Welcome to Blogtown, Population: This guy

Well, I've gone and done it. For years now I've carefully cultivated a sense of superiority over the blog-mad Web two-point-o-izens, pruned it and protected it and watched with almost paternal satisfaction as it bloomed into a beautiful, smug little flower.

But times they are, uh...well shit, a-changin', and it dawned on me that the smug prick who stares down his nose at bloggers in 2007 is the smug prick who stared down his nose (or over the collar of his vintage peacoat) at people who didn't buy vinyl records in 1997. Get with the times, pops.

Of course, all of this is needless preamble to one plain truth: the masturbatory self-regard that is the lifeblood of all bloggers -- among whose needy, self-important ranks I must now, it seems, count myself -- has become too much for me to bear alone. And so it falls upon you, dear reader (christ who am I kidding, mom and dad) to bear the brunt of my uninformed opinions, half-baked social commentary and miscellaneous, inarticulate rambling. But I mean, y'know. Over the internet. Web 2.0, etc.

At the end of the day my blog (short, as most of you know, for "web-blog", itself an acronym from the German Welfureinkreutzbuchen Braunleibeolandergreunblog) will serve as a record of my time in New York, and a much-needed substitute for the biannual Here's-everything-I've-been-doing for-the-last-two-years-crammed-into three-long-paragraphs-by-the-way-I-hope-everyone's-well emails I'd bang out on a slow day in the office in Japan. Now you can have front-row tickets to this carnival of the mundane: watch the inexorable transformation from spangle-eyed emigre to jaded New Yorker in real time! Web 2.0!

If I learned one thing from my time in Japan, it's this: you better share the weird shit while the shit's still weird. In the beginning, even the basest, most innocuous example of J-weird would spurn hours of heated emailing. By the end of my fourth year, however, even the sight of a video clip of a woman shooting baby eels out of her lady-junk barely warranted a tired sigh. And that's a goddamn shame.

So, let this web-blog stand as a corrective, lest the eel-infested vaginae of the world go unheralded. Huzzah!

B.W.