This actually happened. A few days ago, we had the periodical pest-control thingy done at home. Dad treated us to dinner, because we couldn’t eat at home. Then we came back, and there was this cockroach lying upturned on the floor.

Dad stamped on it with his shoe.

“Don’t do that,” mom said, “it’s dead.”

“It’s not dead,” dad said.

“It’s resting,” I said.

I know you didn’t get that joke, you daft buggers. Go watch Monty Python!

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For the last few days, I spent a little time everyday visiting some random blogs (by clicking on the ‘Next Blog’ link at the top).

I found that most blogs were not blogs, but actually advertisements for commercial websites. Another thing I discovered was that the blogs by females (we have to assume they weren’t guys pretending to be otherwise) outnumbered the blogs by males seven to three, which is not that surprising when you think about it.

Then suddenly on the third day, I found that 60% of the blogs I now found were an advertisement for porn – exactly the same ad in each one. I tried to find a normal blog, but it was very difficult. So I have to assume that either someone spammed Blogger.com with these sites, or someone hacked into Blogger. I don’t quite know.

Anyway, it was an all over bizarre experience. I found some good (or at least interesting) blogs. These are some of those:

Indian Writing (which is a great blog itself, and through which I found Shweta’s Wonderful Blog)
The Mouth of a Loosed Woman is a Deep Pit (the rather fine blog of a woman who is chuffed about having liposuction done in 20 days)
Tatum Alice (this one’s too cute for words – a blog written by a mother completely dedicated to the antics of her daughter)
Onanymous (a rather cool diary blog)

I also found some disturbing blogs. There was one blog, by a sixteen-year-old girl – it was not disturbing in itself, but it had a picture in which “I Only Want to Be Happy” was carved into someone’s skin. Now I don’t honestly think that was CGI. That almost made me turn back, but I went on because I realised this must be very rare, and thankfully I didn’t get any more of those.

I saw that there were many Indians out there, and I thought that was just fine (up the republic and all that). Many blogs were rather entertaining, and others were simply diaries. But there were some weird ones. There was one somewhat sad blog, with over 20 posts over two months and not a single comment, and one really poignant blog – a guy had written his blog completely as a memorial to his recently-expired dog.

There was some encouraging stuff as well. About a third of the blogs I visited were written in a language other than English, and this made me very happy, because I feel that diversity is a good thing. They did irritate me a little, because I had to wait for them to load (and I’ve got a pretty slow connection), only to have to press ‘Next Blog’ again because I couldn’t read them. I found two German blogs, and I now visit them periodically to practice my fledgling Deutsch.

After visiting all these blogs, I still realised that I had only scratched the surface of the Blog world. I had found only one blog I already knew – Sandnya’s blog – and I hadn’t found a single blog that came under Blogger’s recommended and recent section. This felt rather nice, because of the huge variety, but it also made me feel that the few people that form this particular community/network are such a miniscule portion of the WSOGMM (or ‘Whole Sort of General Mish Mash’ if you’re one of those unlucky enough not to have read Douglas Adams) of Blogging.

Puts us in our place, doesn’t it?

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If you like reading stories, here are some that are available free on the net (and quite legally at that). All of them are SFF, but that shouldn’t stop you, should it? SHOULD IT?

Neil Gaiman – Goliath: a story set in a world similar to that of The Matrix, but much better than that particular crapfest (I’m referring to 2 & 3, of course).

Terry Pratchett – Theatre of Cruelty (link down): the story that seduced me into Pratchett’s world. It’s a bit too fast-paced, but it’s quite wonderful.

Samit Basu – The Plasmoids: a story by the author of The Simoqin Prophecies. Nice without being great in any way, and unlike other readers (through whom I got the link), I didn’t like the Tolkien reference. But I got into SFFWorld.com due to this story, so I can’t complain.

And last but not the least:

Writerbo: a magnificent illustration of what it is like to live with a writer. All wanna-be (‘aspiring’, as we like to be called) writers are going to cringe because it’s totally true. It’s not a story, but who cares?