Content Junkie on the new Columnists...

Annoying thing #2 is the Daily Cal columnists. My reflex is to begin any criticism with "Of course, I have no room to talk but..." This is because I don't want somebody to think they're making some great revelation when they point out to me that I cannot do a better job of writing than the Daily Cal columnists. If I could, wouldn't I have applied for the job? Wouldn't I have gotten the job the one time I did apply for it? But I am going to suppress that reflex this time.

For one thing, I don't have any real criticism of the Thursday or Friday columnists. I liked the Thursday column a lot. It's not like the college != movies thing hasn't been pointed out before, but the writing style makes this one work. I won't say anything bad about the Friday column because Lia would kick my ass. The Monday column wasn't badly written. I learned later that there were a couple of factual errors, and I wish that the guy would be clearer about his biases, but I figure he'll do better next time. I hope he focuses entirely on politics because it's an important year for that and all.

The second reason I am not going to be all self-deprecating is the Wednesday columnist. The reason for this is because I could be a better writer than this guy. I am a better writer than this guy, and I don't have anyone (including myself most days) to edit my writing. Don't think I'm getting arrogant here: monkeys on typewriters could do a better job than this guy. For example, I found his column last week so boring that I never read it all the way through. Every time I sat down to do so, I found my eye wandering over to the advertisements nearby. Now, this might not seem remarkable to you. But I read pretty much anything. I read Salar Jahedi's column faithfully during the summer. I read online journals. I even read message boards.* If anyone can handle boring, incoherent material, it's me. Yet I could not bring myself to sit down and actually read all the way through last week's column. I was better today, and I actually managed to read this week's column in its entirety. All I can really say is that if I wanted to hear stuff like this, I'd go to more parties. And that Mark Pilloff (scroll down) should have his own column.

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