, reading an appropriate prayer or meditation, or both.

For now I'm keeping this practice deliberately unstructured, except to say that I block off my first 30 minutes of my work time each day for it.

And when I do engage in it--which I admit I do not every day--I do find myself more centered and satisfied and ready for the day.

A question to anyone who reads this blog

The way this is set right now, all links automatically open in a new window. Do you find this convenient or annoying? Feel free to leave a reply in the comments.

The final Hitler video parody

via It's all one thing.

Data Smog

Data Smog is the name of a 12-year-old book (I haven't read it, yet) about the rapid proliferation of information on the Internet making it increasingly impossible to tell fact from fiction.

It is by now an old and widely perceived problem, but recent events -- getting to the bottom of the real story about the meaning of the hacked Climate Change e-mails; accurately understanding what to make of Sarah Palin, her book, and the facts and myths of her political life; separating, likewise, the myths, facts, hopes and fears behind the current health insurance reform legislation -- just underscore its nature.

It's not uncommon to hear media critics, especially bloggers, complain about the way the media "filter" the news, yet with so much of blogging devoted to opinions and interpretations of isolated news nuggets through a particular ideological lens, the degree of "filtering" is even greater in the blogosphere. Again, not an especially original notion.

And I'll add that I know that the media do display all kinds of bias, subtle and not so, where ideology, class, and other factors of point-of-view are concerned.

Still...

New-media triumphalists dismiss the diminution of leading journals and passing of once-revered journalists as a good thing, urging us all to read more widely and "make up our own minds" about the news of the day. Increasingly, though, I find such prescriptions facile and naive.

Who's got the time?

I suspect that among the media models yet to emerge will be one that is highly digested, comprehensive but succinct, well researched enough to persuade readers it knows what it's talking about, and thus brave enough to tell us right out what is important, what isn't, and what's absolutely irrelevant drivel. But, of course, anyone who disagrees with its conclusions will just write it off as biased, cranky, or both.

And whether it will gain enough readers to provide the necessary revenue to sustain it is an open question.

PS: I was gonna do all kinds of snazzy, awesome links up in that second graf to make this whole post look that much more hip and Internetty, but I'm just too damn busy.

Apocolypse Now?

The item below arrived in the mail over the weekend. We thought it was a Jehovah's Witnesses tract at first.

Turns out it was from the Wilson Quarterly.



....The Wilson Quarterly?

An unintended vacation from blogging

Between being away for a long weekend last week, and then coming back to a lot of work to get done in a short time, I've been offline here and also out of touch with the blogs I usually read. And look at what I've missed.

Well, I'll try to catch up sometime this week...

On second thought...

Hmmmm....

After calling advertising a "devil's pact,"I suppose I'd better not turn on the "monetize" function here.

Oh well, there's always Emerson.

Blogging as bloviating

For a while I blogged rarely at Talking Points Memo, also as DairyStateDad. (I'm still registered there, I think, but I gave up political blogs around the time of the election and try to stay as far away from them as an AA member stays from taverns. Usually.)

In a fit of nostalgia I was looking over my posts there. Many never garnered any comments, others only one or two. But this one resulted in an amazing 229!

It was early May of 2008. Obama was the all-but-declared winner. My question was, how would he gracefully not offer the VP nomination to Hillary Clinton without risking the wrath of her loyalists? Well, you can bet that set off a lively bar fight, as people speculated on her inevitability as VP, or, alternatively, who would be chosen in her place. (No one--no one--in that thread predicted Biden. And no one suggested she might by Secretary of State. Oh... and in retrospect the fact that some seriously proposed Edwards [this was before his admission of the affair with Rielle Hunter] is breathtaking.)

OK, old news. Among other things it was a reminder about how much vicious enmity there was at times between Obama and Clinton supporters at the height of the primary race. That seems so 2008.

But the amusing part is the amount of energy people (self included) put into making arcane predictions and complicated calculations, and all of it best forgotten within months.

To be sure, the blogosphere wasn't alone in being rife with so much wrong-headed speculation. The mainstream media does it all the time, too. (Think of the obituaries some were writing for the Democrats in early June of '08.) As a journalist I tend to be cautious about predictions, although one editor keeps trying to get me to lighten up: "If you're right you'll look like a genius. If you're wrong no one will ever remember."

It's human nature to speculate to no end, for political junkies, sports junkies, the followers of Hollywood gossip or even those oh-so-serious of us who try to dope out what's going on in world affairs.

And sometimes the speculators get very, very lucky. True story: I worked at a Gannett paper in Rochester, N.Y., 25 years ago. Gannett had just bought the Detroit News. One of my colleagues was absolutely convinced that the then-editor of the Rochester paper would be tapped to run the News. He knew I had sources who might be aware of that prospect; I checked and they had heard absolutely nothing. Months later, however, that's exactly what happened.

Which brings me to, so what?

Initially I planned to wind this up with a puffed-up promise that this blog would be different and that this post would stand as a peremptory challenge to myself not to fall into that trap. But who am I kidding? And why limit myself? So I won't swear-off speculative bloviating entirely. I'll just remind myself that, of all the sub-genres of blogging, as fun as it is, it's probably among the least useful. Unless, of course, I turn out to be right and end up looking like a genius.