Rhinocrisy

We are (as of this posting) apparently still only the #5 google hit for “dinosaurs with lasers“. There is much to do.

A missive from the hedgehog woke me from my torpor, and I realize that I should give this blog its due diligence.

I wish I had a good story to explain the long silence. I was visiting a community of Arab exiles in Paraguay, whom I became acquainted with through a friend who trades in refurbished stereos with Arab expatriates all over the world. I found an old boot containing half a kilo of cocaine and an ancient illuminated copy of “The Lives of the Saints”, and had a devil of a time getting rid of both. I contracted a multiply-resistant strain of Staphylococcus and spent the month groaning in a hospital bed, my skin covered in sores that made it look like dried dates, while my doctors attempted to defeat the bug with various combinations of antibiotics. I unfortunately laughed at a man who stepped in a puddle of murky ice-water, who it turned out was a not-so-forgiving Jewish gangster, and spent the month hiding out with my old roommate in Ithaca until the whole thing blew over. I attended a conference in China and lost my passport, and so had to sneak back into the country with the assistance of a parade of smuggler groups, one of which made me work as a driver along the southern border of Panama for two weeks before allowing me to travel north again. I was trapped in a glass bottle by a djinn, and was only discovered a few days ago when my roommate mistook my prison for a bottle of Trader Joe’s olive oil. I went scuba diving and got my foot trapped in the maw of a giant clam, and had to take my air through a long tube until the clam (apparently popular as a local tourist attraction and therefore more valuable than my foot) released me. Meanwhile the skin on my hands partially rotted and they nearly had to be amputated. A fit of mania seized me and I took it upon myself to dig a well in the backyard; the frozen ground made it impossible to identify the water table, and I dug thirty feet down before I realized this. My yoga instructor spent a weekend in samadhi and conceived some brilliant insights about the nature of being, and enlisted my help to translate his fevered and fragmentary memory of his brief wisdom into a vernacular text. We argued almost constantly and in the end wrote almost nothing down. I experimented with a low-sodium diet that resulted in me dropping into a coma. In my comatose state I dreamt I was a salmon, desperately struggling upriver against the current, with the vague desire to spawn glimmering in my mind like a flickering beacon to guide me. Along with some friends I built a stone tower thirty feet high in a local park, working under cover of darkness and sleeping during the day. It collapsed after the first snowstorm and now resembles a ruined battlement. While drunk at a party I received a brief instruction in Tibetan throat singing. But poor coaching led to me developing two completely separate voices, which warred constantly whenever I attempted to speak and often expressed contradictory viewpoints. Recovery required learning to swallow my own tongue without choking. I received an envelope in the mail addressed to a former resident of my house, which I opened; the contents included a letter from the real Santa Claus and one of Baba Jaga’s iron teeth. My subsequent attempts to interest a society of cryptozoologists (some of the most frustrating, and, ironically, close-minded individuals I have ever encountered) in either of these items proved fruitless. A botanist I know isolated a phytoestrogen from a Colombian vine that he claimed suppressed homosexual urges and promoted heterosexual ones. A society of gay ninjas determined to destroy his research solicited my help as a mole. A new brand of long underwear I recently began wearing resulted in an unusual level of static accumulation, which caused me to destroy any keyboard as soon as I touched it; I proved unable to isolate the source of this problem for several weeks. My roommates discovered flatworms in a bunch of tripe they had purchased with the intent of making rennet for use in a homemade Havarti cheese, and got the rest of us tied up in their bullshit legal dramatics with the provider of the infected meat. Fuckers. I stumbled across some bones while jogging, which turned out to be those of a dromedary camel, a mystery which eventually led me to discover a defunct bestiality society which used to run around these parts in the 1920s.

But the truth is it’s winter, and I’m depressed, and tied up with work, and my own guts are strangling me. Which seems an ill excuse not to write. I’ll try to pick it up.

Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately, folks. I got a paper back from review and have been busting my ass to turn it around and get it out the door again.

In the meanwhile, I was going to entertain you by writing about an incident wherein Steve McIntyre (of McIntyre & McKitrick fame) was crowing about having found an error in NASA’s GISS mean temperature records for the US; following his correction (which NASA acknowledged), 1998 is no longer the hottest year in history for the US - 1934 is. Many right-wing blogs are also crowing over this, and asking climate scientists to EAT crow over this, but it turns out to be all hat and no cattle crow.

Anyway, I was GOING to entertain you by writing about this, but Tim Lambert already did it very nicely. Read it!

Due to popular demand, the poll is back. A probatory poll is to the left. If it proves stable, we’ll replace it with something more robust and full-bodied.

Since everyone’s been asking about where I’ve been for the past couple months, let me fill you in. First of all, my Civil War wound started flaring up again and they didn’t have room at Walter Reed, calling the gangrene in my thigh a “cosmetic” issue that would “clear” up with “time.” So I went and lived with family for a while and let them pour fine scotch into the old hole — not a bullethole as some have claimed but actually a nest hole for a family of finches. They pecked it out when I was hiding in a tree before I got killed at Shiloh.

Anyway I wasn’t too worried that my absence (nor my abscess) would cause anyone trouble because I had long since outsourced all my bloggy needs to Jonathan. The guy is preternatural at posting the stuff I was just thinking about. Or would have been thinking about if I were smarter.

For those of you who are extremely unobservant and are navigating the Internet by closing your eyes and clicking wildly: we have moved.^*

A small update on my life: I’ve had typhoid fever for the past month. Actually it’s been going around my house; all of us have gotten it except my roommate Mary, who apparently has a sturdier constitution. However, this weekend I cured myself by application of an enema made with extract of burdock and galangal root. I am hale and fit and ready to take on the world again.

After a long absence, this is perhaps a poor way to reintroduce ourselves. I can only encourage you to, like Tantalus, keep reaching for those grapes. Some succulent fruit is on the way.

I suppose it’s about time to say formally that we’re on hiatus. Although there is much to say, unfortunately at the moment there is even more to do. Fear not, we will return shortly.

While I was wasting time reading our logs (looking at which google searches land people up here - my favorite is probably “mary ann and ginger wrestling”), it occurred to me that our site is not very jazzy, and oughta include something reflecting our history of more appeal than the bland archives. So, taking a long, long shot (given your poor history of actually commenting), I ask you: what’s your favorite post on this site? For whatever reason - humor, information, cynicism, etc. I think I’ve previously made my favorite clear.

Echoing the tentative celebratory note sounded by Hedgehog, new poll on the right.

Regular commentor Hibiscus recently started a bloogh of her/his own, and it is impressive.