An Introduction (and Welcome)

Since no one else seems to be hanging about the place, I should introduce this blog to all the new readers who have shuffled over from Mere Comments. Mighty is the power of Touchstone magazine! Look on its works, ye Culturally-With-It-Trendy-Worship-Leaders, and despair!

Doctor Curmudgeon & Co. is a humble 990 square foot rowhouse in Blogopolis with a large bar, a well stocked library, a small but useful kitchen, and no bedrooms. We like it here. It began because the Ombudsman was tiring of continually forwarding the vituperations of Dr. Curmudgeon (an old school chum) to the Style Editor. Once the concept of "blog" and "to blog" was explained to the Doc, he was sold

Hence, our community. The Doc is a professor of history at a college somewhere in the vast American Midwest, to which he has come tentatively, warily, even suspiciously...for lo! He is of Yankee stock, and likes it best where people turn the "ar" into a dipthong. The Doc is married, and his mysterious wife and he have a child: one Scooter, a Welsh Corgi, whose life was shortened by about a year and a half during the American League Championship of 2004.

The Style Editor and the Ombudsman are related...they are, indeed, brother and sister. They come from a small village in the Mid-Atlantic, where there is a near-continual cry of waterfowl, mumuring of the tide race...and blam-blam-blam-blam of the citizenry proudly exercising their Second Amendment rights on aformentioned waterfowl. Thus, the Ombudsman and Style Editor share a love of the sea, stalwart yeomen, firearms, and any sports team connected with Philadelphia, particulary [ahem] the Philadelphia Eagles. Excuse me, I meant to write Phuldulphia Iggles.

Say it fast. It is a sort of prayer.

The Style Editor is legally trained, and works for an internationl Non Governmental Organization, NGO to the cogniscenti. The Ombudsman is a historian without licence, now in the throes of final combat with his doctoral dissertation, which as the Style Editor would point out to you has been a hell of a long time coming.

Dr. Potomac is a bosom friend of the Style Editor and the Ombudsman. He is one of the most sober and sensible people on the face of the earth. A politico of long-standing, he has traversed parties and ideologies until the current moment, in which he is a wonk and politico of no small standing in the serried ranks of the Washingtonian intelligentsia.

As is not unknown in the blogosphere, Dr. Curmudgeon has never met the Style Editor or Dr. Potomac. Great, no doubt, will be the shouting and consumption of cocktails when that happy event comes to pass. Or they might just hate each others guts. It's a tricky thing, blogging.

We remain anonymous, not because it gives us a frisson...well, it kind of does...but because we all inhabit a cold and cruel world. The Doc wishes to get tenure; the Ombudsman wishes to get a job; the Style Editor doesn't want to hack off any more NGOs than she does on a daily basis; Dr. Potomac does not want his views confused with that of the Bush Administration, and he does not want to get fired, for he has chilluns to feed. OK? Face it, we're wimps. If you want heroes, go some place else other than the internet.

Lutheran bloggers come here, thanks to our dear friend Bunnie Diehl. Yet only two of us (Style Editor and Ombudsman) are of the Lutheran persuasion. The Doc is a Catholic; and Dr. Potomac is a non-denominational Protestant. Even Bunnie has not rejected us because we form an interdemoninational community.

Thus we are liable to blab on about the Christian religion, given our effervescent interests. But we are also likely to babble about current politics, vituperate about academic affairs, drone on about 19th century history, enthuse about matters gastronomic, and obsess about matters British. For we have a strange interest in events in that island kingdom, such that some Brit bloggers confuse us as one of their own. But no, here be Americans only. Though the Ombudsman, it must be confessed, returned about a year or so ago from four years in that demiparadise; the Doc is strangely interested in it, for an Irish Catholic; and the Style Editor attributes her fascination to an early exposure to Masterpiece Theater. Dr. Potomac avers, meanwhile, that everything he learned in politics he could have learned by watching Yes, Minister at a younger age.

So...if you like some of what we say, you might not like the rest of it. Such is the way of the world. But remember, we are having fun. That is really our only purpose here.