Imagine my surprise when I poured myself a cup of coffee Sunday morning and opened the newspaper to see, on the front page, a picture of myself the previous night, tie askew, dorky expression on my face, staggering out of a Viennese bar with my arms around the necks of two skanky starlets. Journalists work so fast nowadays, I thought.

It is important to write a catchy opening paragraph. The internet is a busy place, and you have lots of competition. When I first started blogging, back in 1868, there weren’t so many blogs, but nowadays there are more. So you want to snag your reader’s(s’) eye(s) right off.

To this end, it is totally allowable to stretch the truth a little. If you feel compelled to be ethical, you can just straighten out any “misunderstandings” in the opening paragraph in the ensuing ones.

Like, I wasn’t really wearing a tie. And the picture was taken in the afternoon, not at night.

And it wasn’t in Vienna, it was in another town. And it wasn’t a bar, it was a concert hall, and I was sitting in the second row, not staggering anywhere.

And I was sitting beside an eight-year old girl, with pigtails. My wife was on the other side of me, but she got cropped. But even if she hadn’t – neither one of them bears a remote resemblance to a skanky starlet.

And it wasn’t on the front page, it was buried in the local section.

But I totally had a dorky expression on my face. Luckily, there was another guy in the picture with an even dorkier expression on his face, so I looked relatively un-dorky.