Charmed, I'm Sure.

I'm starting this blog at the suggestion of a friend, who flattered me by saying other people would want to read my observations. He also said it would save him having to search through his e-mail, so clearly it was not an entirely altruistic suggestion. I, on the other hand, recently lost my phone and realised how the social networking sites the kids keep talking about could have made recovering my contacts easier. If I'd joined the rest of the world in sucking on Rupert Murdoch's saggy teats, I could have simply "MySpaced" everyone I know to get their number back. Or I could have skipped that entirely, since I never called most of the hundred-odd people in my contacts list, but might have been able to work up the motivation to follow a link to their MySpace page. But I hate MySpace. I especially hate the usage of "MySpace" as a verb.

Instead, this blog is part of the Google "cloud," mankind's first corporate-sponsored attempt to store all the information in the universe in a computer smaller than and contained within the universe. Google was accepted as a verb more quickly than you can say "Fuck you, Jeeves, and the Aston-Martin you rode in on." But instead of finding this usage irritating, I find it endearing. As Blaise Pascal said, "There's no accounting for taste." ("La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.")
The discovery of this project with the most damning consequences to number theory is that despite thought experiments about the nature of infinty involving monkeys, typewriters, and the works of William Shakespeare, nothing even approaching English, let alone classic English literature, has yet been produced by the vast number of monkeys posting on /b/.

So here is my blog, which is designed to save me effort while allowing me to expound the little and bigger points that tickle me. Like how I'm totally getting off on all the news that compounds the devaluation of the dollar and the imminent recession that newspapers are finding it harder not to acknowledge. (Mr. Bernanke: Instead of lowering interest rates more, why not try printing more money and giving it away free to stimulate domestic spending? Or edge out the Euro by buying them all and selling them back to the world at a much lower price, thereby devaluing them? Maybe because those are also stupid ideas? Crikey.) Or the sad lady I saw at a Safeway in Bremerton on Thanksgiving, wearing a Navy sweatshirt cut into a halter top, making her preteen kid hold her rack of PBR Light while she strapped her infant into the cart. In a very real way, she is the ultimate inspiration for this blog.

Incidentally, it may entertain you.