You’d think that after 20+ years of computer use, I might be reasonably clear on the concept of “copy and paste.” To review: first you copy, then you paste.

Turns out that for AdSense to work, I had to copy and paste all of the code. Every last scrap of it. Deleting nothing. Adding nothing. Changing nothing. Who knew?

I knew, of course, but I can’t for the life of me figure out the origin of the code I found pasted into my page.

Now AdSense seems to be working, sometimes at least. I love the way it picks up the word “maxima” in this headline and pumps out car ads. I’ve driven a Nissan Maxima since 1999. It’s getting old and is as much of a gas hog as ever, but I’m attached to it.

Getting attached to a car is as dumb as screwing up copy and paste, but what can be done?

OK, Google, here I am. A brand spanking new URL all set for you. But you never call, you never write. My Lijit search over there on the right doesn’t work without you, Google. And my AdSense? That is you, Google! Dammit, don’t get me started. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Play Elaine to your Lancelot and waste away waiting for you? I’m not feeling it, Google. I’m just not feeling it. So why don’t you crawl your robot ass over here right now and index my damn blog?

And while we’re on the subject of crawling, I know you guys at Yahoo! are up to here in alligators trying to fend off the barbarian hoards of Redmond. But still. You are in the search business, aren’t you? So search me, already!

As for you, Ask, it just hasn’t been the same since you dumped Jeeves. And you, MSN, what’s up with the butterfly? Maybe you guys have already stopped by. No offense, but how would I know? So it’s up to you, Google.

I’m waiting, Google. Don’t make me come over there…

The unavailability of the subdomain on Wordpress.com should have been a clue. The way the phrase came to me all at once might have tipped me off. The deeply ingrained habit I have of adopting phrases I like and then, after God knows how many years have passed, forgetting where they came from could have motivated to search a little harder for a name.But nooooo. (Thank you, John Belushi.)

I had to go ahead and name this blog “As I Was Saying…” I like the name. It turns out a lot of people have liked the name for a long time.

There are dozens of blogs that use the phrase as all or part of their names. It’s a phrase the television pioneer Jack Paar used a lot. He even used it as the title of a book.

I was a huge Paar fan. He hosted The Tonight Show from 1957 to 1962 and actually had cameras in Havana at the time of the Cuban Revolution. You couldn’t really see much of what was going on in Cuba, but I was transfixed with the thought that I was witnessing the overthrow of a government as it happened.”

As I was saying…” is also a family joke that I use as an easy way of admitting I’ve made a mistake about something. Sample dialog:

Me: Let’s eat at Margarita’s tonight. We haven’t been there for a long time.
Marge (my wife): We ate there last weekend!
Me: As I was saying, I’m sick to death of Margarita’s.

In our family at least it’s the sort of thing that gets funnier with fairly frequent repetition. Please understand that I’m not talking about murderous, sanity-shredding, “Wazzzzzzzzzzuuuuuppppppp?” style repetition here. What I mean is that using the phrase once a week (once a month?) has become my own little family tradition.

I had a professor years ago who spoke of “doughy lumps” in writing. He used the term to refer to a phrase or sentence (sometimes a whole paragraph) that comes to you easily and all at once when you’re writing. It comes to you all at once, he said, because it seems familiar. It seems familiar, he said, because you have heard it before. A doughy lump, therefore, most likely represents plagiarism, cliché, or received wisdom. As I was saying…

Perhaps Oscar Wilde had a point when he said, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

Anyway, as I was saying, I might have been happy with a different name for this blog.