A selection of actual registered blog names on WordPress.com:
I Don’t Know
I Can’t Think of a Name
Insert Song Lyric Here
Random Words
I Hate Naming Things
Whatever
Name
Password
Blah
Blah Blah
Blah Blah Blah
This is Stupid
Names Are Stupid
Nameless
Every Name is Already Taken
I Give Up
I recently decided to catch up to the 1990s, technologically-speaking, and start a blog.
My friend recommended WordPress. “Create a new blog,” the homepage said. “Start posting within seconds.”
The first step was choosing a name, which must be unique because it becomes the distinguishing part of the blog’s site address.
Earlier that day, I had heard the Verve’s song, “Lucky Man”, on the radio. “Happiness, more or less” is the first lyric of the song and, I thought, a perfect name for a blog about the joys and challenges of everyday life. I typed it in.
“Sorry, that site already exists!”, WordPress said in stoplight-red text.
I went to the existing blog to see who else had chosen this name. This person must be a kindred spirit, I thought. I’d probably relate to their writing.
It was a ghost blog: the blog had been created but never actually used.
Maybe if I left a comment on this blog, asking the blogger to relinquish the name, they would let me have it. But probably not. Better to move on.
Alright, well, “Where’s my elephant?” is a Simpsons quote that I’ve always appreciated. When I was a teenager, I thought this would be a great band name. I’m in my 30s now and haven’t started a band (shock!), so why not donate this worthy name to my blog? It would be idiosyncratic enough to pass the WordPress Originality Test, surely.
“Sorry, that site already exists!”
I went to the blog to see who had stolen my fantasy band name. I’ve been holding onto this phrase for 20 years; this blog had better be good.
The blog had a single post: a photo of a small plastic elephant surrounded by peanuts.
Shocked and horrified but still determined, I went back to my original strategy and tried to think of a suitable song lyric. Stumped, I went meta and cheekily typed “Insert song lyric here”.
“Sorry, that site already exists!”
#%@#^$^%$!!!!
Also taken: I Don’t Know, I Can’t Think of a Name, and Random Words. Seriously.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have waited 15 years to do this.
Obviously, the blogosphere had already mined pop culture and meta-irony. I would have to pick something more particular.
Raspberries were fresh in my mind (and in my stomach) because I had been picking them in my backyard every day for the past few weeks. Each time I went picking, the bushes attacked me with their stinging thorns.
“Pricked by the raspberry bush” had not been taken. And it had an everyday, struggling-in-the-pursuit-of-happiness, quality to it. I quickly registered it before someone else beat me to it.
The name was settled. Now, what to write about…
Confession time: I have an e-reader. Worse, I like it.
I wasn’t planning on getting one. When e-readers became the latest mass-produced hardware, I scoffed.
I’ve always been sceptical of new technology. While most of my friends text each other all day, I carry a cell phone just in case my car gets stuck in a snowbank.
But e-readers, I thought, were just unnecessary. They simply promised to replace books. What kind of utility is that? And with the media full of stories about the threat they pose to bookstores and libraries, they seemed like quite the menace to society.
Then, by chance, fortune threw one in my path. I won an e-reader in a contest.
When I was informed about my win, I figured I would give it a try. At the very least, I would browse the free e-books. If it didn’t work out, I would give it to my mom. Some of her book club friends have e-readers and she hears that e-books are cheaper than the tomes she buys from the local big box store.
My contest bounty arrived at my house one day courtesy of a friendly FedEx man. I took it out of the box and set it up. I flipped, or should I say, screen-tapped, through the pre-loaded sample books with ease. I scrolled through the free e-book section, noting all the titles that I would be interested in reading. Due to the quirks of copyright law, the free books are mostly classics, but this was fine with me.
It was all very enticing, in an evil-masking-as-temptress way. But I had a real book from the library still on my nightstand, so e-Nicholas Nickleby would just have to be patient.
I really love library books. Other than having the supreme benefit of being free, they’re like living organisms. Their aging is noticeable; pages wrinkle and yellow. A certain passage might be underlined, leaving you to wonder why someone found that part significant. An old library check-out slip might fall out of the pages, leaving you to wonder why someone who chose the book you’re reading also chose the other titles on the list. If you’re lucky, you might even find an old card that someone used as a bookmark and forgot about. E-books, on the other hand, have no surprises.
However, as I picked up my library book during my usual pre-sleep reading time, I now noticed how heavy and cumbersome it was. After using the light and compact e-reader for even just a short while, I suddenly resented having to use both hands to hold up the weight of the book as well as hold the pages in place. This book is rather demanding, I thought.
And if I was being honest, yes, sometimes nice things fall out of library books that make me feel happily connected to my fellow patrons, but more often, I find myself wondering about the origin of mysterious and icky crumb-like things that have been permanently pressed into the fibres of the pages. There is definitely a less romantic side to communal property.
Within just the first day, I could sense my attitude toward e-readers beginning to shift.
Since then, I’ve been happily screen-tapping my way through my e-books.
There is just one problem: I now must face all the people who hold my old beliefs. A hip Ottawa arts and culture blog recently started a “Paper Kindle” book club as an anti-e-reader statement (“Remember books?” the club’s web page begins). I guess my e-reader and I won’t be welcome at that club.
And one of my friends recently admitted, after hearing about my contest win, that she would like to try an e-reader, but that she could not bring herself to do so, for fear that she might actually like it.
Now I can confidently say: fear not, people. Libraries are still going strong. In fact, I download all of my e-books (other than the already-free classics) from the e-book section of the library’s web site. My library love (and cheapness) is intact, and yours can be too.
I also haven’t given up on physically going to libraries. I have a one-year old son and he is all about flipping, not screen-tapping, pages. The children’s section at our local branch also has toys, a puppet theatre, and a friendly librarian who knows my son by name. We won’t be giving all that up anytime soon.
During our visits, I also browse the new adult titles on the shelves as I always did in the past. Except now, when I see an interesting title, I check to see if the library has an e-book version.
As for bookstores, well, you never really had me as a customer in the first place, so you didn’t really lose me either. No skin off your back.
So I confess, I like my e-reader. I do still tend to shy away from new technology, worried that everyone and everything will eventually get swallowed up into a computer chip, or worse, the invisible internet cloud. But I think that sometimes, technology can be useful. Imagine that.
This week’s contest called for new punctuation. At first, this blew my mind, but then I had some ideas. The New Yorker mentioned three of them, and declared one the winner.
Earlier this month, I offered to write a community profile for the Convent Glen – Orleans Wood Community Association’s web site. I think it covers all of the area’s highlights.
The New Yorker recently started a Twitter contest called Questioningly (#tnyquestion). Every Friday, they come up with a question requiring creative answers, which people submit via Twitter. Then on the following Monday, they post a summary of the responses on their Culture Desk blog, including a “winner” and “runners-up”.
My tweets were mentioned in the June 11 and June 25 contest results. I would explain the questions and my answers, but it would be better if you just read the posts (I’m @toddlerlit).
It’s a fun weekly challenge and I encourage everyone to play.
In April, The Walrus tweeted a solicitation for questions for its “Ask The Walrus” blog series, which covers “underexplained people, places, and things that have arrested our collective attention.”
I sent: “Will Canada’s territories eventually become provinces?”
They chose the question, gave me a free subscription, and posted the answer.
Now, go Ask The Walrus yourself: ask (at) walrusmagazine.com
