Bay Blogger Thursday (Night)

Links to Giants blogs pop up once in a while on SFist. Have you ever looked at them? If you have, hopefully you got to Waiting for Boof, where you'll find not only well-conceived baseball analysis, but damned funny writing too. WFB is the brainchild of San Mateo's own Grant Brisbee and is widely recognised among the tiny community of Giants blogs fanatics as the best written Giants blog out there. It never ceases to amaze SFist how many pop references and cultural allusions can be jammed into WFB's obsessive baseball writing without bowling over the actual baseball content. (And for those of you wondering, the "Boof" in question used is a guy named Boof Bonser who used to be in the Giants minor league system but who has since been traded. And the name of the website may or may not constitute a Beckett reference.)

So anyways, because it's really late on Thursday night and SFist wants to go to bed, and in the interest of showing you a fine example of lazy writing, the rest of this piece will consist of barely edited cut-and-pastes of an electronic correspondence between SFist and Waiting for Boof. Enjoy!

SFist: I don't really know what to ask cause I never write these things. I kinda got roped into it since I'm the resident Giants lunatic.

I guess I should ask stuff like...

What's your name?
Where do you live?
Where are you from?
What do you do when you aren't writing for your blog?
Do you feel bad that you completely addicted me to Homestar Runner when you linked to Lil' Brudder?
How did you start your site?
How long have you been doing it?
Anything particularly interesting ever happen involved with the site?
Anything else?

I should add that I think you're a helluva writer. That choose your own adventure bit was great. I'm glad that you're back to writing on a pretty regular basis. (Which is funny, seeing as how it's the offseason.) And what happened that time when you disappeared for a while?

Waiting For Boof: Name is Grant Brisbee, and I live in San Mateo. I was raised in Burlingame. I'm probably an alcoholic, too, but it's a classy alcoholism. Martinis and scotch, and all that.

When I'm not writing, I'm not cleaning as well. I am also a singer-songwriter who knows better than to bore people at open mics. I don't even play for my future wife, I just do the solitary thing. I also have a latent fear about writing lyrics which are unspeakably lame, so I just mumble my songs. I'm probably the greatest songwriter of my generation, but no one will ever, ever know. Oh, the tragedy.

If ever there was one Homestar Runner cartoon to get people addicted, it'd be Lil' Brudder. I just got the DVDs in the mail, and it's impressive how unfunny the first 30 e-mails are. Somewhere along the way, those fellas hit their stride. Funny, funny stuff.

I started my site as a way to practice my writing. I had written a couple of pieces for the original Giants blogger, Gregg Pearlman, at http://www.eeeeeegp.com, and enjoyed it. I didn't publicize it at first; just did my thing. Then one day I thought, what the heck, and asked one of the guys at Baseball Primer to give me a link. From then on, it was whatever is between "history" and "completely inconsequential crap".

I've been doing the site for a little under two years. I wish I had the time to write more. The last job I had, I was able to write during my down time. At my new job, there is no down time.

The most interesting thing which has ever happened to me relating to my blog, I actually wrote about. Maybe people thought I was kidding or being ironic, but it genuinely blew me away. I am able to see the search terms people use to find my site. You might have seen my post about how "free Disney porn" leads to my site from msn.com.

That's all well and good, but once someone found my site by entering "flatulent baseball catcher". That someone entered this string of words into a search engine is funny enough. That they came to my site was funnier. The kicker is that in the top ten search results, in addition to my site, was a link to another website which I occasionally contributed to. Of course, I had never pasted those three words together on either site, and the work for both sites was years apart. No one cares, but I still can't get over it. First question of any afterlife will deal with the meaning of the "flatulent baseball catcher"-cloud hanging over my head.

My mysterious absence wasn't all that mysterious. I moved from Oregon back to the Bay Area after a few years, and the transition left me unsettled. My computer crashed -- twice -- and I also completely lost my confidence. I thought really hard about quitting. Don't know why I started up again, to be honest, but I'm glad I did.

I also have a thirty-pound cat. He's quite large.

There are going to be some pretty drastic changes soon, hopefully for the better. I might be teaming up with some folks, and, hopefully, gaining a wider audience. We'll see.

Thanks for the kind word about the actual writing. The funny thing is that I love baseball. The actual game, I mean. Just love it. But I almost love the offseason stuff just as much. The speculation. The wishcasting. The optimism. So I tend to write a bit more. Also, I'm not preoccupied with, you know, the actual games for three hours a day.

Thanks for the interest, and I'm looking forward to checking out your site.

SFist: Have you got a picture of yourself I can use? Looking over old Bay Blogger posts, it seems like there's usually a picture of the person or some sort of graphic from their site. Seeing as how WFB has no graphics whatsoever, I'm thinking picture.

Bay Blogger Thursday (Night)

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