So, I thought I could keep it like that for a while: avoiding updates and ignoring my blog as much as possible. However I was just contacted by the Technorati Top 100 Blogger Consortium‘s lawyers, threatening to sue on the ground that I am currently infringing on the “blog” trademark by misleadingly labeling this pathetic excuse for a website as such.

According to their cease and desist letter, I am failing to qualify for the Blog©®™ appellation by not complying with Article 1 of the International Blogging Treaty which stipulates that:

Posting rate must be above 6 posts per day. Of which at least:

• Two must contain pictures of the household pet (can be replaced by household baby or infant if pet unavailable).
• One must discuss extensively local weather condition and give poorly supported previsions regarding upcoming season change.
• Two must give a detailed recount of daily office job routine as well as minutiae of every meal ingested during day.
• Three must contain more than 5 words (though a maximum of two monosyllabic entries is allowed).

International Blogging Treaty, article 1

The fact that I happened to comply with alinea 2 of Article 1, they added, was no excuse for the shortcomings of this site in the other areas: I had to rectify this situation or face the legal consequences.

Not one to be intimidated by such threats, I immediately contacted the dissident United Blogger Syndicate for advice. They assured me that the requirements enounced in Article 1 were absolutely not mandatory.
Provided of course that a minimum 70% of all posts (85% for female bloggers) contained allusions to the author’s sexual life and daily substance abuse, with a 10% exemption for posts containing Goth poetry and another 5% break for blogs entirely written in green on black background.

While I was still considering my options, a certain part of my close readership, that also happened to be instrumental in the fulfillment of aforementioned blogging requirements, subtly hinted that they would see with great displeasure any allusion on these pages to behaviours of theirs that their mom could disapprove of.

The hints were subtle, yet impossible to miss (well, try not noticing a dead rat impaled on the corner of your laptop screen with the pieces of its shredded heart prominently spread harmoniously over the keyboard)…

Naturally I turned to my next best option: the cat.

However, that furry bastard had sought his own legal counsel in the meantime and hit me with some Child Labor Protection law, claiming I already owed him a hefty sum in royalties for the last pictures I posted here without his consent.

So it is with not much of a choice that I finally resign myself to break this hiatus by an absolutely pointless post listing the miscellaneous occupations that have prevented me from touching this blog over the past week. If you find any kind of interest in the following items, congratulation for having such a bright son, you are probably my mother.

Anyway…

• Since my roommate Nordine has finally found somebody desperate enough to accept his relentless mariage proposals (the man is aging and balding, need to hurry), he has deserted our comfy suburban slum for a cold impersonal apartment that he will be sharing with his bride to be, in the posh Sangenjaya area. Eriko moves in and take his room next month. Which leaves me one month to enjoy my newly expanded lebensraum, something I am starting to get dangerously used to…
• Saturday evening was therefore the occasion for a friendly dinner at my house. Or, to put it in Atsushi’s own words: a “curry festival merrymaking” (I could mention that the circular email he sent also bore the title “Can you fooling around?”, but that would yet again give you the wrong idea).
  I’m happy to report that the coconut yellow curry and bamboo and beef red curry were both equally enjoyed and much fun was had by every party present until unduly hours in the morning.
• Wary as I am to avoid sinking in the convenience of an easy daily routine with little to offer in terms of lifetime achievement opportunities, I made sure to set myself a few easily reachable yet meaningful goals for my week.
  Namely: 1) fix my bike, 2) do all my laundry 3) put an end to hunger, disease and poverty around the world.
  Most of the plan went through OK, and I had reached a 66% completion-level by wednesday — way ahead of schedule. I had to operate a last-minute substitution for some elements though, and finally settled for the next most important problem on a global scale: spam eradication and WordPress optimization:
  • The latter you will find on the WP Plugins DB page: the new version of wp-plugin-mgr will do everything you want, provided you ask nicely…
    Of course you don’t have to install it… Even though, many recent scientific studies have officially linked WP blogs running without wp-plugin-mgr to a substantial increase in cute furry kitten mortality rates throughout the world… Yet, installing this invaluable tool is a choice that you should make on your own, without letting such considerations affect your decision (heartless kitten-eradicating monster that you are…)
  • The other project I am currently wrapping up is likely to bring the art of spam fighting to a whole new level of brilliance and efficiency. More details shall be released on these pages real soon now©. Unless, of course, sufficient hush money funds get wired to my swiss account by tomorrow (spammers, think of your job).
• I also bought a heater, which –Japanese 21st Century Technology being what it is– runs on… gaz… the kind of gaz that you go get yourself at one of the nearby gaz stations (which luckily happen to be the only service convenience massively represented in the area around my house). I guess I must consider myself lucky that they stopped using charcoal eventually. And by the way, this is probably the most important item in this list as far as you, dear reader, are concerned, in that it means the level of temperature-related bickering all along this winter, will be kept to a minimum.

Ok, that should make the blogish blogging quotas for the month. Thank you.