I’m just trying to anticipate people’s questions, so here’s my second overly verbose and self-indulgent housekeeping post in a row.
I got to D.C. a week ago yesterday, and I’ve spent way too much time since then trying to find a name for this goshdarn blog. After talking to everybody in the office about it, here were some of the candidates:
The Hourly Caller
The Instant Caller
The Gentleman Caller
Caller ID (Instantaneous Debate? Intellectual Deliciousness? Incredible Dumbness?)
The Daily Cholera (“Hey, that’s what they’ll call us anyway…”)
Caller Response
Fast Call
Good Call
On Call
DC Crab
The Friendsurgency
Bloggy Bloggy Bloggy Bloggy Bloggy Bloggy
Red Eye, J/K LOL
Tucker’d
The Jimnasium (which is good because it reads as “Jismnasium”)
The Daily Trawler
People around the office seemed to be split between Caller ID and Daily Trawler. I was leaning toward Trawler, because that’s kind of what bloggers do: trawl a huge sea of information and try to pull up as much edible goodness as will fit in our nets. Plus Tucker is an avid fisherman, as I learned when he regaled me with Bill Dance bloopers on YouTube during Tucker & Treach’s Excellent DC Adventure.
But then we thought, “The URL would be dailytrawler.dailycaller.com. It would be the Daily Caller’s Daily Trawler. Isn’t that a bit much?” Yeah, a bit. So Neil Patel suggested calling it the DC Trawler. It still had the “DC” branding and whatnot, and it avoided some of the repetition problem. I said that was a good idea, because he is my boss.
Everybody else seemed to like it too, or at least kept quiet about their simmering hatred. I had an idea for a logo and suggested we get my friend and collaborator Batton Lash to draw it. He whipped it up in no time. I felt happy.
Then my Twitter buddy Greg Pollowitz noted that “DC Trawler” sounds like a serial killer. And I realized he was kind of right.
But … why would that make me like it less?
(Incidentally, do you guys remember the DC Hauler, back in the ’70s? He was the Washington-area moving-company employee who murdered and transported his victims in one of the company’s trucks. Google it if you don’t believe me. I’m definitely not making it up out of whole cloth just to mess with you.)
So that’s the fascinating tale of how this blog got its name. If you think you’ve got a better idea, I will be happy to ignore it completely.
P.S. Yes, that little guy in the logo is exactly what I look like in real life. That is indeed what I wear every day. And that’s the precise size and shape of my nose.