Things I don’t understand

Okay. So I just logged on and there is this message from the BlogTeam: the site is ‘under attack’, we are ‘getting hammered’ and experiencing a ‘site hack attempt’. Oh God. Is this the end? (Of course not-. BlogTeam JUST SAID that we are ‘getting there’) Are we out of the woods? Are these words designed to calm our crackling nerves?

It sounds like a war, and, like all wars, it sounds completely unnecessary, except that in this case the stakes seem quite mysterious. No borders are being contested, no oil, no other scarce resources, no sovereignty-. Here is innocent old Blogmark, a simple fellow, really, in anybody’s estimation, full of the fears, joys and the isolated, vague flashes of genius of the ordinary man, taking a lovely walk in the park on a sunny day and then suddenly-. BAM!!! WAR!!! RATATATATATA!!!! Ugh- (Sound of Blogmark hitting the ground, blood spewing from a thousand orifices in his skinny, pale corpse). And then- silence. Today the paint splotches on the masthead look like bullet holes.

Why? Why? Why?

What has he ever done other than provide a platform for the both the dull and the scintillating alike to disgorge their prose and poetry and Individual Point of View on the similar folk who care to read all that crap? Who could possibly hate him for this? It is a noble task, surpassed only, I believe, by the little old ladies who harbour thousands of stray cats only to be eaten by their charges when the old ladies die alone after slipping on some cat piss and cracking their skulls on the stoep.

I got my cell phone six years after everybody else, I learned to e-mail even later, and it was big moment for me when I sent my first attachment. Even now posting a link on the Blogmark is a mystery to me- My name is George Eliot and I am a technopeasant.

And I find this brutal onslaught on the poor Blogmark completely puzzling. Who could possibly gain from its demise? Even if JT and Andreas have taken someone’s ego to the cleaners, it is easier, surely, to just seek out a different corner in Cyberspace. Or fight back, for Pete’s sake. Fight where everybody can comment from the side. Mandy? Are you there? (What ever happened to her, so by the way?)

Attackers- hackers-. What information could they possibly want from the Blogmark? Evidence of how many bad writers can boast of a degree in English or Journalism? There must, ultimately, be little to fear from these foes because they are clearly demented.

I am beginning to feel the same about the Checkers workers striking now for the 3rd or 4th week in a row. They seem to rotate the city, because they don’t do the Rissik/President Street intersection every day. But every now and then one notices a small band bobbing along the pavements, toyi-toying hurriedly towards a greater mass somewhere in some square. With flags and banners and everything. Are they not bored by now? Do they rotate the shift? It is not that I am unsympathetic to their cause, I just wish there was some sign of their protest being even vaguely effective. Checkers is still open; we buy toilet paper there almost every day.

It is so disheartening to see the rolling mass of their first march trickle down into tiny streams. I think it was Einstein who said that a sure sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In this case, it would mean that both the union and management are insane.

It is a day filled with many things I do not understand. Well, two things, at least. Normally I would keep this to self because nobody likes a stupid whiner. (Indeed, what good is anybody who does not understand to anybody else?) But today, considering that the Blogmark is out of the woods, having survived both a hammering and a hacking attempt, I wanted to celebrate its daft but brave purpose- and say something.