Introducing Offsprung!
To the approximately 100 people who read this site, 50% via feeds and 50% the old fashion way, I say ACHTUNG! How are you? It has been so long since we chatted! Oh, it is just so good to see you. Isn’t this weather crazy? I mean, statistically speaking, you live in either California, Austin or New York, and wow! Crazy!
(To the three readers still I still have in New Zealand, I say KIA ORA!)
Many of you know of the long and semi-sordid affair I have had with Neal Pollack, writer, lover, and as featured tonight on ABC’s Nightline, spokeman of the “alternative” parenting movement. I was there when Neal had his knee bashed in with a whiskey bottle in a hot tub by an insane teenager in preparation for a wild punk rock tour, and I was also there when his son Elijah had his second birthday party where his sister or cousin or someone gave me a dirty look for giving as a gift a copy of LABYRINTH. There is nothing wrong with showing a two-year old David Bowie’s girating man meat. I say these things to convey that I have been there, and I have done that, AND YET, I still love Neal like a brother/father/mentor/drug buddy.
(Many of our antics, most of which you, loyal Ben Brown fan, are probably familiar with, are captured in Neal’s latest book, Alternadad. Even if he only mentioned me 3 or 4 times, I LIVED IT, MAN, I KNOW I WAS THERE.)
Of all the things that Neal and I have worked on together, I think I am most proud of the one that we are launching today. Offsprung is a humor magazine crossed with a parenting community mixed with a political blog and a snarky shopping review site. Neal and Matthew Tobey are in charge of the editorial side of things, and I am managing the infrastructure behind everything. As someone who has started a bazillion online magazines, I can say that this is the happiest I have been on all fronts - I don’t have to worry about writing or editing anything at all, yet I still get to point at the site and say THAT’S MINE, LOOK HOW FUNNY IT IS.
Here is the hard sell for you. Offsprung is a site for people who might have children. There is humor and politics and sex and celebrity gossip. It is written with the child-bearing in mind, but it is not ABOUT parenting in the way that mommy blogs and daddy blogs and Parenting magazine is ABOUT parenting. Rather, it is a culture magazine FOR parents — and soon, a place for parents to meet like minded folks so that they can go out and have a beer and see a band together while the kids rock out together in the play area of the discotheque.
That wasn’t a very hard sell, I know, but hey, I’m not really a salesman.
We have reached the point in this post where you are supposed to click this link and go see what I have been talking about. Thank you for reading.
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