frequently asked questions about the Daily Whale

Who writes it?

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 called it 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.

Why is it called the Daily Whale?

A good dictionary can help you here. Look up the verb "to whale". No, I said a good dictionary.

What does it mean when it says "give me a clue"?

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.

Yeah, well, speaking of background facts, buster, you're wrong about X.

Accuracy is not guaranteed, especially accuracy about Malcolm X. I do try to avoid blatant fabrication; I prefer to be more subtle about it.

Why is this web site so... plain? Not to say dull.

Epigrammatists are minimalists.

I could make the text gray on black, 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 minutes or so that it would take to hack up the fancy HTML.

Is the Daily Whale a baleen whale or a toothed whale?

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

Are all these questions really frequently asked?

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.

the Daily Whale