Ten years ago today…

As I mentioned at midnight, the date of today’s blog relaunch wasn’t just picked at random. On the contrary, I’ve had my eye on this particular date for quite a while. Why? Because this blog is called “The Living Room Times” — and, as of today, it has been exactly a decade since the publication date of the final Living Room Times newspaper issue of all time, reporting on my class’s graduation from high school.

Here’s the front page of that 10-years-ago-today issue. Note how the masthead is “wearing” a graduation cap, because the Times itself was “graduating.” I always thought that was a nice touch, if I do say so myself. 🙂

Some months ago, after deciding to name this blog “The Living Room Times” — an obvious choice, by the way, and one that I can’t believe didn’t occur to me last summer when I was trying to think of a name to replace “Irish Trojan” — I settled on June 23 as an ideal launch date. It appeals to my innate sense of symmetry, to say nothing of my obsession with anniversaries. So I’m rather pleased that I was able to pull it off. 🙂

Anyway, you can view the whole issue here, if you’re so inclined. And that’s not all: I’ve converted a whole bunch of old Living Room Times issues (originally created in Microsoft Publisher, or, in the case of the very early issues, Microsoft Write) into PDFs and PNGs, and created an archive of them here on the blog.

The archive is still a work in progress — I need to add little descriptive blurbs for most of the issues, and narratives for the school years, plus there are some missing issues that I hope to find and add — but even so, there’s a lot of content to peruse, if anyone feels so inclined. I haven’t counted, but I know there are well over 100 issues online, out of the 400-plus that I published from 1993 to 1999. (Officially, I published 371, but there were a whole bunch that didn’t get counted.) Putting together that archive is mostly for my own benefit, I suppose, but I imagine some of my old classmates will get a kick out of it, too.

My adoption of “The Living Room Times” as this blog’s name makes a lot of sense to me, not only as a “branding” device (suddenly the names of my NCAA Pools, which harken back to the LRT and my freshman year in high school, will make a lot more sense), but also because the old Living Room Times newspaper is the project that, in a certain sense, “started it all” in terms of my publishing endeavors. You can draw a straight line from the LRT (and the official school paper, Scribe, of which I was also editor-in-chief — ’twas a Brendan Loy media monopoly at Newington High from 1997-1999!) through The Whiteboard (our dorm newsletter at USC’s Trojan Hall) and the Daily Trojan, to the early incarnations of The Irish Trojan’s Blog.

Well: maybe not a straight line. Perhaps a squiggly one. But a line nonetheless.

It also seems an appropriate name because my life is so much more domestic now, what with an 18-month-old daughter at home and a new baby girl on the way — not to mention our new house, which we bought in April. We own a living room now! Even if I hadn’t thought, back in 1993, of naming a publication about my life “The Living Room Times,” it would make a fair amount of sense today.

As for the slogan, “All the Nose that’s fit to blog”… that, I realize, makes no sense whatsoever. 🙂 But I’ll write about that in a separate post, a bit later.

Anyway… as I mentioned, the LRT newspaper archive pages are still under construction, and you can rest assured that I will occasionally bore you all with updates on that ongoing project, not to mention periodic “this day in history” posts highlighting this or that memorable issue from between 1993 and 1999. I now have a huge wealth of material to work with in that regard. I, at least, expect to have fun with it. Hopefully my readers will indulge me. 🙂

By the way… one final note, in the interest of full disclosure. The June 23, 1999 publication date of that final issue of The Living Room Times is actually something of a fiction. I was pretty busy on June 23, first attending the post-graduation all-night party at NHS, then sleeping, then relaxing and enjoying my newfound freedom. I certainly wasn’t rushing to finish a newspaper that nobody would be seeing that day anyway, since (obviously) we didn’t have school. I don’t know if I even started it on the 23rd! And regardless, it took quite a long time to complete. As I recall, I actually didn’t finish the LRT graduation issue until sometime in early July — at which point I set about making copies and mailing them to those of my classmates who had ordered them. But despite that delay, the official publication date was June 23, the day after graduation, and so I’m using that for anniversary purposes. I know, I know: fuzzy math! 🙂