Put to the Question

Q:  How's your brain?
A:  The usual—firm in some places, squishy in others.  Why?

Q:  Do you know what today is?
A:  Sure.  The iPad 2 goes on sale today!

Q:  No, you silly tron.  It's the 5th anniversary of your blog.
A:  You're right!  I must be 65 now.  You're scaring me.

Q: That's a big difference.  How much of your original blog is still "operative."  A lot changes in five years—how about a review?
A: OK.  I'm still RIKL and the blog is still the RIKLBlog.  I can still see my toes, and I haven't shrunk much if at all.  I still like music, although there hasn't been much exciting new in the past half-decade.  The new Heart album isn't one of their best and Marillion has been disappointing.  In literature, Asimov and Heinlein are still dead, there's been little new from the others.  Clancy finally turned out a new "Ryan universe" story but needn't have bothered.

Q: Blue?  Chocolate?
A: Of course and of course.  Some things never change.

Q:  How about the blog itself?
A:  I was right about "long-term and time-consuming."  My late friend Prof. Tom Parsons decided that the Latin cacoethes scribendi was a good term for compulsive writing.  For the first blog year, I tried to be compulsive and turned out a blogitem every workday in emulation of my blog hero, Andy Tobias.  He's still at it; now I sometimes let a week or even a month go by blog-free.  Clearly if this is a sickness it's a manageable one. 

Q:  Still irony and not sarcasm?
A:  Ten to one or more for irony.  And plenty of intentional and occasionally unintentional zeugmas.  Just type "zeugma alert" into the search window if you don't believe me.  Irony you'll have to find for yourself; it's not much of a challenge.

Q:  I count two semicolons in just your last two answers.
A:  I like them as well.

Q:  When you said your blog would eventually develop a subject or a point I gave you over a month and you couldn't elucidate one.  Now that I've given you another five years, surely you can suggest something coherent about it, no matter how spurious.
A:  Beyond blue?  And chocolate?  And the inevitable whining that is concomitant with life itself?  Let me go back and check...  Nope.  Although if you keep reading you'll eventually see some notable T-shirts, now in the queue.  A few of my blogitems do contain the seeds for worldwide revolutions of one sort or another, but here on the East Coast of the United States we're still pretty comfortable despite the snows of January and the flooding of this very moment.

Q:  What about any "expertise" or political leanings that you disclaimed in your first blog.  Have you had any revelations or epiphanies? 
A:  100% epiphany free in a political sense.  I have the usual disquiet about our representatives in Washington and the two heads of state whose terms this blog has spanned.  My one oft-expressed wish is that our politicians individually and collectively should be smarter.  But even that is subject to the vicissitudes of USDUC and the "be careful what you wish for" clause.

Q:  Has writing the blog been "fun" as I suggested it might be?
A:  Often it has been.  And, strangely believe it, re-reading some of my blogitems months or years later has provided me some entertainment as well.  I think it has made me more observant and definitely more inclined to snap pictures of things I think just a bit odd or unusual.  You've been spared most of them.

Q:  What's up with SETI?  PriUPS?
A:  Still no space aliens, although we remain hopeful and bolstered by the advances in observational astronomy and the (controversial) analysis of some meteorites.  There have been very few power failures, although the PriUPS system seems to be reliable.

Q:  And what about your life outside the blog?  Anything major going on?
A:  Yes there is.  It so happens that ... Oh—I see we're running out of space.  To be continued...

Q:  So, are you getting an iPad 2?
A:  With a front facing camera?  You must be joking.