Pick a Card, Any Card...

Back at work and trying to make sense of the soon-to-be changing leaves, I'm falling back on the one thing we can count on in life: utter chaos. Or, at least, attempts at organizing chaos, which is more or less how we spend every waking moment as humans.

When I have some time on my hands, as sometimes happens in stagehandery--one waits until one is needed after all--I like to play with the Next Blog button. It takes you to what appears to be a randomly selected blog, but damned if there isn't some subtle connection. Crafting blogs will tend to take you to other crafting blogs, and vampire fan fiction... well, you get the point. Subsequent clicks of Next Blog from the same starting point, however, "navigate" you to a completely different site. Some talented people at Blogger no doubt spent considerable time and effort "crafting" the interior logic of this nifty algorithim, and I'd just like to shake their hands. To wit: I'd hoped that when I Next-Blogged myself from these pages, I'd find another slightly deranged, wack-a-doo blog like my own. What invariably happened, though, is that I wound up reading the zealotry of Korean born-again Christians.

So instead, I've used other people's blogs as a starting point.  Here are a few tidbits to brighten your day, found through "random" connections, in some way, to three blogs I like. Again, note that like fingerprints, these three-click results are unique. I played bossa nova in the background while I mixed down this World Wide Meatloaf. If you'd like to do the same, press play for your convenience.



First map: Start at the Live Nude Poems, and hit Next Blog three times. Apparently, the poetical tastes of my man Rusty shares tonguespace with cartoon-like art, as manifest in our combined blogging consciousness. Here's a neat print from Rusty's far-flung Internet cousin, Enzo Avolio:

We are all birds of a feather, n'est-cs pas?

If you start from Nothing Profound's Out of Context and click your heels three times, you wind up at To the Moon and Back, which gives fair warning: "This blogger is a purpose-driven wife." Here you'll find what appears to be a lot of biblical meditation as well as obligatory child documentation and, as an extra bonus, book reviews, like one sporting this fine fellow:

And for our next trick, starting with the greatest cycling blog in the multiverse, BikeSnob, which put the "meh" in "meh-ta," my three clicks got me to this guy:

Now... I'm not being mean, folks, because mean people aren't liked, but I must at least unfold the irony board here. I would be doing no one any favors if I didn't point out that this gentleman is probably exactly the kinda guy whom BikeSnob delights in skewering. Also, he's not updated his blog since last January. Is this where the Things He Thinks About end? I, for one, hope not.

Note that this little "meme" only seems to work for sites driven by Blogspot, and then again, only when the blogger in question keeps the Next Blog button within their design scheme. You WordPress folks, you do fine work, but you just don't seem to have an interest in quantum mechanics. Damn shame.

That's all I got for a Thursday, and you know what? That's plenty. Thanks for reading, and please bear in mind: If it ain't Thursday, it sure ain't Thanksgiving.

Also: If no matter where you click, you invariably land upon born-again Koreans, land softly. It might just be God's way of saying, Keep the Faith.