Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Holy smokes. I was subjected to Dennis Eckersley’s unvarnished bias when he filled in for Jerry Remy as a color man for the local Red Socks broadcast earlier this season. Now, when I’m watching the Socks game in Boston, I expect unabashed, baldfaced homerism, and Eck failed to disappoint. However, comma, when I’m watching the national broadcast of the game between the Yankees and the Indians on TBS on a Sunday afternoon, I expect a baseline level of objectivity. You don’t have to sing the Yankees’ praises, but be fair! Eckersley has spent all afternoon absolutely KILLING Phil Hughes. “He doesn’t have any offspeed stuff. His curve doesn’t have any bite. Blah blah blah.” The guy gave up four runs on five hits and a walk in five innings, with six strikeouts. That’s not a terrible game! Listening to the commentary, you’d think he was loading the bases every inning! You can’t tell from the shots in the booth, but I think Eckersley might actually be wearing red socks today.

I’m in a particularly emo mood tonight. Feel free to join me and listen to a little bit of The Cure.

So if you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you might notice that you can only read a short excerpt, and to read a whole post, you’ll have to click on the title link and have it take you to my site. I hate blogs that do that.

However, comma, since the point of this whole exercise is for me to put together a fun and exciting website, in addition to posting dynamic and engaging content, then it makes total sense to direct you all to my site. And I promise, it won’t be annoying. And you’ll do it, because you love me almost as much as I love you.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to my new website. If you’re new to DD&U, you can expect some great writing, engaging discussion, and insightful insights. If you’re an old-timer from my Blogger site, don’t tell the noobs that the writing actually sucks, there’s no discussion to speak of, and the insights are shallow and shrill. I mean, um . . . Oh my god, that dog has a fuzzy tail!

Seriously, though, I’m tremendously excited about this new site, and I’m tremendously excited that you, my treasured readers, will get a chance to watch it evolve. And evolve it will; I hope you all aren’t particularly partial to the orange fonts, and the picture of the string bean or blade of grass or whatever it is. Those features are not long for this world; I just need to figure out how to change them.

Which brings us to one of the main reasons that I started this site (outside of the fact that now I have like, a real website. How cool!) In this day and age, and especially in the writing industry, it’s all about the Internet (henceforth to be referred to as “teh Toobz”). If I want to have any future at all, this is the way it’s gotta be. It’s not enough to be a great writer (which I ain’t): you’ve also got to have experience working on the Web. I mean teh Toobz. Blogger was a really easy platform to just write what I needed to write and post it up. Wordpress, my new problem, requires a little bit more in terms of manipulating code and working with CSS and PHP and XML. (Or not. I don’t even know what those things are!) In terms of learning HTML, I’m told it’s the way to go. Think of it as like language immersion: you can learn Italian by reading a book, but you’ll probably learn it a little better if you jump right in and move to Parma.

And in the past few days, as I’ve been feeling around and getting to know the site, I’m looking at HTML in the same way I looked at geometry proofs and sentence diagramming in high school (both of which I loved). You know that opposite angles of a parallelogram are congruent, or you know that a word is an indirect object, but how do you express that within this specific set of constraints? Like, that header up there used to be on two lines. I knew it could fit on one, but where in the lines of code was the place where I could manipulate that and make the site do what I wanted? It’s like being a detective. It’s fun, so far. So keep coming back. I’m going to try to make the site look better, and I’m going to try to do some fun things that I couldn’t on the old blog.

Since you know I hate blog posts about the blog, here’s some actual content that I don’t think I’ve ever posted. Sometimes people ask me, “what does Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun mean?” Well, gather ’round, precious readers, and I’ll tell you a tale.

Way back when I was a junior in college, I and a group of dear friends took a road trip out to sunny South Bend, Indiana, to watch the mighty Eagles of Boston College vanquish their bitter rivals, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. On the way home, two of our group attained other means of transport home, so it was just Michelle, whose car we were in, Katie, and myself splitting driving duties. I remember being behind the wheel and blazing through Indiana in a pelting rain storm. I don’t recall how long it took us to get back to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but I do remember driving through the night, and trying to get some shut-eye in the backseat, which wasn’t necessarily easy.

So there we were, on the Massachusetts Turnpike, 15 or 20 minutes from home, going through a tollbooth. Michelle was driving, Katie was in the passenger seat, and I was in a half-catatonic state in the back. Michelle called our attention to an advertisement on the divider between toll booths. I think it was for Boston’s public parks. Anyway, it hyped up Boston’s playgrounds as “Safe, Clean, and Fun!” This wasn’t inherently hilarious. But then Michelle said “Of course they’re safe, clean, and fun. What are they supposed to say? Dangerous, dirty, and unfun?” This wasn’t inherently hilarious, either, but for whatever reason, be it the sleep deprivation, or maybe the residue of the copious amounts of fermented spirits I had imbibed hours before, I laughed harder than I ever did in my entire life. All the way home, I couldn’t stop laughing, gasping for breath, clutching the seat in front of me, wheezing “Dangerous, dirty, and unfun! Ha!” After that, the term became something we brought up in conversation, and it also became the title of the memorial mixtape of the trip that Michelle made for me.

So that’s it. I just thought it was a fun term. Is there any inherent meaning or application to the blog? I don’t know. You tell me.

Or, should I say, hello world.