Breaking All the Rules

OK, two of you have called me out on the latest breach of the Lordzim articles of faithlessness. Thanks to my laxity, this slo-mo blogsquall and its credo aren't worth the pixels they're printed on.

Wrote the anonymous me@me.com at 9:30pm Monday:

I thought your blog was different. no politics. no gossip. no celebrities.. and there, right there.. all together... bill clinton, sex, grandmothers, esses, and paparazzi-like activity.

Well, Me, you've got me dead to rights. You and my mom, Me. I'd drop a mea culpa and give you 40, but it's been a rough week for This Old Blog, what with a glut of memories, more PC difficulties, a creeping summer malaise that saps the very whip and thrust from the heart of the blog itself, and -- on top of all that -- serious backchannel backchat from some of you out there in TV Land on just how much Lordzim.blogspot.com sucks these days. Hey, it's not like there's a cover charge here.

What's a self-appointed profiler of the condition human and its discontents to do? Retreat. Retreat into the known verities, the things that make me laugh. Those things, kids, include a photo of Bill Clinton (Oops! Damn! Said his name again. Fuck!) about to lick a grandma's head, and a duck preening before a massive waterspout. Aflac your own damn self.

Ultimately, it shows that even a curmudgeon will succumb to the charms of powerful leaders and little old ladies. And ducks.

OK, here's something almost important: It's about freedom of expression in this brave new post-9/11 world. Let me just set this up, as the people on TV say. (Oops! Damn!) When viruses killed my hard drive two weeks ago, I lost a few hundred digital images, almost all of them from my last trip to NYC. The only images I still have are the ones I posted here, including the bleak subway platform scenes and one eerily illuminated MTA tunnel vision.

Last week, back in NYC, I was walking past a certain signage-heavy garage and thought to recapture the Parking for Dummies image. Yet as I stood in the driveway framing the shot, a crewcut suit goon marched up and said I wasn't allowed to photograph the garage. Soon thereafter, I heard cops do the same if you try to take photographs in the subway. Or not. But the shutterbugs are fighting back via this manifesto. Where will this end?

OK, maybe I can't say where exactly, but in the spirit of linking, here's a grim, exhaustively researched series of articles on how it will end. Yep, it's that scary New Yorker series on global warming entitled "The Climate of Man."

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