Lent over, blogging cockroach reemerges.

With Easter greetings:

happy easter
i love easter it s so hopeful
and the food isn t bad
mom and dad here at the house
are having some friends over
for easter dinner yay crumbs
and maybe lots of other goodies if mom
is sloppy as usual i adore hollandaise sauce
one of mom s good friends who s coming
is jewish and her husband is oirish
from the old sod plus there are the
mexican chinese jewish polish couple
and remember mom is french so
welcome to cambridge
which is identity enough for all the kids
who happily say grace over dinner
and love to hunt easter eggs
while i m under the fridge waiting
for hollandaise sauce from heaven
hoping they don t decide to look
too carefully for those eggs

Cooking a sausage.

A Russian technique, apparently:



IN THE COMMENTS: This picture is bringing out some... male anxiety. And -- unexpected bonus! -- the blogging cockroach:

ooh i love sausage
but i m not getting anywhere near 219 volts
tommy tried this trick cooking
a hot dog the other week
tommy is the boy whose computer i use
who is 12 years old
he learned it from his science teacher
who is 57 years old
and very weird
anyway tommy used two nails
hooked up to wires from an old cord
stuck the nails into the hot dog
plugged that sucker in
humm bzzz frap pow
smoke and steam poured
out of the hot dog
then it exploded
but not before it blew the circuit breaker
mom was just saving an important edit
she had done on a job
that had to go out that day
an hour of work vanished
about like the hot dog
except i found some yummy bits
of hot dog stuck to the wall behind
the curtain rod in tommy s room
no such luck for mom

Then former law student said:

The Presto Hotdogger used the same technique as the Russian process, applying 120 VAC directly across up to six hot dogs. The salty dog is a high resistance conductor. And long before Presto turned this technique into a product, techie types I knew would electrocute dogs using two nails and a suicide cord.

But the LEDs' tapping into the current flowing through the dog to light up is a neat feature.

The cockroach replied...

fls

nails and a suicide cord
is exactly the technique
tommy used to explode his hot dog
some dogs seem to have more
resistance than others
because tommy s drew more
than maybe 10 amps
and with everything else
on the circuit
pow
the breaker blew
maybe it was the aluminum
nails he used
plus it was a hebrew national
hot dog and you know how
they re connected
to a higher power

Chip Ahoy animates blogging cockroach.

Commenter Chip Ahoy responds to this post about the commenter known as blogging cockroach. He's adapted and animinated the beautiful "archy and mehitabel" drawing by George Herriman.

Now, of course, our blogging cockroach has the relative comfort of a computer and is not stuck with an old-fashioned typewriter like the archy in Herriman's illustration. It's already in the original post, but let me repeat the adaptation of the drawing by our commenter Palladian:



Krazy! What commenters!

ADDED: A reader notes a misspelling. I should have written: Krazy! What kommenters!

Sir Archy, archy, and blogging cockroach.

In the early morning hours yesterday, this blog received a visit from our ghost commenter Sir Archy -- dead these 260 Years and more. As a ghost, he had something to say about Barack Obama's first press conference, in which the prez-elect claimed to have spoken to all the living Presidents and quipped "I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances." (That quip -- for which Obama's had to apologize -- would surely have inspired warm chuckles in a law faculty room.)

In the comments, Amba said about Sir Archy: "I get him mixed up with the cockroach." By "the cockroach, she means our delightful insect commenter blogging cockroach. (Click the "blogging cockroach" tag below to see old posts with writings by the industrious arthropod.)

Amba adds: "I wonder if they aren't the same person, though, and 'Archy' is a clue." She's thinking -- I happen to know -- of archy of archy and mehitabel, the literary creations of Don Marquis:

Archy is a cockroach with the soul of a poet, and Mehitabel is an alley cat with a celebrated past -- she claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life....

"expression is the need of my soul," declares Archy, who labored as a free-verse poet in an earlier incarnation. At night, alone, he dives furiously on the keys of Don Marquis' typewriter to describe a cockroach's view of the world, rich with cynicism and humor. It's difficult enough to operate the typewriter's return bar to get a fresh line of paper; all of Archy's dispatches are written lowercase, and without punctuation, because he is unable to hit both shift and letter keys to produce a capital letter.

"boss i am disappointed in some of your readers," he writes, weary of having to explain the mechanics of his literary output. " ... they are always interested in technical details when the main question is whether the stuff is literature or not."

Marquis' George Herriman's ink drawings are sublime. See, here is archy putting in the immense athletic effort needed to type a short column:
Now, blogging cockroach is surely a tribute to Marquis' archy, and we appreciate his explanation of the the mechanics of his literary output by computer even as we contemplate whether the stuff is literature or not. (Perhaps someone can make a drawing in the Marquis style of blogging cockroach at the computer or photoshop this drawing somehow.)

