When Life Gives You Chicken Feathers, It's Time for Delicious Chicken Salad (Eyes Closed. Now, Use Your Imagination.)

I used my little Flip video camera to do an update for my fantasy baseball league and the product was ... disturbing. I looked. I looked ....

Well, you can take a look if you wish. Let's be fair. I didn't look so good.

I have a set of guidelines for doing these little videos: one take; no script; use the one-shot or dump it. Why I set these limits I'm not sure. Perhaps, it's the notion of sprezzatura, the desire to give the sense that I am a mere amateur dashing something off. Of course, the idea underlying sprezzatura is that the mere amateur is doing the thing done as well as or better than the pro. So this little video somewhat undershot the definition.

Thus, caught between the desire to not have wasted my time and my own arbitrary set of rules, I had a bit of a problem, given a certain, uh, imprecision of mood manifested in the video. The solution? Add ironic subtitles to suggest that the defects of presentation -- the rather disturbing unsteadiness -- were intentional.

(But no: I wasn't drunk.)

Of course, I could have done a dozen retakes in the amount of time I spent adding the subtitles. But words are my game. It's okay to lavish time on words. When it comes to words, I'm no amateur.