What I don’t know about sports could fill three or four stadiums and a half-dozen indoor arenas, and throw in a swimming pool and a Little League sandlot just for good measure. Nevertheless, one of my favorite occasional stops on the Web is a section of the ESPN site — the section hosted by Bill Simmons, “The Sports Guy.”
Now, I don’t read Simmons for his insights into athletes’ contract negotiations, or various pro sports’ drafts, or record holders, or any of the rest of it. What I read Simmons for is two-fold:
- The sheer pleasure he takes in writing about his topic of choice; and
- His fearless (and almost always entertaining) digressions into areas other than sports.
Among the latter is a new feature he’s instituted, called The Curious Guy, which he described as follows in his first foray into that area:
I e-mail questions to somebody who’s successful — whether it’s the GM of a baseball team, an author, a creator of a TV show, another columnist or whomever — and we just start trading e-mails for an entire day. As with many of the new features I start up, you may never see this one again, or you might keep seeing it. I don’t know. Let’s see how this one works out.
The very first Curious Guy piece, linked to above, was an exchange of email messages with the creator and executive producer of the TV show “The OC”; the second, several thousand words of back-and-forth with Chuck Klosterman (”the best-selling author and pop culture guru who released his third book, ‘Killing Yourself To Live’, earlier this summer. Chuck also writes monthly columns for Spin, Esquire and Honcho. All right, I made that last one up”).
Why I’m rambling on about Simmons here is that I imagine this weblog will turn out to be something like Simmons’ column, transplanted to the technology realm. While my principal focus will continue to be (as it was on XML.com) on XML and related technologies, I look forward to the chance to write about other technologies as well — and sometimes, who knows?, to fall off the wagon and write about something completely unrelated to the transmission of electrons through silicon, copper, and fiber optic cable, or to any of the jillion side- and after-effects of such transmission. I’m kind of a Curious Guy myself.
Anything in particular you’d like me to look into — or stick my neck out about? Feel free to comment on this or any other post; if publicly sticking out your own neck gives you what used to be called the vapours, feel free instead to contact me at johnesimpson-at-earthlink-dot-net.
