"This Nucular World": a blognovel
Sorry if I seem distracted, but I feel kinda bloggy today. “Bloggy?”, you say. “What on earth does that mean? Indeed! What on earth could that mean?”.
The human blog is changing society and the world, and yet, just as was the case in the mid-90s, only a very few are currently hip on blogs, and even fewer are producers of them.
It may sound hard or complicated or technical, but it is far from that. It is the easiest way to freely express yourself at length and with memory on the Internet. And the Internet is far easier than any other of the current possibilities. Unless you own a television or radio station, a newspaper or print and distribution facility, or have some similar wherewithal…but even then the costs vastly outway the benefit.
Blogging is free. And worldwide in its reach.
The non-blog Internet is now primarily business sites, from which art, literature, philosophy, and impartiality have given way to marketing and PR. Sadly, this is also true for an unsavory percentage of News organs.
This is not to say that blogs – short for weblogs
are impartial and non-partisan. They are all over the place. Unlike the commercial media which sticks pretty closely to the received narrative of official news.
No one on TV will suddenly say, “Hey, I think we should consider what the ancients had to say on such matters s these before us.” The pundits and talking heads are too busy watching each other to allow themselves the important leisure to scan their educational inheritance, if not the millennia of riches that have spanned the centuries, and yet have fallen fallow in our better libraries.
THE ACTUAL BEGINNING
OK. Once again I think I have a handle on the matter. Listen up! On the other hand…relax. I am about to explain your future. And not in some sort of cocky I-know-your-future-but-you-don’t kinda way. No. I will leave that up to you. Just remember this:
So here we are. Post-Armageddon. Well, at least in the sense of the millennial signpost of 2000 has passed, and we are still here. Left behind. Unswept up in the Rapture that took away an ebullient minority, long forgotten.
Unless you are one of those who still think there ought to be a a big whoopti-doo might better remember their children, family and friends, or even the unimpeachable Yogurthead Man, if that is the way your mind works or attempts to work. It is generally better to be alive than to be dead. And it is certainly better to be alive than to be killed. It is also better to be alive than to kill.
Great God almighty! I am digressing again, aren’t I?
What I was going to say was that, as a job, soldiering has got to be the worst. By far. It is a 24-hour job. No shifts, at least not when you are on the battlefield.
Their job is infinitely more risky than even a CEO.
And just as Chris Rock made to point that were bullets 5,000 bucks a piece…there would be much less shooting. So would there be less wars if soldiers were paid like CEOs. But I think they should be paid like CEOs. If we can’t afford them…quit starting wars!
OK. That is what I was going to say…
This is what I am actually saying:
Blogging is fast becoming one of the most important inventions in the history of humankind, or manunkind…however you look at it.
It is Copernican. Gutenbergian. Maybe even Gutenburgundian! By I doubt it. And were you an architect, I might even say it is Gundian, but you aren’t so I shant.
And let me apoligize up front for saying words like “shant”. Ever since I bought those sandals I have been feeling biblical. Might as well talk biblically! And yea though I doth speak of matters grave and strange, hope springeth eternal that timely timeless wisdom will issue forth upon the page like an exultation of larks ascending the stairway to heaven knows where…
This is about blogging. What it is. How to get there. What you need. Who to know.
It is also about the Nuculus. I’ll get to that later.
It is also about the Nucular world, the Nucular age…the times in which we live, and about which I care and write. BushWorld, if you will.
Topsy Turbeville.
Topsy Turbeville will be one of our guides as we venture through the blogosphere. Other guides include me, Anonymoses, blogmeistress Iddybud, famous raconteur and explorer, Jim Beckwourth, Baruch the Scribe, Mr. Wondrous, Megajesus, Surreal McCoy, Clara Bowie, pundit Hume Hannity (Oh! The Hume Hannity!), and a few other toadies.
And Rather than write a dry technical manual with just a few snippets from the blogs, this book has great wet chunks from one or two blogs, and references to valuable others so as to delight and instruct…in that order.
nightpalsy in the 21st century
We had such hopes! The 21st Century, the 3rd Millennium was to be absent the stain and pain of war. The exuberant years leading up to the big event, the apocalypse, the Rapture, the birth of the Age of Peace, or however you viewed it, were, I admit, energetic in part as a way to avoid a negative consequence. One of the more widely disseminated quotes in those early years of the World Wide Web counselled thusly:
I’ve seen attributions to both Alan Kay and Nicholas Negroponte, but am still unsure who actually said it first. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was to realize the wisdom therein. Most of us pioneering the Net – pioneering the landscape we were all also creating – knew very well the predictivity of at least that which we created. Instead of asking, say, what will the Web be like…we set to work creating what the Web would be like.
RUSH LIMBAUGH HAS ENTERED THE BUILDING!
17 November, 2003
12:27:36 PM
Well, this is the big news. Rush Limbaugh, after a month in rehab, has returned to the airwaves. Curious to see if he has learned anything. Right now he seems to be brown-nosing Matt Drudge. Matt Drudge! And now he is pondering apologizing to his audience.
He does seem to be contrite…
Now he is taking a call from a nice-sounding woman named Mary Jo from Alabama.
No news.
So far a half and hour has passed, and it seems to be mostly commercials. No real information as yet. If he reverts back to the same old tricks, I think I shall have to turn him over forever. I don’t have time to waste my brain cells on corporate PR disguised as opinion.
I’m no big fan of opinion. As Shaw says: “Not intelligent, only opinionated”.
Finally…Rush returns. So strangely, he is saying that one needs to trust the addicts among us. Say what?
Rosemary, Wisconsin. An old lady. Ebullient. He is now pretending to know the news behind the news…as a hook, no doubt, and the woman is ranting about lying socialist democrats. Strange that at her advanced age she has yet to be touched by the nuculus.
“The problem with liberals is that they don’t like themselves”, Bush, I mean Rush, blathers. Now full blast Hillary bashing. Bring in the drugs!
He has apparently forgotten that there was someone ono the line, as he has now set off on a sermon.
God what garbage! How do people listen to this yowling?
Now he is reading from the Boston Herald in a voice that makes me think his brain is going through some form of nervousness.
What irony! He says that when Liberals talk about the Conservatives…they are really talking about themselves.
“Hang in there, Rush! A day at a time!” says the local interlocutor…apparently also aware of his nervousness. The nervousness of nightpalsy. Nightpalsy of the Nuculus.
5 weeks of absence of news, information
God! A whole hour down the drain. Why do people allow him to steal their time like this?
Jim Beckwourth never had to put up with such a cloaca of unconsciousness. Jim could run 95 miles at a clip. What use had he of bloviation, ceptin' as he could use it to paint histories.