Xanga’s been busy.  They’ve been making a lot of changes unannounced. Some things like Featured Content now running 24x7 (instead of down for ‘peak time’) are fairly obvious.  Other things aren’t obvious until one goes exploring—like revamped help pages. Somewhere in the mix of change, xanga also stopped allowing html-coded images in comments. Who the fuck knows why but they never gave an explanation.   I heralded the arrival of graphical comments in a post entitled The Komment Revolution in March 6, 2002.  Now those days are gone.  I’ll tell you this: ‘Xangaland Security’ almost sucks as much as the Homeland variety.  Of course, we’ve got to learn to live with it, right?

Wrong!  Welcome to...

“Simplify.”  (Who’s most famous for saying that?)

I don’t think I agree.  You simplify life by eliminating options.  If you have no options, no choices, but simply one foreordained path, life is at its simplest and you either then quit life or proceed. 

But having options can be good.  They fill the universe with Plan Bs.  What good are Plan Bs?  Hell, Ronald Reagan was, at best, a B-movie actor.  A lot of somebodys made the choice to watch his B-movies rather or in addition to others’ A-movies.  And that dubious foothold of cultural popularity propelled him along, eventually, to the Presidency. Bedtime with Bonzo: all about Bs.  Plan Bs and B-things are the real workhorses of the cosmos.  Truly excellent things are much too rare to carry us along day-to-day through the whole haul of a lifetime. 

And the phrase “for simplicity’s sake”  proposed as the reason for doing something is even worse than the mandate to “simplify” all by itself.  In my mind it is clear-struck evil.  True, there are times when you may have to simplify your life somewhat if the number of options available to you is overly staggering and confronting their complexity becomes stagnating.  So if your wardrobe is so huge that you’re chronically late for important dates because you can’t decide what to where, either simplify your decision making (ie., flip a coin or use a magic eight ball) or simplify your wardrobe by donating a chunk to charity.  You simplify because the alternative is to become moribund. But to do something just for “simplicity’s sake”, while sounding quite innocent and almost idyllically noble, is the essence of the greatest evil worked in this world.

What do I mean?  Read on…

I’ve decided to experiment with a newly conceived  form of  blog-posting.  (Well, “newly-conceived”, at least to me, i.e., I’ve not seen it anywhere else consistently implemented.)

I shall, for awhile, indefinitely at least for now, put only a teasing portion of my thoughts on my portal page  The continuation or conclusion or punch-line or even the overturning antithesis of my thought for the blog shall constitute the first comment on given post. 

Why?  Read on…