February 21, 2006
MarkBernstein.org
 

Cheese Sandwiches Again

As I was saying, even the proverbially boring blog post

I ate a cheese sandwich.

is not really boring if you do it well. And there are lots of ways to do it well: so many, indeed, that I left out some important ones.

  1. How I made a cheese sandwich is always interesting. While I was in LA, Linda did some experimenting and found that lightly toasting the bread before grilling the cheese sandwich made a huge difference -- the bread stayed crisp, it got nicely buttered, and the Vermont cheddar melted just enough.
  2. The cheese sandwich may focus a larger issue or resentment. Every Tuesday and Thursday, they serve the same cheese sandwich to the inmates -- a repulsive and unhealthy sandwich which, thanks to graft and profiteering, costs the taxpayers more than steak. This is the dominant discourse of political weblogs. The sandwich isn't merely an emblem, but it's part of the picture.
  3. The cheese sandwich may be introduced for pacing. I am in the midst of a dramatic, unfolding story -- struggling with a dreadful disease, perhaps, or running for Congress, or selling my startup to Google -- and you're visiting my weblog every day to see what happened, and today I'm going to tell you a long and interesting story about this cheese sandwich because I want to remind you that life continues to unfold while we're waiting for the test results or due diligence.

Just to review the bidding, our earlier cheese sandwiches included:

It's not just cheese sandwiches, of course.

Cheese Sandwiches Again

Exercise: the LiveJournal equivalent of the cheese sandwich might be something like this:

Last night I went to the party at Foo and saw this really cute guy and we danced all night and then I brought him back here and it was really great, except...

Compose blog posts that use this story for each cheese sandwich variant.