The Pseudoblog

I've been gently persuaded by some folks to start writing a blog - mainly by a bunch of irate bloggers who are fed up with me monopolizing the comments pages on their blogs.

So this blog could be considered a public service of sorts. If I'm busy writing posts here, I'll have less time to be putting a lot of wise-butted comments on all of those other blogs. And I'll also be giving those other bloggers a chance to get some well-earned revenge.

You see, the neat thing about leaving disruptive comments without actually having a blog of your own is that the blogger has no way to get even. They can try to respond to your wiseacre remarks, but that just creates more of a disruption on their own blog. So, after doing some deep soul searching, I've decided to man up to my responsibilities and give those other bloggers a way to fight back. It's going to be rough - I'll probably come out of this bruised and beat up - but it's only fair.

I undertake a blog with a distinct handicap - I don't know boo about anything.

Most of the sailing and water bloggers who I've been tormenting for the past year are experts - or nearly experts - at something. Despite all of the fooling around and goofing, each one has something they really know about.

Carol Anne is an expert on the mechanics of the English language. She's probably one of the few who will have noticed that I should have used 'whom' at the beginning of the preceding paragraph.

Tillerman is well-respected in the Laser community - he may not finish every regatta at the top of the fleet, but he's been sailing Lasers long enough and hard enough that he can write authoritatively about his sport.

(He's also the powerful Godfather of the sailblogging community who mysteriously moved from New Jersey to Rhode Island, where he keeps a low profile. As he presided over the recent wedding of his son at a posh New England yacht club, representatives of US Sailing were taking license numbers in the parking lot. Be careful what you say about him.)

Bonnie is an accomplished kayaker and a spark plug in the New York paddling community - she's well connected and knows what's going on. And on top of that, she knows how to grow basil. That last part just blows me away.

Captain JP is our man about town in London. Few events of note that occur on or around the Thames escape his observant eye. He holds the current world record for the sailing blog with the lowest incidence of the first person singular personal pronoun.

Greg Andkris is supremely talented at making connections in his community. In just his first year sailing on the Williamette, he's on a first name basis with nearly the entire Portland Fire Department.

Joe Rouse is one of the world's foremost authorities on fish.

And if you want to know almost anything about sailing, from how to destroy an aqualift muffler to how to prepare for one of the world's most grueling fishing regattas, who else would you consult than superblogger Edward?

I have no such expertise. I have a boat that I sail on San Francisco Bay whenever I can, which isn't very often because I live 90 miles away from it and spend three out of four boat weekends just trying to keep it in good enough shape to sail.

Since there's not much sailing content in my life to chronicle, this will be a kind of pseudoblog, then. When something in another sailing blog generates the usual scattered thoughts in my head, I'll curb the temptation to blab all over the comments page of a real blog, where it would bug a lot of people. Instead, I'll try to get a post up here. It seems like the only humane thing to do. Occasionally, I do have an original idea of my own, so I may write those up, too.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat, and puns.

Let the Pseudoblog begin.

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