February hasn’t been a banner blogging month, despite the recent association of www.infospigot.com with this here page. Isn’t that exciting.
I was going to write something in connection with Samuel Pepys’s birthday, which was yesterday, the 23rd. It might be au courant to call him the first blogger — though not really, because he was the only one and didn’t want anyone to read what he wrote, and both of those conditions are about direct opposites of what we are up to now. But what I would have written about is that Garrison Keillor does an email/audio writer’s almanac by way of Minnesota Public Radio. The almanac includes a brief essay on one of the writer’s born on the date. The audio version features Keillor readng the mini-essay aloud. Kate and I have noticed he’s given to occasional, slightly goofy misreadings of the text. Yesterday’s piece was on Pepys (pronounced just like the popular marshmallow-based holiday-centric animal-shaped confections, a fact I didn’t pick up on until an English lit doctoral student of our acquaintance filled me in). Talking about Pepys’s personal life, the essay mentioned that, “He was continually resolving to quit drinking, but he never did.” But reading it, Keillor says, “He was continually resolving to quit dancing, but he never did.”
Amusing, eh?
Nah, but it’s the best I can come up with tonight. Unless I get started on Bush and gay marriage and constitutional amendments. I won’t. That’d be an all-nighter.