"Good writing is like a windowpane."

"Orwell would be rolling in his grave." "This policy is Orwellian." "I don't like this, so I'm going to call it Orwellian."

George Orwell's name is pretty broadly abused in the punditry world, thanks to 1984. So we can safely assume that Orwell, if he had a blog today, would be a political blogger, right?

Wrong! He's a navel-gazing minutiae blogger, just like the rest of us. The University of Westminster is converting Orwell's old diaries into blog form. Most of it is boring English countryside stuff so far. But overall, it's kinda charming. It's bound to get more interesting (unless those English scholars are just big teases). And I'm all for getting the non-political aspects of Orwell out there.

He was a brilliant observer, and the blog thing actually kinda fits. After all, he totes perfected the "look what I'm doing, give me a book deal" thing in Down and Out in Paris and London. (I kid, I kid, love the book.)