I've been thinking of writing a one year review of SF Days for the past few weeks. Alas, as is usual for me, I delayed too long and now my brother has beaten me to the punch. He decided to go ahead and send me his critique of my postings over the last year. Given that he gave it a nice Creative Commons license, I've decided that it will do better than anything I would've come up with myself.
I will make one additional remark though. I've been averaging about a post a month recently. I'm hoping to improve that to a post bi-weekly for the next year. We'll see how it goes. What follows is his email review.
From: Abe Mirrashidi <abe>
Date: May 27, 2004 13:23:15 PDT
To: Payam Mirrashidi <payam>
Subject: SF Days Review, by Abe Mirrashidi
[ editor's note: I hope you enjoy this. It's meant to compliment and entertain, nothing more. ]
"But let me first admit that given the excellent blogging I've been exposed to over the past year, I am somewhat anxious about this enterprise."
Thus began Payam's blogging experiences a little over a year ago. Now my good friend Amir Ali somehow stumbled upon Payam's site and started reading it. The problem is that the site is mirrashidi.com, and so he's reading it but trying to find my voice in it, and he's thoroughly confused. In multiple ways. First, he sends me
http://www.mirrashidi.com/gallery/haircut/aaq
and claims that the picture is of me, not my brother. In fact, even my dad thought the photo was of me (his reaction was "Wow, that picture looks just like Payam!"). Anyway, after reading several blog entries, Amir asked me,
does your brother always write like that? I mean, do you find his personality is reflected in his weblog entries?
Unfortunately, "Payam" cannot be explained, it [sic] can only be experienced.
So I decided to go through the painstaking task of narrowing down all of Payam's aphorisms and Seinfeldian (50 years from now, will this be a legitimate philosophical belief system? One can only hope) observations and come up with ten nice web-nuggets of entertainment, presented in reverse chronological order.
1. Axiom: The time spent on figuring out what each participant of the party owes is to be minimized. Any contradictions or omissions in the rule set will be resolved by applying this axiom.
2. Those with a costume, no matter how lame and pathetic, are invitees, while those in lay clothing are party crashers and suburbanite voyeurs.
3. From modest one room structures on small plots of land to sprawling country villas with swimming pools and endless gardens containing a plethora of flora.
In a sense, they have bought into the myth of the American suburban: a country place within the shadow of the urban sprawl.
4. Especially in this day and age when ambiguity is verboten, the images drawn up by the concept of metrosexuality are ripe fodder for a creative copywriter working on a beer commercial.
5. Make both of our lives easier, as well as help me deal with those embarrassing pauses in conversation at family functions and buy yourself a Mac rather than a PC.
6. In fact, prude, modest photos in baby books has become a pet peeve of mine: it should be okay to show full, frontal nudity in the contexts of birth and the birthing process.
7. Alas, "Cheap-Labor Conservative" will not join "Cheese eating surrender monkeys" in the lexicon as it does not quite have the same ring to it.
8. Ceci est une meta-blogpost.
9. Once I digested it, city planning became the bread-and-butter of my cocktail party banter.
10. Maybe he had lost his belt and couldn't afford a new one. Or maybe, he was too enslaved to fashion to look any different.
Alas, it was so hard to limit myself to 10 quotes, here are a few quotes that I felt deserved an Honorable Mention:
What will another year in blogging bring? Perhaps I should create a "PayamOrNot" site where visitors must determine whether or not the quote is actually attributable to Payam.
Abe
I believe that this email is permitted under the license below, and is being distributed by the same license.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/