Bill Gates and alphabet soup.

And Bill Gates said, let there be blog.

Ok, perhaps it wasn’t the man who has more money and more pants than Scrooge McDuck but I’m sure he was part of it… or at the very least spying on the idea’s inception through the mini-camera installed on all his products which direct feed back to his space mountain lair on Mars. Hi Bill. How are ya? Enjoying your spying are you? Still have to pay for sex? I thought so.

…that was weird, I just had to reboot my computer after that last sentence.

Blog is a contraction of weblog and to weblog is to take a thought, type it up, publish it and then obsess manically over how many hits it’s got. Then you realise what a tool you’re being and log off the computer and log onto a bar. The thing is, at the bar, you get felt up by a midget in a polar bear costume, just the bottom half of it, and you can’t wait to blog about. And end scene.

I’ve often wondered, since about eight minutes ago, what did people do before the internet? Was there a pre-interent blog equivalent?

Some would suggest it was the Diary. To those people I say fooey because Diaries were always kept under lock and key or sheet and pillow as it were. The diary was the heavily clothed nun’s apprentice while the blog is a Surfers Paradise tube top scragg in logic defying ‘fuck me’ boots. Yeah, we get it Cynthia, you’re a platinum blonde with a horrendous lip gloss to non lip gloss ratio, the letters OMG worn out on your pink Motorola’s keypad and a fake tan so orange that people either speed up or slow down because they think you’re about to turn red.

So did people just type out their fancy on paper and leave copies of it scattered around town? Send a copy of it out to hundreds of strangers? Calligraphic graffiti? Sky writing?

The more I think about it, (which is, to be honest, not a whole lot as I’m quite sleepy), the more I feel there actually was no medium available for the prolific pen master to post his or her rants and raves for all to see and quietly judge. And for that reason, people weren’t lulled into the flawed ideal that’s ok to blurt out one’s opinion on absolutely everything. There was more control, more respect. And the ones that were so good at conveying the King’s language in print, were able to do it professionally, therefore, most things you read back then had exceptional content and phrasing mixed with seamless wordsmithing.

The act of blogging has given wide berth to the literary equal of effluent and allowed rant cowboys like me, who don’t even know that wordsmithing isn’t even a word, to spread like the spilt vat of alphabet soup that we are.