g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Tuesday, December 10, 2002
03:02 - Oblio in the Pointless Forest

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Okay... so I've been doing this blogging thing now for about a year now (on the 18th), and in all this time I haven't come up with a title for the page, or any kind of visual theme. Part of the reason for this was the same kind of self-effacing, purposefully unassuming humor that informs all those clever and abstract bylines that identify blogs to their readers; taking it to an extreme, I insisted on leaving the page as boring as possible, and letting readers (if any) make their own decisions about what to call it. And part of the reason was that I didn't exactly expect that I'd have kept at it for a year; I figured, why waste a precious cutesy name, of which there can only be a finite number, on a blog that isn't even going to last?

But it's still here, unaccountably; and if I'm going to mark my "blogiversary" with anything, hey-- I figure I may as well at least take the opportunity to pretend like this page is a significant part of my life, which it has indeed become, and give it some kind of personality.

The idea came up yesterday, when Chris and I were sitting around my cubicle with various other engineers discussing global issues like whether The Two Towers, the movie, will completely follow the Merry/Pippin/Aragorn et al storyline before turning back to Frodo and Sam, the way the book does it-- or if it will interleave them together throughout the movie. (I suspect the latter.) During the discussion, though, I glanced over at my e-mail, and noticing in a passing message one of the modern language quirks nearest my heart, I suddenly burst out, Why is it so difficult to understand-- OOPS is not spelled OPPS! You've got your double vowels, and you've got your double consonants. It's not a difficult concept to understand! (I mean, I swear-- I knew more kids in Mrs. Muņoz' third-grade class with a firm grasp of this rule of English than I meet in a given day, it seems.)

The discussion halted; pairs of eyes focused on me as I hyperventilated, glowering, glancing huntedly between the iMac screen and the faces of my sardonic co-workers.

This wasn't just a pet peeve, Chris and I agreed. This was a free-range peeve. This was a peeve that had been ranched.

So anyway, the previous byline (Irony, Adjectives, and Eyebrows) was fun, but probably just a little too obscure. (Kudos to all those throngs of readers who correctly identified the reference but didn't mail me to say so, as I'm assuming is what typically has been happening.) I'm hoping that this one will work out; I keep giggling at it, but perhaps that's just me. In any case, I'll at least leave it up as an experiment for a while.

And if you don't think it works, well-- in that case, it's just a silly prank I'm pulling, and I never intended it to be permanent. Yeah.

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© Brian Tiemann