If Iran’s president could blog, why not Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo?

He’s boiling nukes in his backyard, Bush (who everybody knows is such a terrifying badass) lovingly thinks specifically about him as the American rancher so carefully reads Albert Camus’s tale about “killing an arab,” he’s unloved by Western governments for his exciting views on the Holocaust and Israel — Mahmood Ahmadinejad must be a terribly busy man.

Today we’re kicking off with what we call “Megalinks,” a 3-month-long campaign to gather the coolest blogs and list them on one single page.

If you own a cool, strange, techie, funny, or sexy blog, click here to join.

Why are we doing this, by the way? Because we often write about the interesting posts we find in other blogs and inject our own brand of snarkiness, but there are so many good blogs out there we don’t yet know about. We figured gathering them in one single list saves us all the hassle of sifting for them in the huge blogstack.

“You see that?” I’m pointing at a group of nuns ambling down the road toward us.

My buddy says, “Yeah, so what?”

We’re having coffee at this small roadside café. It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, the cafe piping in Kalapana, the girl at the next table has blinding white thighs I’m gawking at. But this “idyll” has just been destroyed by the sight of the nuns.

“I hate nuns,” I say. “They’re wasting all that sexual equipment. They make me sing that Black Eyed Peas song, ‘What you gonna do wit all that breast? All that breast inside that shirt?’”

“Then you should hate priests, too.”

“I don’t care about priests. They’re boring by default. With nuns, at least sometimes there’s a saving grace. I once ran into somebody who looked like Cheska Garcia and she broke my heart with that penguin suit. Beautiful nuns make you wish you could go back in time and slit Emperor Constantine’s throat. That is, if you could get past the nasty in hoc signo vinces crowd.”

“Why Constantine?”

“Why not Constantine?” I say. “If it wasn't because of him, our “nuns” today would have been largely pagan, complete with fertility orgies. Wouldn’t it be nice? Religion and sexual orgies. Who wants to be an atheist if you have that wonderful alternative? These days, either they bore you out of your skull with stories that never change and are as dry as dinosaur bones, or they frighten you to death with varying pictures of hell and the afterlife.”

[from the blog called, See. Read. Evil.] 

Once, when I was six, we had a well from which our poor neighbors would get their water. The well’s water was deep and crystal clear. It so happened that our well for that day was full of fishes. There had been a flood, and when it subsided, the fishes remained trapped in it.

Once, we had a cat that my mother called “Cathy.” One day, Cathy was hungry.

So I asked the cat, are you hungry?

The cat said, “Meow!”

I nodded; that probably meant yes.

So I asked the cat, “Do you want to eat now?”

The cat said, “Meow!”

I nodded; that probably meant yes, too.

So I asked the cat, “Do you want to eat fish?

The cat said, “Meow! Meow!”

I nodded sagaciously; that probably meant, Yes! Yes!

I smiled at the cat; and patted her furry head.

Then I shoved the cat into the well.

She shrieked, “Meowrrr!”

I assumed it meant, “Thanks!” So I shouted into the well, “You’re welcome!”

Then I heard a deep splash.

I’m not sure if Cathy enjoyed the fish; I never saw her again.

***
This is part of an ongoing "saga" of my "war" against small animals. For similar posts, see:

Destroying the Beautiful

Trouble with the Debutante

[also on The Skirmisher]

The further integration of blogging into the lives of individuals is fast taking us back four million years ago, right at the heart of Stanley Kubrick’s greatest tale.

I have always believed the whole idea behind blogging is simple: placing anybody in a role that allows them to make sense of something as faceless as the Internet on a purely personal level.

[Also on The Skirmisher]

You can’t really believe most things you see on the surface. Take her, for example. One look at her, and something tells you what you see is just bull; that if you drill a hole through her walls, you’ll find a little girl just dying to be understood.

And usually, her beef is all about small things.

Something strange is happening to me. And me talking like this is “strange” in itself; people who know me would eagerly attest that you haven’t heard and seen weird things in your life if you haven’t met me; and that’s not a “self-compliment”; I’m not trying to be cute like Woody Allen. To be even brutally honest about it, people with whom I’ve closely worked long enough eventually discover how disagreeable I am.

But the thing is, these recent days, certain discoveries bubble up on the surface of your life, discoveries that tell you that somehow, fuck-ups as large as Mt. Everest began life as a pocket lint.

And when these small things get bigger, you’re left wondering like Tony Leung in Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love, asking dear Maggie to help him imagine how their spouses’ betrayal began: When did it start? And how it must have felt?