I know, I know, I’m about three years late, but I saw Bowling for Columbine for the first time last night. The whole movie is excellent, but by far the best part is when Moore goes to Canada and hears that no one there ever locks their doors. Suspicious, he heads to a Toronto neighborhood to check it out — by walking up to random houses and opening the doors. Not only are the doors all unlocked, but the homeowners are remarkably polite about the intrusion.

CNN has an article about wireless etiquette. Loud cell phones, calls in inappropriate places I can understand. But I never knew there was a 20-minute rule for wi-fi in cafes. I can understand a “be willing to share your table” rule, but 20 minutes? That’s barely enough time for even an InstaMunger post.

I’ve completed my InstaMunger experiment — an entire business week of nothing but pithy, snarky posts on whatever I happened to be reading. Of course, by Saturday I was feeling the effects of not being able to write out an extended thought so much that I felt compelled to write a bonus, non-InstaMunger post.

Since a couple commenters have asked why I did it, I thought I’d take a moment to explain. I was feeling in a bit of a rut with the usual WordMunger posts — like if I didn’t have 500-plus words to say on a topic, I shouldn’t be saying anything at all. And so I found that, more often than not, I was saying nothing at all.

The reason I started Word Munger in the first place was to help me with my other writing — it’s a place where I can get whatever I’m thinking about off my chest so that it’s not polluting my thoughts as I work on other, more extended writing projects. In short, if I’m not posting in Word Munger, it’s going to be negatively impacting my other writing.

So InstaMunger was a way of freeing up my thoughts by removing that bit of censorship from what I was doing here. I decided to give myself a week to not worry about quality, just quantity. And it worked. Not only did I write a lot more Word Munger posts, I did more writing outside of Word Munger — the kind of writing that pays the bills.

I think I’m going to keep InstaMunger around. I’m not sure if Word Munger is going to turn into a Kottke or Rebecca Blood, where every day there’s an assortment of long and short posts, but I do like the idea of not always feeling constrained to write a mini-essay with every post. If you don’t like the InstaMunger posts, they’re short enough to skip over. I’ll definitely be writing some meatier posts, so there should be a little of something for everyone. Hope you like it.