Look...a new blog!

Why does James Joyce hate you? Primarily, I guess, because he can. Also he’s Irish, and have you ever walked away from a conversation with an Irishman and thought, “Gee, that was pleasant?” Actually, I can’t really say whether or not Joyce would hate you - even if he were still alive and hadn’t killed himself from autoerotic asphyxiation...but the long and short of it was that I needed a name for this web log!

So welcome. Welcome to this web log. Just some more noise out there in the universe....begging the question, if someone writes something but no one else finds it interesting, should he eat ice cream? This might seem like a non-sequitir, but sitting at a computer makes me want to eat ice cream. As does most things.

So my web log name.....I had a very good friend recently go into the consulting business for himself. As he read up on starting a limited liability corporation, one piece of advice he saw was “don’t spend a lot of time deciding on a name.” This was a piece of advice which he of course ignored, and he spent a lot of time, in fact, naming his business. But the book from which he got this piece of information was likely assuming that the audience for the book was already billing people ridiculous amounts of money for that nebulous service of “consulting” and shouldn’t be wasting billable hours on thinking of a name, and in reality this friend had lots of free time to kill. He is only soon to be billing people shameful amounts of money for something called consulting but not right now, not at the time of this writing. The point of mentioning this is to say that I spent way too much naming my web log, that is all. And also, if you need water consulting done, let me know. For $150 an hour he can tell you which knob is "hot" and which is "cold" on your faucet. For an extra $10, maybe he'll fill your icecube trays.

So I named my web log. By the way, I have decided that in the age of technology with things changing so quickly, “blog” is already passé, and we have come again to an era when we ache for simpler technology times. And so just as the primarily white populations of the US do things to get back to their "roots," such as making soap and candles and pasta at home instead of just buying them, I long for the simpler life as well…the time of, say, 2004 when we had a relaxed go of things, when we savored things, and more importantly, when we called these things “web logs.” Plus, blog is just a stupid word.

So I spent way too much time on naming my web log, and one could argue that I didn’t even do a good job of it then, as much as one can do a good job at such a thing. But there are so many ways to go with this, as you can tell anytime you see a random web log. There is the very literal and somewhat descriptive. So I could have chosen “Steelers Fan” or “Sexual Underperformer,” but I think they really indicate topics which won’t necessarily be covered here and I’d hate for people to be misled and have wasted their time (as you are doing right now) looking for information on something not discussed.

Then there’s cutesy, but I don’t think that fits. Or I could go with some obscure brainiac reference, like using a character from one of Virgil’s minor works like, oh, I don’t know… “Meliboeus,” for example, and then nonchalantly mentioning him as though everyone knows who he is (and forgive me for this bad example because clearly everyone knows Meliboeus, I mean, really). I could have gone the disparaging route, like when George Carlin chose “Brain Droppings ” for one of his books, but then every time I web logged I would think of him and the thought of his soul being thrashed in hell for all eternity for the mere 40 years of awful, awful things he espoused on earth would make me sad. I think the sentence in hell should be equal to the years of bad things on earth...then simply cast into darkness. Then there’s the very irreverent, like “Mr. Rogers was a Wife Beater” but I think that would simply turn people off (except for those of you who get turned on by that kind of thing). Political didn't appeal, but maybe I could have done some political irony, like state something so crazy you know I can’t believe it, like “The Holocaust is a Lie” or “Slavery was Good for Blacks.” I mean, ha ha ha those are CRAZY. (Seriously, if you’d like to explore these ideas more contact me offline.)

So I went with “James Joyce Hates You” and I did it for a couple reasons. 1. Have you ever read James Joyce? When he wrote Ulysses he was pretty popular, and he knew it would sell well and therefore every English-speaking person he could conceive of, including people in the future and therefore you and I, are his audience…and if you read Ulysses or anything else of his really, you can only walk away with the impression that he hated his audience. QED, or whatever, he hates you. Reason 2. The eventual popularity of this web log is going to shoot it high up the Google search results and when people are out looking for James Joyce, they’re going to be redirected here. Now the people searching for Joyce are in one of two categories. The first are the Joyce fans and they’ll be compelled by the title and maybe a little angry about it, and when they read that first paragraph up there saying that he died of autoerotic asphyxiation they’re going to get mad. (This is not true, for the record, and was only put there in an attempt to be funny. Joyce was actually killed when the nephew that he was molesting shattered a shot glass against his temple in an escape attempt.) And when they get mad they’re going to post comments and I figure they’ll be fun to read….given that they’re Joyce fans their comments will read like this:

I came to your site when the fallopian tubes were wrapped around the oak tree like the dreariness of a rain drop. Ha he said would you ever tell me if it were so. We walked into Dublin singing Jenny Get a Handful and then read on. Peter made a comment on it and the fact that you would mention it is extremely upsetting, like Butch down at 15 Newcastle Street. U suck - Joyce rules!

And I would find that humorous.

The second group of people are high schoolers and college kids who have been tasked with reading Joyce and they’re looking for Spark notes or some other way to cheat. If I can draw them in here then they waste time and don’t get their work done and get a lower grade. And since I have a daughter who will be competing with them for jobs soon, every one of them I can knock out of contention the better, not that my daughter needs much help in that regard.

So there you have it. James Joyce Hates You.