Earlier this week, David Blaine tried to set a world record for holding his breath while submerged in a giant fishbowl. He lasted only seven minutes and eight seconds. Wimp.

By comparison, City Paper tried to set a world record for being a newspaper without a blog. We lasted years before being hauled up out of the fishbowl and slapped silly.

It was worth the wait. Because following us out of the murky waters was …

Well, this thing. (At right.)

The Clog.

Isn't it cute?

The Clog is the official City Paper staff blog. The blog that will eat other blogs for breakfast. With mint jelly.

What's the difference between the Clog and other local media blogs? Instead of one person climbing on top of this slimy sucker, we have much of our staff riding herd. The bylines you see in this paper on a regular basis—Hickey, Rapa, Portnoy, Halpern, Taussig, Howard, Adams, that guy with all of the consonants in his name—will be posting regularly on the Clog, Monday through Friday. (Weekends, the Clog crashes on Paul Curci's couch with a pile of Big Macs and a Diet Coke on the floor next to It.)

"Around here, we're tired of talking to our readers just once a week," explains Brian Howard, who will be the guy charged with the daily care and feeding of this slippery and oh-so-subterranean creature. (Our Web systems guy, Marc Steel, will also lend a hand.) "We're hoping that with our fearsome new blog, we'll be able to maintain more of a constant dialogue with y'all, make it more like a party that never stops."

We took inspiration from some our favorite blogs—and they happen to be group efforts (BoingBoing.net, The Stranger's "Slog"). The fact is, we here at the City Paper like to pretty much do everything together—meetings, lunch, bathroom trips. We're like a pack of sophomores at a Catholic school mixer. So why not do a blog together?

What should you expect from the Clog? Well, the rationale for the beast was something like this:

Dude, if only there were a way to consolidate all these cool links and funny comments we make to each other all day via our Instant Messengers.

Yeah, me neither.

"Anyway," says Howard, "a few smacks on the backs of our heads later, and you've got the Clog. Now, when we get a hot tip or a breaking bit of news on, say, a Thursday, something that'd be just a speck of ephemera by the time we went to press again, we can bring it to you with the most incisive paragraph-long analysis in the biz. You'll get links. You'll get weird crap. It's a blog. You don't need too much explanation."

We're also opening this thing up to your comments. What good is a blog if you can't tell the author when he's full of it? (Not that it's stopped you before.)

And about the name?

Even before the Clog was released from its titanium prison yesterday, there were some nattering nabobs of net-negativity mocking the name. Which is fine with us. Because the more you mock it, the more the name sticks in the crevices of your brain. The more you try to ignore the Clog—brought to grotesque life by our own Evan Lopez and Christina Dowd -- the closer it appears in your rearview mirror. Destroy the Clog, and four more will spring up in its place.

The Clog.

Can't you feel it pricking, like a fat, pulsating splinter in your mind?

The only way to relieve the pressure is to hit www.citypaper.net/clog. Many, many times a day.

(When, of course, you're not reading the paper.)