Various things of not too much importance:
* First, because he’s been absent from the site for a while, here’s a picture of Lopsided Cat for y’all. Lopsided Cat gets underplayed as the third member of our cat troika, on account of he’s not as worldwide famous as Ghlaghghee or full of as much kittenish exuberence as Zeus, and also because he spends most of his time outside, hunting down the field mice and rabbits and bears and what have you (I remind people that I live surrounded by agricultural fields, so all our cats, Ghlaghghee included, are working cats, charged with keeping rodentia from invading the Scalzi Compound). But while he’s the least famous of the Scalzi cats, in many ways Lopsided Cat is my favorite because I see him as close to being the Platonic ideal of a cat, i.e., a fluffy yet totally badass predator. He is “cat.” And I, for one, love him for it.
* Apparently last night a radio talk show host named Mike Malloy read my “Being Poor” piece out loud over the radio, which is interesting because the first I heard about it was after it happened; i.e., this is apparently another incidence of a radio talk show host assuming that if it’s out there on the Internet you don’t actually need get permission to use it. Now, as it happens, I’m perfectly fine with the dude reading it on air; “Being Poor” is the one piece of writing for which I always give permission to reproduce, as long as there’s attribution (which as I understand in this case there was). But, you know. I’d still would have liked to have known. I might have listened in.
* A social networking milestone: I have 1,000 friends on Facebook, as of friending someone there last night. You may assume I have a deep and beautiful relationship with each and every one of them. I also have 695 MySpace friends and 1,356 followers on Twitter. I’m assuming at least some overlap. And, of course, put them all together and I only have 3,481,300 or so friends to go before I catch up to Tia Tequila. Which puts social networking “friendship” into perspective, doesn’t it.
* Paul Boutin explains in Wired why you shouldn’t bother to start a blog, the reasons boiling down to a) all the cool kids were doing it by 2004, so you’re an entire presidential election cycle behind the times, b) you’re probably barely interesting enough to justify a Twitter feed, anyway. I’m pretty sure he didn’t write the piece with the intention of sounding like a bored hipster geek asshole, but I suppose we all do things we don’t intend. I will say Boutin’s correct that if you intended to start a blog with the intention of having it become Teh Most Popular Blog EVAR, you probably missed that particular boat. But there are lots of other reasons to blog, such as, oh, you like to write.
* As a final note, I probably shouldn’t wonder why I’ve gained a little weight recently when I’m eating chocolate and peanut butter ice cream at 10 in the morning. But I’m also having a Coke Zero! Zero calories! See. That makes it all better.