Under new management

Hi, I’m Joe Clark. I’ll be your Fake Ouimet for today and the foreseeable future.

The real Alphonse Ouimet, who really is one or more real persons not really named Alphonse Ouimet, really is on hiatus. But as of today, this blog isn’t.

We still need the Tea Makers because there is still shit going on with the CBC – or, as twee, rectangular-eyeglass-wearing Corpse mandarins insist on calling it, CBC/Radio-Canada. A writer on hiatus can’t very well provide coverage of that shit, so Ouimet and I brokered a deal.

The deal is I’m going to write and edit this blog for the foreseeable future. I’ll be doing it as Fake Alphonse Ouimet, or just Fake Ouimet. How can I be Fake Ouimet when I’m out, loud ’n’ proud as my real self? Because that’s the place Weblog “identity politics” are at these days. Follow along, my friends: This is almost as complicated as a Kent Staines plotline on MVP.

The person(s) behind Alphonse Ouimet adopted and retained that psudonym. Fine. But elsewhere, somebody did a bang-up job writing a blog called Fake Steve Jobs. People pulled a MeFi/Kaycee Nicole and busted a gut trying to figure out who the real Fake Steve was. (Most people assumed a single author.)

Eventually the truth was revealed – Fake Steve was Dan Lyons, a writer at Fortune. But then an amazingly 21st-century thing happened: Lyons kept right on blogging as Fake Steve. He wrote a book as Fake Steve. Everyone knew who he was, but they had no trouble accepting him as Fake Steve – as a real person acting as a fake real person. (Isn’t that what acting is?)

That ground has now been covered. We can’t undo those events. If I’m going to take over this blog, I can’t very well cower behind a pseudonym like some commenter on the Tea Makers. How ancien-régime would that be?

Nowadays, the only way to take the place of a pseudonymous writer is to adopt a different pseudonym and also tell everyone who you really are.

Say hello, then, to Fake Ouimet. FakeOuimetster rules Bartertown.

Nouveau régime

Now is the point in the exposition where I paraphrase Bill Maher. New rules!

• There will be an initial flurry of posts. That pace may not be maintained. Then again, I have a to-do list of 35 items.

• I’m gonna talk about some of my own boring CBC shit, but only some, and I’m gonna try to do it in a way that isn’t actually boring. I am not turning the Tea Makers into a CBC Captioning Sucks! blog. (Captioning does suck, but man does not live by captioning alone.)

• There’s gonna be a separate tumblelog for links and miscellanea that don’t warrant a full post. The old Ouimet Delicious account is still active and – who knows? – may see some new entries. But my new links are kept separate – they’re over at Tumblr. (It has its own RSS.)

  See also: Twitter; Flickr photos.

• There is E-mail: fakeouimet AT Gmail.com. I may or may not be on chat using that username. All E-mails are assumed for anonymous quotation – unless they come from any kind of official spokesperson or source, in which case mail is for attribution by default. If you don’t want to be quoted, please be an adult and ask for confidentiality before you give me the juicy details. Remember, the default is anonymity, not confidentiality, but you can ask for the latter and I’ll try not to be a dick about it.

• And speaking of that: You are explicitly empowered to act like bloodthirsty sharks of viciousness and cruelty in the comments area – if you want. Just like old times! But this place is under new management and there are gonna be new and very thoroughly enforced limits on character assassination.

  You can thrash Stursberg’s policies into nothing more than bloody sinew and gristle if you insist, but you can’t say anything personally defamatory, cruel, or hurtful about Stursberg – or Ouimet, Tod Maffin, Strombo, Brian Mulroney, Ben Mulroney, Ivan Fecan, Jim Shaw, Allan, me, Mansbridge, or a dog named Boo or anybody else.

  I am so going to enforce this policy ruthlessly and without apology. If you work at the Corpse and we think you’re fucking up, we’re gonna say so, but what is not going to happen is tearing you to shreds as a person. I won’t allow it.

  If you think you can skirt the rules by filing an inflammatory comment that you know I’ll read and delete, thereby ensuring that I get upset in the process, well, watch out, Dr. Frink, because you’re not the only one with technology at your disposal and I can simply ban your ass for good. And I’ll do it. Be as mean as you want about issues, but leave people the fuck alone. This is for real.

  On the other hand, if you wish to act like a little angel, go right ahead. Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

• Would you like to write a guest post? If it’s bigger than a breadbox and also bigger than a blog comment, you may. Send E-mail and make your case. No reasonable offer refused – but everybody gets copy-edited. That means your spelling and punctuation get cleaned up; it isn’t censorship, so don’t play that card.

How long is this gonna go on?

How the hell should I know? I just work here. We could all die tomorrow. We shall live each blogday as though it were our last. Because one day, it will be. But not today, for today is the first day of the rest of our blog.