But Amba's question is whether Sir Archy is named to connect him to the cockroach. (Bonus points if you you do that drawing/photoshop and replace mehitabel with Sir Archy.) Are these writers one and the same (and, if so, are they also anybody else that we see around here)?

Well, the cockroach saw Amba's musings and dropped by the comments thread. Here is what he wrote:

well all i can say is that there are some
advantages to being a cockroach
one of them is i don t have to worry
about my hair or clothes anymore

having the transmigrated soul of a composer
i can look back at all the troubles i had
when i was a music professor
to buy the right suits and keep my shirts ironed etc
in those days they paid us a pittance
and so i drove a 56 studebaker
but had to wear a suit on campus every day
which cost me as much as the damn studebaker
i hated clothes
not to mention haircuts
i was actually kinda glad to go bald
except maybe for the combover
which frightened away my female students
damn
but now i don t worry about any of that
and other than molting now and then
life is simple
and i sure don t want to mess it up
with a powdered wig

but having spent a little time
on the astral plane myself
i can tell you archy s right about seances etc
you just settle in and some idiot
comes and bothers you
about something really stupid
reminded me of office hours
anyway one day my ex wife showed up
wondering where the key to the
safe deposit box was
now some exes hire private detectives
but mine hired a medium
tells you a lot
anyway i screamed let me out of here
let me slouch somewhere to be born
and presto the next ticket said

cockroach
cambridge mass

so here i am
maybe i ll tell you about the safe
deposit box next time

So here's another clue for you all:



Plus, cambridge mass... Harvard/MIT? Some bald professor with a penchant for nudism?

ADDED: And at last night's Crossroads Café, Chip Ahoy said:

What I know about the Kennedy administration was learned by reading.

Smithsonian used to be so interesting. My favorite part was letters from the readers remarking on articles. What an erudite bunch. It ran a couple of pages. Then they got another new editor who cut that section back to just a few letters and to about half a page. That told me all I needed to know about the new editors attitude toward his readers.

Then they ran an article in relation to the John Kennedy assassination anniversary. Readers were asked where they were when the event occurred. That series of letters then ran for several pages. All the remarks were about how glorious the age of Camelot was, how idealistic, youthful, energetic, positive, and optimistic everyone was. How amazing incredibly beautiful the time was. Every single one glowed with praise and rued a lost past.

Except for one. A response from Tom Clancy. He had a wee on their little party. He remarked the administration wasn't all that remarkable. He reminded readers of several notable failures and obvious shortcomings. He suggested had the administration lasted, it would not be remembered so fondly. This caused me adore Tom Clancy, even though he's a schmuck.

I was so put off by the whole thing, the rebuff to the readers, the hard leftist turn, the ceaseless pontificating, the whole desktop publishing look, I ended the subscription I held since junior high school.

It occurred to me though, reading through all those responses, those writers, were recalling an idealized, sanitized youthful optimism -- their own youths. Their optimism was entirely of their own making and had little to do with facts on the ground. As is their present pessimism.

And now, I'm seeing that phenomenon occurring again right before my eyes. I'm going to enjoy this. As an observer. But this will not affect my own naturally occurring cheerful optimism nor my own self-indulgent satanic pessimism. I'm just going to watch my wonderful country, the less wonderful world, willfully create their own optimism. Myth making. That's what is happening. Observe a new myth. This is how it's created. Begin by overlooking faults, dismissing them, excusing them. Next exaggerate any gain, whatever actual good there is, suddenly is really REALLY, REALLY everlastingly good. Yay! Dance! Glee! Canonize! Deify. Mythologize. Expect comparisons to Camelot, and know then you're in the arena of myth. But know also, this is all occurring within the minds of the mythologists.

But know also, optimism is very real. Just as real an uplifter as pessimism interprets into very real and actual drag. Therefore, I choose to enjoy the optimism in my fellow Americans, no matter how ridiculous it is. I could go for another Camelot myself, even though I know it's all occurring entirely within the minds of all you silly dumkopfs, present company excepted, of course. I vastly prefer my fellow citizens as silly little shits, than as obnoxious unbearable cnuts. <--- See what I did there? Letter transposition. Disguises a word unacceptable in polite mixed company, one worse even than the s word before it. This completes my remarks about ridiculously delusional self-constructed optimistic mythos. And now for something entirely different. Here's what I made for lunch.

Sorry you couldn't be here, I'm sure you'd have been wonderful lunch dates.

