A Boy & His Blog

Regular readers have doubtless noted a certain limp and lifeless quality attending these pages in recent days. OK -- in recent months, actually, if you want to get all snitty and technical about it. While many of you, alarmed by my extended absence, wrote touchingly to express concern for my welfare [editor's note: yeah, right], in fact I was neither abducted by aliens nor at death's door with dengue fever. No, the truth is a tad less Hollywood than that, I'm afraid.

Simply put, as has happened to many an unsuspecting author before me, the dog ate my blog. (Why do you think none of Jane Austen's online journals survive?) Yes, Fido's dining generally runs to less exotic fare, but homework being in short supply here these days, I guess it seemed a natural enough alternative.

My sincere apologies if, in the absence of A Boy & His Blog, your life seemed suddenly adrift, the universe devoid of meaning, and all your hair days were apocalyptically bad...but hey, buck up there, Mister. Them's the breaks in this dog-eat-blog world. Anyway, I vow to blog my heart out for you in future, and will never leave you blog-lorn again. Well...at least not for whole months at a whack. Probably.

What are we waiting for, then? Let's see if we can't get at least a hint of a pulse out of this thing. Between my trusty blog defibrillator and an annoyingly irrepressible "I think I can, I think I can" attitude, anything's possible, right? We'll soon find out, Dear Reader, so brace yourself. Ready...stand clear -- shock!

OK, so much for waxing silly. Now the hard part. Having been AWOL for so long, how do I actually get this thing moving again? Do I slip it into reverse and try catching up with blog fodder from long-ago mid-April? Or should I view the past ten weeks as having simply vanished into a black hole of my own making, and start over from scratch? The "clean slate" approach may well be the more logical, easier path...so, true to my nature, I'm instinctively inclined to go the opposite way. Then again, I suppose we could always opt for some clunky compromise, dutifully touching on one or two relics that merit mention, then fast-forwarding to the here and now. Decisions, decisions.

Like Scarlett, I'll think about it tomorrow. In the meantime, before signing off, a few random links might be nice to round out this slapdash jumble of thoughts. Here, then, direct from the ether to you, are our links du jour:

This article* caught my eye, springing up
as it does at the intersection of two abiding
interests--movies, and Central Europe--and

featuring the tale of the intriguing girl above.

Some people know that a letterform can
be a thing of beauty. Others don't give a
rodent's rump about typography. Mark
Simonson is clearly one of the former.
If you fall somewhere in between, with an
untutored but curious eye, you might enjoy
a stroll around this breezily informative site.

So, how did everyone's favorite
Yale-trained chucklehead turn out
that way? Hard to say, but this
Salon article gives us a peek at
one possible scenario. Don't skip
page two, or you just might miss
the best (or is it the worst?) part.

And with that, I've time for one last gulp of coffee, then it's back to toiling for my daily bread. If today's visit didn't scare you off, though, I'll meet you back here day after tomorrow for more of the same, OK? See you then.