frequently asked questions about the Daily Whale

That would be me, Jay J.P. Scott, not to be confused with Jay Scott the Canadian film reviewer who died not long ago or any of the other myriad Jay Scott’s who populate the, as I once said when I wasn’t even trying to appear serious, ultramontane macrocosm.

I’m the one who writes the Daily Whale. That’s how you can tell.

A good dictionary can help you here. Look up the verb “to whale”. Really, it has to be a good dictionary.

I’ll try to say this simply. If you click on “give me a clue”, it will give you a clue.

The clues usually mention background facts, or at least the source of any quote that I’m spoofing. Mere facts may or may not help you understand the joke, but they could help you impress people at your next cocktail party.

Accuracy is not guaranteed, especially accuracy about Malcolm X. Nevertheless, many of my mistakes have an excuse—they’re on purpose.

Epigrammatists are minimalists.

I could make the text yellow on blue, add flashing slogans and animated doodads, and divide the window into a grid of frames as fine as mosquito netting, but I prefer not to. This policy saves my readers approximately 32,768 hours of download time every day, and just as importantly it saved me the 32.768 minutes that it would take to hack up the fancy HTML.

Toothed. The Daily Whale eats giant squid, not plankton.

If I have, then I’m not allowed to say so. But I won’t lie, either. I can say that as of 14 June 2013 I have not received a National Security Letter. If the date was over a year ago, I suggest that you draw your own conclusions.

I’m pretty sure they are. I don’t think my professional staff of three hundred dedicated customer satisfaction specialists would lie to me about this.