Mouse Afire
My normally loyal and faithful comment-program-provider HaloScan has apparently decided it needs some time to itself and is currently being a petulant, non-functioning bastard. I have yet to get an e-mail telling me how I'm a "really great guy" and how any commenting system would be "lucky to have me" but HaloScan and I would be "better of just being friends", but the signs are out there, oh yes. I spent enough time not dating in high school (and, OK, college too) to know when I'm being set-up for the brush-off. It always starts with the silent treatment. Or pepper spray. But this time I hope it's just the silent treatment.

Of course by the time I write this, the thing will probably be working fine just to fuck with me and make me look like an ass. For instance, if you are reading this blogpost and then are immediately able to comment on it, you're going to wonder if perhaps Pops has been making his own brandy out of apples and... well, mostly apples. Again.

In response I can only say that I have no regrets and no embarrassment. I wrote a whole post two days ago about peaches. My shame gland is obviously underperforming. Further, I am a man of the moment. A man of action. I have chest hair. I live in the now. Deal with it (if you can).

Actually having the comments temporarily disabled is sort of liberating. I'm free to write what I want without the expectation or pressure to entertain anybody. Sure, you could always e-mail your displeasure to me directly, but I have no fear of that. What I can say definitively about Bucketeers as a species is that they are crap e-mailers. 99% percent of you never even answer the e-mails I send even though I promise you natrl hrbal viAg.r.a cheep! Remaining silent in the face of offers like that speaks to your masochism, your loathing for me personally and/or your aversion to e-mail as a medium of communication on principle. Believe me, by now the (lack of) message has been received loud and clear.

I'm sorry if that came out with a little tinge of contempt. I don't have anything approaching contempt for bloggers, you people in particular. I love bloggers. How could anyone not love bloggers? We're the helpless, fuzzy, co-dependent, happy parasites on the back of the two-headed beast that is snarling, all-devouring Infotainment. We're sort of a cross between a spaniel pup and a tapeworm. Adorable.

And so endearing. I mean, look at the world today: the Sharon thing in Israel, confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court justice, a nuclear showdown with Iran looming and--come on--bird flu in Turkey. That's a story with built-in puns!

But were any of these the most popular topics of conversation among bloggers over the last 24 hours? No sir. Not according to Technorati. What was it that stoked the nation's--nay, the world's, as I know many of you out there are tricksy, cursed foreigners--interest over this period of recent time?

Flaming mouse burns down man's house.

Don't think I don't see the angle because I do. Man catches mouse, throws caught mouse on pile of burning leaves, mouse escapes arboreal conflagration, runs back into house setting house on fire and burning it to the ground.

Politics is hard. If you're going to talk about it, you have to (presumably) make a token effort at least at a little research and understanding the issue a little bit if only to get the names right.*

Discussion is hard since essentially a blogpost is a conversation with yourself with comments as freakish, unexpectable, unreliable (sometimes simply technologically so) things that sometimes happen and sometimes don't in those giddy hours between the times you hit that big orange PUBLISH POST button.

Hell, humor is hard if only because you post six times per week and there are only so many ways you can think to steer a conversation toward the topic of Brad Pitt's dick. There's only so much lipstick you can put on that pig before it looks like a tragically unfunny transvestite pig whore. Or Robert Smith from the Cure.

But man, a mouse on fire that burns down the house of the man who tried to kill it. That's got funny built right in. And some irony, so long as you don't spend too much time considering that the mouse died in the house-fire anyway. It's sure as hell more interesting than anything that's happened to me in the last 17 months or so.

Did I mention I like peaches?

I guess this is all just my way of writing about this mouse-house-fire topic without writing about it. It's all very meta in the probably-misused way bloggers like us take words and co-opt them for our own nefarious grammatically incorrect ends.

I'd worry more about, but since comments aren't working, I'm going to have to assume you all love it and are would be too busy swooning in text-inspired rapturous ecstasy to be able to comment anyway, were they working.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.8


Pops


*= unless you're like me and your "political" blogposts are almost exclusively devoted to imagining big-shot politicians in various degrees of sexually humiliating positions, preferably with one another. That also requires research, but mostly in pictorial form.
- posted by Pops @ 10:28 AM