Yesterday marked the first entry in George Orwell’s blog, an interesting project assembled by the Orwell Prize, the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly and Media Standards Trust. They’re taking Orwell’s personal diaries and publishing them on line in WordPress blog format, posting entries in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were originally written. I personally look forward to reading what George had to say, even if it turns out to be a banal collection of daily personal observations. I also enjoy the ironic notion that if Orwell had in fact been a blogger with no paper trail, we’d probably never know exactly what he said at all because of today’s disturbing tendency toward Newspeak. Orwell’s book A Collection of Essays has always been an inspiration to me, especially the essay Politics and the English Language, which (I hope) has helped me avoid a lot of “bloat” in my writing over the years.