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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com. Post a comment at dailygazette.com.
Introducing, dear readers, a ... blog?

    Long ago when I first heard the word “blog,” naturally I didn’t know what it was.
    I thought it might be an imaginary land from Gulliver’s Travels, like Brobdingnag or Luggnagg, or possibly an invention of Lewis Carroll’s, like a snark or a rath, which I had forgotten about.
    Alas, when I finally learned it was short for “Web log,” I was no better off. Then the problem was, what the devil is a Web log?
    Now we all know what a blog or a Web log is: It’s a place on the Internet where you can sound off to your heart’s content and where other people can sound off back at you, without a referee, a judge, or a bouncer.
    Sort of like journalistic karaoke. You imbibe a few, step up to the mike, and start singing, maybe in tune, maybe not.
    And now here I am, disdainful of the medium as I am, in the curious position of launching a blog of my own, for this very newspaper, at our free Web site: http://www.dailygazette.com, where starting today you can find me as “Strock Freestyle” down among the other blogs created by my colleagues.
    It’s what I have come to after all these years of honest labor. It’s no longer enough to produce an offensive column three times a week. Now I have to produce an offensive Web log every day. It will be the death of me, I expect, and I see that my heirs are lining up already.
    The advantage to you, the reader, is that you will be able to come back at me instantaneously. If you want to rebut me, or rail at me, or pray for me (my favorite), you will be able to “post a comment” right there on the blog, and I’ll see it promptly and so will the rest of the world, or at least that part of the world that’s watching.
    The catch is that this column you are reading now, The View From Here, will not be on the free Web site, at least not yet. In order to keep too many people from reading it, which is only prudent, the management of the Daily Gazette Co. will continue to confi ne it to our other site, www.dailygazette. net, which you have to pay for, and to the newspaper proper, the kind that is printed on paper and that you also have to pay for if you are too principled to steal it off your neighbor’s porch.
    This means you can use our free site to respond to something that is not on it, as well as to what I do “post” on it, and if this does not make you a contented taxpayer, I don’t know what will.
    We do everything we can to please our customers here at the Gazette, and this is just one more little example of that.
    We’re not yet offering racy video clips or auctions of used printing equipment, but who knows what might come next?
    My plan is to “post” something fairly frequently, and I refuse to be more precise so as not to open myself to any claims down the road. I don’t want someone calling me on Sunday morning and saying, “Hey, you haven’t posted anything yet today.”
    I expect to post scintillating fresh material that does not appear in The View From Here, when I have some, and otherwise to rely on self-plagiarism, pontification, and maybe the occasional prayer, if only to show that more than one can work that angle.
    Of course if I’m lucky, on my very first day as a blogger, the governor of our great state might get caught trafficking with a prostitution ring on a visit to Washington, maybe arranging a $4,300 liaison with a hooker going by the name of Kristen. Now, wouldn’t that be something!

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