The Living Room Times

One of the more peculiar aspects of my new blog, without question, is its subtitle: “All the Nose that’s fit to blog.” Where on earth does that come from, and what does it mean? Well, as Page 2 of the August 29, 1995 issue of the Living Room Times newspaper explains:

One thing about this newspaper that often confuses readers is our slogan, which has been included on every issue ever printed of The Living Room Times.

The slogan, of course, is “All the Nose that’s fit to print.”

And the truth is, it doesn’t really mean anything.

Brendan Loy came up with it on December 27, 1993, when he wrote the first issue of the Times. He decided to call the newspaper, which was at that point written only for the sake of writing it—Brendan didn’t start bringing it to school until several months later—“The Living Room Times.”

This name reminded him of the world-famous New York Times, which has the slogan “All the News that’s fit to print.” Brendan wanted his slogan to be slightly different, so he came up with a nonsensical, meaningless, and somewhat corny satire: “All the Nose that’s fit to print.”

The slogan stuck, and has now become a Times tradition.

In light of that tradition, it seemed only natural to adapt the slogan to the bloggy reincarnation of The Living Room Times. So, instead of “fit to print,” now it’s “fit to blog.” But “All the Nose” remains, in all its glorious silliness and meaninglessness.

Becky, however, thinks keeping the old slogan is a stupid, terrible idea, as it’s obscure, nonsensical and will require constant explaining to the uninitiated. Frankly, I think she may have a point — and I was bolstered in this belief when Josh Rubin, one of the LRT‘s biggest fans during high school, expressed similar sentiments via e-mail.

But I’m still undecided on the point. So the question is, first of all, should I keep the slogan? And second of all, if I get rid of it, what should I then put in the white space at top right? What should take its place? You can answer question #1 via the poll below, and question #2 in comments.

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.

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