All roads lead to Rome

Thanks to Bob for explaining his "shorter" versions via Busy, Busy, Busy. I enjoyed that page, and somewhere along the clicking superhighway I got to this:

Obituary corner

A verse tribute to the author of "Orientalism:

Edward Said
Is dead.
Unless it is pronounced Said
In which case he dieed.

What can I say? I'm sorry.

And also found Busy, Busy, Busy's credited originator of the "shorter" version:

Shorter Steven den Beste

As part of my New Year's Resolution to pick a really nasty fight with someone, and as a potential supply of more regular updates, I've decided to become a "watcher". I believe that this was all the rage in weblog circles about a year ago.

Anyway, I want to do it, and nobody convinced me that there were better targets for a jihad than Stephen den Beste, so I picked him. It also helps that, as far as I can tell, he's incredibly thin-skinned (see my comments board somewhere for proof). Now, I thought of doing "Smarter Steven den Beste" (note that part of my strategy is not to use a consistent spelling of his first name), but that would probably completely dominate my blog, and besides "fisking" is like so five minutes ago. (Being a "watcher", however, is retro and cool).

Besides, people don't necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste. Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet. What people want is a Shorter Stephen den Beste; one that doesn't take about ten thousand words to get from A to halfway through the downstroke of B. So I'll be posting one-sentence summaries of posts on the USS Clueless, on a reasonably regular basis, until I get bored. Here's today's batch:

• I've never served in uniform.
  
• My dislike of the French is independent of any facts about the world.
  

No thanks, please, I do it for the love.

Update: Fuck me, this is gonna be more work than I thought. Here's another one:

• I have intricate knowledge of the command and control structure of the Iraqi Army, and astonishingly enough, the news is Good For The War Party!
  

Too funny. Thanks, Bob, for another push off the old chaos carnival ride.

I fully understand this last guy's update sentiment. This blogging stuff starts out fun and breezy, and then you find yourself working. But, it must be a masochist's wet dream, and where does that place me? Because there's nobody there withholding a paycheck if you don't do it and no clock to punch - so essentially, a blogger is turning the thumbscrew on one of his own hands using the other.

Doesn't matter. It's still a lot more fun than supporting the capitalist free market.

Go ahead, try it. There's a link to the supporting FREE eBlogger at the bottom of this page, and in the sidebar as well. But I'm warning you, if you have any masochistic tendencies at all, they'll be tapped.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.