In This Business, You’re Only

In This Business, You’re Only as Good as Your Last Post…and This One Sucks

Anyway, at the latest employee assembly, we collectively reflected upon the wild, wonderful ride that “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” has been these well nigh six months.

Since our first day of “weblogging,” we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have experienced some great joys. We witnessed the birth of “Chip,” the first child of one of our senior editor’s children. (If the government can ever track down “Chip’s” father, our senior editor is in for some hefty child support.)

And we have seen our humble “weblog” grow. In these past months, we have had such fancy readers as James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal, Brit Hume of Fox News, Stefan Beck of The New Criterion, and Harry Siegel of New Partisan. And, we hasten to add, the countless other less impressive characters who flock to our “website” like flies to feces. We love you all dearly.

Still, in the midst of our Little Riverband-esque reminiscing, we couldn’t help but ponder some of the patent disgraces in the life of a “weblog.”

Most importantly, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” collectively realized that, in this business, you’re only as good as your last post. You might have knocked ‘em dead with a mordantly witty expatiation on Gillette. You might have tickled them pink with an uproarious patriotism quiz. And you might have briefly touched the heavens with your own horrible college student poetry contest.

But all of these choice tidbits are tucked away in your musty e-archives, and are seldom visited by all but the most intrepid of fans.

As a result, each day’s post must simply be a zinger. If not, soon enough you’ll find that you are about as popular as Adrian Zmed.

And frankly, dear reader, sometimes we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” aren’t particularly inspired. Sometimes we are not, as they say in this line of work, feeling our Muse. Sometimes we aren’t, as they do not say in this line of work, in the Zone.

As a result, every once in a while, even the crack young staff comes across as slightly less than crack. We know, we know: It’s hard to believe. But it happens to the best of us.

And what, you may be asking yourself, do we do on such days? Well, we tend to pen a navel-gazing post in which few will find anything of note. In fact, we think we just did that.