A Bright New Blog

My last blog entry on record knew the heady summer breeze of 2004, and I won't bother pointing you to it as the whole hanky-panky that it concludes is laden heavy with embarrassment. Not that I intend to make this new blog any less embarrassing, just that I plan it to be so in entirely new ways.

With perhaps the exceptions of the Vasa's maiden voyage and the release of Kim Jong Il's motivational biopic, few events bear the mark of simultaneous grandiloquence and ridicule as patently as the launch of a new blog. It is a time of adamantine resolve and obdurate optimism. The world is awash in topics requiring urgent coverage, the masses are unwashed in opinions they need opine to, the creative flame burns brisk and crunchy the midnight renewable energy source.

Yes, one thinks, I have been told the stories of those blogs created many a second only to fester in quick silence and persist only as a last update increasingly putrescent. But these are not times of defeat. These are not days for downfall. And our voice, prevailing against vile odds, will keep echoing its Churchillian vibrancy across the vast internets: we shall blog on the beaches, we shall blog in the fields and in the streets, we shall blog on the hills, we shall blog in the cool shade while sipping fresh margarita with the utmost in wicked cool sunglasses; we shall never surrender.

But once the sentimental grandeur abates, the fifth Horseman — Statistics — must claim its due; and many a blog will await its last untimely update. In fact, this trend of blogs towards individual extinction is so common that I for one am surprised that it hasn't warranted further scientific enquiry. Indeed, it is a habit so difficult to get into that one could see reason to learn from it so as to inform the combat against such gravely afflicting addictions as smoking, eating andouillette, or opening new tabs from Wikipedia articles. An opposite of addiction, this study of undiction as it were might pave the way towards a world in which one might actually eat "just one more cookie", watch "just one more episode" of How I Met Your Mother, and honestly ask for "just five or six last ones for the road". Think of how much time it would free up, of the hapless mirth we would know trying to figure out what to do with it! We might just find ourselves with little else on our hands but the time to blog again.

Whichever way it goes, however long it lasts, stouthearted and determined I shall try. Join me in asking Eris, goddess of the internet, for her mischievous help, and wish me luck — from here on it's posterity at ten paces.