Appellation Contrôlée...

The other day, I did that thing that everyone has done, but no one dare admit, for fear of being labeled narcissistic. I Googled myself.

That's not entirely fair - I Googled the name of my blog in order to stimulate its appearance on the landing pages. Although from an outsider's perspective, it might appear as some form of digital self-gratitude, this actually serves a purpose, but there's no way I'll convince anyone of that - just as explaining you were trying to kill a spider that has crawled into your pants is not an oft-accepted excuse for getting caught interfering with yourself.

But I did it. And I came across a plethora of similarly wittily-entitled blogs. I had thought that the terrible pun I chose to splash across my blog's header was a tad too obvious to be unique, rather like claiming to have invented the question mark.

I found several blogs with a shared title, including 'Canada's number one equine-themed politics blog'. Such a dubious honour must be tongue-in-cheek; it's like me calling mine 'The world's number one blog written by a 21 year old named Patrick Galey with a small, egg-shaped birthmark above his right hip.' Which it is. Hopefully.

There's also something to do with wine. Why would wine-drinking enthusiasts feel compelled to use this name? Is it just that, like me, they have commandeered a pleasant sounding but essentially meaningless piece of aural manipulation?

There's a minimalist and unsettlingly neurotic blog. But not neurotic in a charmingly befuddled sense. This is what a stalker would write, if their preferred medium wasn't a letter handwritten in blood.

And then there is this. I wont patronise by saying it's actually quite entertaining but, since this blogger is clearly an enemy diametrically challenging my autonomy as a writer with a frivolous title, I would like to invite conjecture on the grounds that he lures children into his gingerbread house.


Given that it is nigh on impossible to copyright a title, authors often change them (or have them changed by judicious editors,) is my fixation on appellation a bit strong? Could I continue to write with any form of enthusiasm if my blog was called something even more cringe worthy, say "Write Of Way", "Just A Blog In The Machine" or "Raining @s and Blogs"?

The fact that I chose the title pun as an act of self-scrutinising metonymy, meditating on the repetitive and over-proliferated nature of regurgitative blogging will no doubt count for little in this battlefield of bad names. (That was going to be my sub-title, but I considered it a little less catchy, even though it was guaranteed to be peerless). I also wouldn't dream of being such a pillock as to suggest I named my blog for any reason other than it was the first thing that came to mind.

I am now faced with the dilemma of keeping my blog's somewhat obvious title and running the risk of having it submerged in a sea of retarded punctuation and bad poetry, or bowing to the draw of individualism and changing it.

Maybe in the choking smog being created by millions of bloggers, convinced that a) their opinion matters and b) anyone actually reads it, I'll have to make do with maintaining the 'number one blog called 'Blogging A Dead Horse''. Written by me, that is.