Dog bites man

From el Beeb:

Two teenage girls in the US have been charged with holding up at gunpoint a man they are said to have contacted on social networking website MySpace.com. (cont'd...)

I don't know what the going exchange rate for incidents like these is in terms of cancelling out the more common perv-lures-girls stories. I say we wait for two more incidents like the above and then declare the forces of lonely adult men and web-savvy teenage girls to be all square. Sound fair?

On this note, let it now be said that being held up by girls in braces is yet another reason for me holding out on the whole myspace thing. I've stubbornly made a point of avoiding the whole friendster/livejournal/myspace/facebook/stalkmenow fad for a whole several years now, and with every passing day it gets harder to spurn pleas to cross over from various people who like me marginally enough to enlist me in the cause of going from 436 to 437 friends. Someone even dangled the "top 8" bomb, which I understand is a great gesture of honour and respect in their native culture. And I steadfastly refused! And she was even a she! And pretty, too! The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the penis has nothing on my internetting principles.

There may be looming cracks, though. I initially made much of how by avoiding committing to one I was avoiding committing to any. That, however, was the old, pre-blogging Tom. Now, not only have I made the awful precedent of getting my toes wet with this very blog, but I'm even getting the earliest premonitions that people with these digital presences can actually use them to lead more productive social lives. Of course, people with cellphones lead more productive social lives, and that hasn't gotten me on that bandwagon. (There's the old cost excuse there.)

Now that I seem to have acquired that mana from heaven known as visitors, let me pose and open question: Is holding out on those websites (Wikipedia informs me they are termed "social network services") yet another example of inherent Tom canniness in all things net, or a misguided attempt at online time-saving that just results in lonely nights reading about the history of state secessionism in the United States when I could be listing my favourite Pink Floyd albums for the benefit of former classmates and friends of friends of former classmates?

The comments link has been tapped for the first time and can't wait to get hit again. Spill.

World Cup thought

I find it endearing how the FIFA sideline medics have "Doc" written across their backs. Gives them a certain cartoony quality. Of course, when you're spending your time carrying off brutally incapacitated Italian strikers on a stretcher, that's only fitting.

This would have been damn cool

...if I had started it, oh, four years ago.

Of course, it would also have been cool if I'd started it five years ago, but only in a deceptively-slashdotty-wilwheatoney-I-remember-
when-Morgan-Webb-being-hot-was-all-like-underground-and-shit way. That would make me what the tech industry calls an "early adopter," which means there'd be a Roomba zipping around on my floor avoiding piles of cheese doodles, a cell phone clipped to my belt wirelessly communicating with a PDA clipped on the other side of my belt, and drawers full of T-shirts with internet comics printed on them. Needless to be said, my sperm would have long since received their walking papers following a visit from the redundancy consultants.

That said, I think the only thing nerdier than having had a continuously-updated blog for five years is to have spent five consecutive years quietly planning on maybe possibly sometime soon when I get a good idea starting one yeah someday alright. The creepy thing is that I think I could well be the only person on the intarweb who has succesfully wanted-to-but-not-blogged for five years. Everyone else either caved years ago or got laid or something.

So today, I take my place in the blogosphere. I bet the person who registered their new blog immediately before me was a ten-year-old girl with plans to muse about Daniel Radcliffe and how her dad is like so unfair, and the person who joined right after me was a 66-year old Boer War history fanatic. Neither had probably touched a computer seven years ago, the former because she couldn't climb up to the desk, the latter because he figured he had a TV with cable now and stuff.

So you'll forgive my embarassment, if this feeling of nerdy insubstantiveness really constitutes embarassment. If my blog were an ICQ account it would have ten digits to everyone else's bitchin' cool seven. If you get that reference, be ashamed. If you had a six-digit ICQ account, be even more ashamed.

Digression: The above point raises an interesting realization. The novel thing about starting a fresh blog is the fact that there are a few days where absolutely fucking nobody has seen a thing you've written. You're effectively writing messages on postcards you're stashing in a hidden space behind the kitchen cupboards. (Yes, spontaneous references to contemporary German cinema! Tom's got it all!) I guess some poor fuck might press the "next blog" button on some tentacle porn discussion somewhere and stumble in here right away. But basically this is a hermetically-sealed glass case of emotion until I spill the beans. Delightful.

I read somewhere blog postings should be short but frequent, and I feel this deadly combination will pose an ongoing problem. So, to sum up, I should by all rights have had a blog a long time ago, I didn't, I do now, and whether this makes me cooler or less cool than I was a few minutes ago is an open question.

Comment away, my tentacle-loving guests.