Friday, February 04, 2005
Backstory
This question came in to the Monday Update offices today.
“I don't understand any of this. Who's OZ?”
This is pretty typical of the feedback I get--except normally it’s angrier and mentions my bad punctuation. Here's the history for anyone warped enough to be interested. Like the reasons Tom Arnold continues to find work, The Monday Update is a mystery that has never been fully explained to the public. Until now.
OZ. That's a nickname I picked up in the Navy, and it carried over into my afterlife as a civilian. For several years I did a weekly e-mail out to friends to kill a lonely, empty hour while doing my laundry. It was pretentiously titled "The Monday Update" or, as it came to be called, simply the "MO." I think I meant to rename it "Spin Cycle" at some point, but never got around to it. Several people claimed to have completely lost bladder control reading it. It was shocking, sometimes enlightening, but always chock-full of the latest swear words and very full of itself.
Boldly ahead of its time, the Monday Update predicted years ago that it was unwise to let your little boys have a sleepover at Michael's house. It's been defunct for several years for reasons too personal and shameful to explore here.
SMUB. The craze caught fire when a friend started a competing weekly--Sunday Morning with Uncle B (or by its acronym: SMUB). Sadly, it was a small fire on my coat-tails that went on smoldering for a while. The SMUB died a slow, lingering death while its chief editor gave his life to the dark side (law school)--but triumphantly reemerged about a year ago as a forum to bitterly complain about work, life in general, and to write scatological Haikus. Its author is a very gifted and funny man, but he's also terribly disturbed, and as such his complaints are often the only thing on the entire Internet worth reading. He lives in fear that someone will one day discover his double-secret identity and he'll be disbarred, downsized, or otherwise degraded. If you'd like to turn him in for the reward, you can find his musings intermittently posted at...
http://www.smub.blogspot.com/
Flash-forward to January 2005. The SMUB publicly laments the mysterious disappearance of the MO, calling it the "retarded younger brother" of the SMUB. Patently false and slanderous, as the MO was first on the scene--and is only mildly retarded. Anyhoo, rising from the ashes of good sense, the Monday Update returned in 2005 all grown up and looking for trouble as a "blog," (shorthand for weblog). As punishment for his treachery, the caption contest is designed to help my friend reacquaint himself with my frightening wrath, while simultaneously proving conclusively that we all used to have *a lot* more hair.
Basically these blogs are online journals, political rantings, miscellaneous fumings by the general public. Anyone can get a blog of their own, and post whatever their little black hearts desire. And oh, how they post. There's apparently no oversight of this phenomena at all. People all over the world post stream of consciousness drivel for the masses. Even the French. If you don't believe me, click "Next Blog" at the upper right of this page.
Hopefully that either solves the riddle for you, or you stopped reading back at "scatological." Google pays me $.000027 per hit, so I make out either way.
With love,
“I don't understand any of this. Who's OZ?”
This is pretty typical of the feedback I get--except normally it’s angrier and mentions my bad punctuation. Here's the history for anyone warped enough to be interested. Like the reasons Tom Arnold continues to find work, The Monday Update is a mystery that has never been fully explained to the public. Until now.
OZ. That's a nickname I picked up in the Navy, and it carried over into my afterlife as a civilian. For several years I did a weekly e-mail out to friends to kill a lonely, empty hour while doing my laundry. It was pretentiously titled "The Monday Update" or, as it came to be called, simply the "MO." I think I meant to rename it "Spin Cycle" at some point, but never got around to it. Several people claimed to have completely lost bladder control reading it. It was shocking, sometimes enlightening, but always chock-full of the latest swear words and very full of itself.
Boldly ahead of its time, the Monday Update predicted years ago that it was unwise to let your little boys have a sleepover at Michael's house. It's been defunct for several years for reasons too personal and shameful to explore here.
SMUB. The craze caught fire when a friend started a competing weekly--Sunday Morning with Uncle B (or by its acronym: SMUB). Sadly, it was a small fire on my coat-tails that went on smoldering for a while. The SMUB died a slow, lingering death while its chief editor gave his life to the dark side (law school)--but triumphantly reemerged about a year ago as a forum to bitterly complain about work, life in general, and to write scatological Haikus. Its author is a very gifted and funny man, but he's also terribly disturbed, and as such his complaints are often the only thing on the entire Internet worth reading. He lives in fear that someone will one day discover his double-secret identity and he'll be disbarred, downsized, or otherwise degraded. If you'd like to turn him in for the reward, you can find his musings intermittently posted at...
http://www.smub.blogspot.com/
Flash-forward to January 2005. The SMUB publicly laments the mysterious disappearance of the MO, calling it the "retarded younger brother" of the SMUB. Patently false and slanderous, as the MO was first on the scene--and is only mildly retarded. Anyhoo, rising from the ashes of good sense, the Monday Update returned in 2005 all grown up and looking for trouble as a "blog," (shorthand for weblog). As punishment for his treachery, the caption contest is designed to help my friend reacquaint himself with my frightening wrath, while simultaneously proving conclusively that we all used to have *a lot* more hair.
Basically these blogs are online journals, political rantings, miscellaneous fumings by the general public. Anyone can get a blog of their own, and post whatever their little black hearts desire. And oh, how they post. There's apparently no oversight of this phenomena at all. People all over the world post stream of consciousness drivel for the masses. Even the French. If you don't believe me, click "Next Blog" at the upper right of this page.
Hopefully that either solves the riddle for you, or you stopped reading back at "scatological." Google pays me $.000027 per hit, so I make out either way.
With love,
