Dear Readers Of This Feed

I don't know what halfwit* decided that with every republish, a new feed item would be sent out over the, you know, "wires" ... and where the fark that leaves anyone like me with hundreds of posts to import, most of which must be published again... but this note is going to stay here til the job is however half-assedly done.

Trust me, I know how to postpone finishing a book.

Isn't that what the Internet is for? Sir Tim had some work he felt he really must get to, so instead he invented the WWW?

Don't despair. Don't give up on me. Besides, some of that old stuff is funny. Some prescient. And anyway, don't you want to say, I knew her when?

Well then, keep reading. Send letters of heartfelt encouragement. And remember, don't get smart—I don't have a day job to not quit.

You'll be surprised—every other word in the book is not fuck.

If I finish.

*Blogger blames it on Atom 1.0. Don't believe 'em for a hot second ...

To All The Little People

I just gotta be a smartass. Don't I. Why can't I just say, Thank you. Especially to the readers of my feed, for I have discovered—much to my horror—that New Blogger spits out a feed entry each time you republish, and republish one does, as one learns the ins and outs of steadfastly remaining Classic in a Semi-Beta world. Which probably makes no sense to anyone not on Blogger; suffice it to say, it's completely nuts here, yet return I did, and from the even nuttier world of WordPress and—I can hardly type the letters—the nightmare of HTML-wrapped PHP.

Where one missing apostrophe can and does bring your entire blog to a screeching halt, and which to my hungry eye was ugly on the page, that code, at least in its carefully bastardized WordPress form. I never absorbed, in what, two months peering at it, a single sense of pattern. No learning occurred.

Needles to say, I am glad to be back on Blogger, where the children are all above average ... and the staff appears to be trying. There is even a contact form. Viva la revolucion. To the staff, I say, You spawn it, you take care of it. This is not something that cool San Francisco web types ... shall we say, obsess upon. Fuck no. To be young is to be ... without certain clues, or at least cooly pretend. Pretend to skim—with style, nothing could more important than style—along the surface of life like fat, beautiful waterbugs. Who, while fast and magical, are still in their larval stages. As once was I, but I guess now I identify more with all the puzzled, pleading people in the Blogger Help Group. The people of the Lost Blogs, for whom it is rare to receive any response at all.

I see they have now have taken up obsequious pre-thanks, in the event a Blogger staff person does show; someone must have told them Americans like ego-strokes. “Oh the new Blogger is so beautiful, I am so grateful for your help.” No, the news from Google Groups, Blogger Help is not good. Politically or otherwise. It is a study in pain. Need it be? Hell no! Some actual documentation would dispense with at least 90% of this, one tech person could respond to the rest.

Clearly, A, Google doesn't give a damn what goes on at Blogger, or, B, Google doesn't give a damn what goes on at Blogger. It's terribly disheartening. Spam blogs, porn blogs, broken blogs, lost blogs, nowhere to report them, no procedures. It's interesting; this is what the Blogger-Buzz-Crew thinks is procedure: they fix an issue and post, “It's fixed!” and god help you if you still have trouble.

What is the interesting part? I'm not sure. Perhaps, the chaos in human lives that results from lack of care. Perhaps that existentially there cannot be lack of care, for we are, as Wittgenstein* says, thrown into the world from which it is both a falsehood, a lie, and automatically injurious to others to withdraw. Yes, the love you take is equal to the love you make (or is it vice versa ) but what the Beatles didn't say, (and what a boring song that would have been) is that You Must Tend.

This is a wonderful platform, Blogger is. You won't see the Third World embracing WordPress anytime soon. Let us hope Google gets a clue ...

And so, dear feed subscribers, I am sorry for post after old post showing up in your reader, your mailbox. It was only luck that I happened upon this knowledge at all, on someone's blog. Thank you for your patience, very much. I will try hard not to—this is so weird— revise.

*Or Heidegger. Same diff.