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Well! I'm sure that by now you are aware that the office where I work is a hotbed, a veritable "well it's not my fault it was on fire when lay down on it" hotbed, of modern technology, so it should come as no surprise to you when I tell you that the other day I overheard Mandy and Diana giggling, as technological girls will, about the fact that Mandy had mentioned me in her blog.
She apparently had complained to the world at large, or at least to the world at large that has internet access and reads blogs (populations that seem to be rapidly converging) about the excessive nose blowing from my cubicle! Since this was occasioned, as regular listeners will be aware, by the disgusting masturbatory habits of the sex-starved live oaks that lurk on every corner down here in Texas I rather felt that it wasn't exactly my fault and that I was (in Aldous Huxely's great phrase) 'being punished for being punished' so I remonstrated with them and discovered to my horror that this wasn't the only case of my private explosions being made public. For example, and I only mention this one because I feel that I came off better than Diana did, Mandy blogged that time when we were each stoutly defending our code for an application. She wrote something like "Diana is being really scary and Richard still keeps on talking and talking" now, ignoring for a moment the apparent role reversal here (I mean, I want to be the scary one: If only for the sake of ), it is true, as it should be true, that we do get just a bit excited about really important things like programming, and quite frankly her web interface to my backend was done in a totally ridiculous way, ...even if it did eventually work... rather well... but where was I? Oh! Yes!
Here's another example, one which will introduce a central principle to the whole world of, ...well whatever this blogging world is: in that very essay about the trees I happened to mention Mandy and her car and its coating of whatever it was the trees were doing. So in her blog Mandy mentioned my mention of her in my essay, and now here I am mentioning her mention in her blog of my mention in the previous essay in this essay. Now if she mentions this current mention in her blog, thus completing the cycle of mentions, we will be trapped for ever in a bloggo-temporal loop of titanic proportions, never to break free until all the protons decay and the universe ends.
This is of course what is known in psychiatric circles as RIMS, or Repetitive Incestuous Mentions Syndrome.
Well, now, since we are more than half-way through this little exposé I suppose I should wonder if you have any idea at all what I'm talking about. If any of you actually knows what a blog is!
Well, when, as research for this essay, I googled "blog" (now there's a scary phrase to use when trying to explain something simply!) I got about thirty-six and a half million hits. Much of that didn't seem to deal with what I wanted, the more basic aspect of the blog (like what it actually was), but it turns out (after a LOT of weeding) that in spite of looking like the the name of a science fiction monster, blog is merely a whittling down of the phrase "Web Log" by the process of aphaeresis and, so far as I can see, this worn down log is a sort of journal or diary, usually of an extremely private nature, that the modern (usually of an extremely youthful nature) techno-stimulated choose to yell at the tops of their voices from virtual rooftops. These blogs are, furthermore, associated and concatenated by means of sophisticated tools and sites on what seems to be largely a "show me yours and I'll let you see mine" basis. And generally a good time seems to be being had by all. And further-er-more some of the people self-indulging in this sport are apparently quite famous, some of them even famous for things other than having a blog!
And finally...
This morning I sit there in the office and with growing horror I listen as Diana tells me that, indeed, these essays amount to nothing more than an audio blog---and that surely puts me firmly and finally in my place
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton.
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