Dangit, there's gonna be a June 2008 entry here!

By Todd Stadler · Monday, June 23, 2008 11:28pm

Now, it's well known that as of 2007, upwards of 25% of blog entries are people apologizing for not having blogged much lately, and saying that they're still alive, and they hope to get back to blogging more, but, well, you know how life is.

This is not one of those blog entries. No, this is a blog entry about those kinds of blog entries.

Okay, that's a lie. This is one of those blog entries. Sorry. I'm still alive.

And now's as good a time as any to mention that RSS is a wonderful technology that allows you to read each and every placeholder entry or hasty-brain-dump-masquerading-as-prose, nearly as soon as I've written it. No more wearing out the F5 key anymore.

(Actually, does anyone use F5 to reload their browser window? I used to be about the <Ctrl-R> to get the latest content — because that's an easy mnemonic — and then I woke up one day, and I was like, "But I can do it with one keystroke!")

Anyhow, this'll come as a shock, I'm sure, but I've been busy. Doing what? I dunno. Stuff.

Actually, if you're reading this, you probably know what I've been doing, because we're probably friends (or family), and odds are I have chosen to interact with you in a more old-fashioned way (phone call, hanging out, jousting match) rather than write on my blog.

I actually have a fairly good excuse for why my time has been especially unbloggy of late: Julia and I are going on vacation, to the Czech Republic. So rather than fill your RSS reader and your brain with tons of fascinating facts and factoids, I have been shoveling same into my head at a somewhat manic pace.

The result of which is that I now know that there's a whole lot of history I need to learn a lot more about in order to truly understand the Czech Republic. But even if I can't give a satisfactory answer to the question of who Charles IV was, I do know that he's famous in the context of the Czech Republic, and that will be enough to cause me to say, "Hey, it's Charles IV!" when I see a statue of him. And ultimately, that is why we travel — to recognize names we read in historical sidebars in travel books.

I know the foregoing text really isn't enough to explain a month's absence from this blog (the rest is made up by laziness), so here's a list of things I was up to tonight. If bullet points won't do it for you, you may just have to move on to a blog that cares about its readers.

• Julia and I attempted to learn the Czech language in the manner of much of my education: by cramming. In this case, by playing snippets from an online audio phrasebook repeatedly. Humorous note for Portlanders: the Czech word for toilets, toalety, sounds an awful lot like "Tuality".
• I wrapped all our Czech guidebooks in brown grocery bag book covers. Partly to relive a cherished grade-school experience (which prompted a discussion of what was on the "official" book covers we got, and whether Louie the Lightning Bug's voice really sounded like Louis Armstrong), but mainly so I could feel less conspicuous when I have to take one out while meandering in Prague or somewhere. I just hate people seeing my guidebook's cover and instantly knowing (1) I'm a tourist, (2) I speak English, and (3) I'm the kind of tourist who would buy that particular brand of guidebook, whatever that means. Now it just looks like I'm reading off-brand smut.
• Julia and I had a discussion about whether the Transformers' Dinobots were, in the Dungeons and Dragons reckoning, chaotic good (my position) or chaotic neutral. This resulted in several of the more geeky Google searches I've ever done, and I'm sure that's saying something.
• As with any mention of Transformers, but all the more so in this election year, Julia and I were forced to sing (and re-sing) my altering of the Transformers theme song: "Government! More than meets the eyes / Government! Robots in disguise / Democrats wage their battles to destroy the evil forces of ... the Republicans!" (Honestly, Mom and Dad, it just so happened that those parties' names fit into those positions in the predetermined meter ... nothing personal!)