To Lockhart Steele:

[Technically, this is last night's Shift Change Memo.]

Just got into L.A. If there's any doubt in your mind that writing Gawker kills brain cells, consider this: I just took a five-hour flight to attend a two-hour FishbowlLA launch party, and I'm leaving at 7AM tomorrow to take another five-hour flight back to New York. That's ten hours of flying for two hours of partying. And somehow, I've convinced myself that this ratio seems reasonable.

Thank god Rachel's blogging FishbowlNY now, or we'd have two posts every ten hours. (Incidentally, I think some of our readers haven't noticed the "posted by" line at the bottom of each post and think I'm inexplicably claiming to be Canadian.)

So on my five-hour flight over, I had a lot of time to think. The usual questions emerged: (1.) How exactly does American Airlines manage to keep the air in the cabin so consistently stale? Do they pump the carcinogens directly into the air ducts, or do they just let the air age in a tank for a few years with a few hundred dirty socks and a dead armadillo of indeterminate origin? (2.) I'm almost certain there's some Venn diagram overlap between the in-flight available food options on AA and Vietnam-era Army MREs. I'm not saying there's any clandestine recycling going on--but I'm not saying there isn't, either.

I was still pondering those questions while looking for an exit on 405 North that apparently did not exist unless the State of California had, unbeknownst to me, decided to move West Hollywood north of Van Nuys. Eventually, the existential malaise set in, as it does every day around 5 PM (EST; 2 PM Pacific) and naturally my thoughts turned to blogging, as they do when malaise of any sort sets in.

Who to blame for the Shift Change Memo-ization of blogging? I nominate Jake Weisberg. I mean, this is sort of like one of those back-and-forth Slate diaries, right? It admittedly lacks the insightful analysis, but it's got all of that familiar mutual self-congratulation and back-patting. It has that certain quality; what did Bill Keller call it? Oh, right. Circle-jerk.

Speaking of, I'm loving Sploid, even though I still think the design evokes large menacing alien robots. (Take Sploid to your leader or Sploid will CRUSH your puny website!) But I guess that was intentional. And yes, I'll probably see Ken Layne tonight, who is, as you noted, my Blog Daddy, so to speak. I started blogging because I was reading Layne's blog back in '01 and thought it looked like fun. I met Denton a year later, and it was all downhill from there.

And as it turns out, Denton and Layne were both in Eastern Europe in the early 90s doing various quasi-journalistic things with a bunch of other people who, as it also turns out, all have blogs now. Blogging: the new Prague.) Required reading on the subject:
this article Henry Copeland (now of BlogAds) wrote for Details in '92 about Ken,
Matt Welch, Amy Langfield and the several other now-bloggers who are part of that ex-expat Prague/Budapest vortex. An excerpt:

April, 1992 Matt and I are on our way to Ivana Trump's ball at Prague's opera house. Our tickets say "black tie or tails," so Matt has washed his shoulder-length blond hair, shaved, and put in a conservative earring. He's wearing a rented set of tails with sleeves that reach his thumbnails and a pair of white wing-tips shoes that belong on a putting green. I've spent all day acquiring the last rentable pieces of clothing in Prague that look like a tux: a blue suit that is tight in the crotch, along with a black vest and six-by-three-inch tie, circa '73.

Matt Welch, twenty-four, is covering Ivana's ball for prognosis, an English-language newspaper he helped start a year earlier in Prague. There have been rumors of an anarchist "action" planned for the evening.

We are walking up Wenceslas Square, the cobblestone venue for many of the demonstrations that toppled Czechoslovakia's Communist regime at the end of 1989. Everyone we pass stares, first at Matt's shoes, then at my bow tie. "Dressed like this probably a good invitation to getting the shit kicked out of us," Matt says. He is silent for a while and seems to be calculating the Norman Mailer points he'll earn for a brawl... in a foreign country... in tails.

So as far as I'm concerned, this whole blogging thing was cooked up in some boozy post-Communist haze. I secretly believe this also explains Jeff Koyen guest-writing Gridskipper.

Off to the party. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

Xoxo,
Spiers