"Because you can't live in a hammer."

[One of my early bizcard drawings. New York, 1998.]

[The following was originally posted in March, 2006. Appropos to a lot of the conversations I’ve been having recently:]

Blogs are like hammers. They are tools for building stuff.

When you talk about building a house with a carpenter, you don’t mind him talking about his hammer for a while.

Nobody minds indulging a craftsman, within reason.

“This hammer is great for this,” he’ll gush. “This hammer is great for that…”

So you think yes, hammers are good things, and indeed his hammer looks like a particularly fine example.

But eventualy you’re going to interrupt his joyous ode to hammers. After a couple of minutes you’re going to abruptly change the subject:

“Cool. Now let’s talk about the ACTUAL HOUSE you’re going to build for me…”

And if the carpenter is any good, he won’t have any problem with that.