Go to Chip's lunch link for all the steps, but here's his last pic:



That brought the cockroach over:

yes chip ahoy that was a beautiful lunch
i adore hummus
if you don t eat those lettuce leaves completely
and leave the remains on the plate
or better yet drop one on the floor
well i ll have a beautiful lunch too

now about the beautiful
kennedy administration
i was a young grad student
when camelot happened
the main thing i remember
is seeing kennedy getting off
an airplane looking really snappy
or hot as they say today
and thinking man that guy
must get some action
then i thought naw
he s the president of the u s
that s really sick to think those thoughts
hoo boy was i wrong

And here's what Tom Clancy wrote:

I never voted for the guy. I was only 13 when he got elected. I was a junior in high school when Kennedy got whacked. I was in the Waverly Theater on Green Mount Avenue in Baltimore watching Shirley MacLame and Jack Lemmon. I had a half-day of school. It was a Friday. I heard it on the way coming out of the movie. The ticket-taker said the president got shot. Then followed four days of nothing but a dead president. They didn't even show the Colts play. He was the president of the United States, so I didn't want him murdered. I wanted him to lose the next election. I mean, what did he accomplish? He has been canonized by the media, which I think is a bit unseemly. He was a handsome guy. He had great style. He meant well. It was Lyndon Johnson who got the civil rights movement rolling. He was a patriot and he put his life at risk in World War II, and that's something to be admired, but I don't see anything historically significant that he did other than the space program. For the space program, I'd buy him a beer.

ADDED: Thanks to Jeff with one "f" for correcting me about the ink drawings. I love George Herriman -- and even blogged about him back here. Mehitabel's resemblance to Krazy Kat is clear... clearer than Sir Archy's resemblance to blogging cockroach.

AND: Dear, sweet Palladian has sent me the illustration I wanted!

I got so mad at George Packer last night.

As expressed in this post and its comments. Here I am in the comments:

I don't mind people attacking me for doing that post itself ["[I doubt that] Obama wore an earpiece that was clearly visible on HDTV"], which was done at the end of a long session of live-blogging. But what angers me are these broad statements about how insular and narrow-minded I've been, when I have spent the last year (and more) being incredibly balanced, to the point where my readers really didn't know which candidate I was going to vote for. [Links added.]

You know, I'm going to vote for Obama (94.67% chance), but these assholes make it a really distasteful exercise.

Later, I added: "Now I feel like voting for McCain... and pushing the inside the ear transmitter theory..."

That was after reading this, from Original George:

Before dismissing the idea that Sen. Obama was wearing or does wear a hearing device, in less than 60 seconds on the net, I found many, many websites advertising CIC hearing aids. Go here.

They fit entirely inside the ear canal. They cost about $1,000. They're the size of a large seed or piece of corn. Probably sold by every audiologist.

So....could there be a radio receiver that size? Why not?

And, lo and behold, another five seconds on Google, and up come many in-the-ear-canal radio receivers...like here.

The mistake the Professor made, if she made one, was not to invest a few minutes research. Best thing to do would be to call two or three manufacturers of these gizmos and see what they think.

Heck, if I were running for President, I'd use a radio so I could be fed reminders and tips, and I'd be gobbling Provigil. Anything for an undetectable edge. Lifts in the shoes, hair dye, Wheaties, whatever.

A night's sleep put me at some distance from my rage so that, even with harassment from the excessively early-rising marching band, I was feeling cool-headed enough. And then, reading more deeply into the comments, I was cheered by our little friend, our favorite insect, blogging cockroach:

i don t know about sir archy or even titus
but i am a 100 percent sorta brown blooded
american cockraoch born right here
in cambridge mass if you want to count
that as america which i am sure some of you don t
and i ve got to say i think that hatchet job
done to professor a was terrible
that s the trouble with blogging
it s supposed to be easy and breezy
but there are people who deconstruct every
breadcrumb that gets stuck under the letter r
for example that really happened and i couldn t
write a damn thing with r

railroad crossing look out for the cars
can you spell it without any r s...

anyway soon people started to say
i broke my right front leg off and other
stupid theories and my blog went to hell
until tommy came back from camp
and fixed the keyboard

tommy is the boy whose computer i use

anyway tommy and i took the blog private
and maybe i ll start again
but this sure is a cautionary tale

i have a confession to make
tommy subscribes to the new yorker
oh the shame
he s very bright and sophisticated for 12
hell he s bright and sophisticated for 34
so he started reading the new yorker
in the office of his fancy private school
and next thing he had to have a subscription
mom and dad got him one for his birthday

i m glad that hit piece is only online
as i would have to find and eat the page
if it were in the magazine
so tommy wouldn t see it
and while there are some magazines
with yummy casein coated glossy paper
i only eat the new yorker as a last resort

The Needles Vlog.

I'm not needling you. I'm thanking you.

"you know i have the transmigrated soul of a composer" writes our favorite insect, blogging cockroach.

Yesterday's last post, with its showy outdoor insects -- bee and butterfly -- lured the cowering, timorous bug from the shadows. It's not easy hopping about on the keyboard, and these days there are new dangers. Here then, in full, is what blogging cockroach had to say:

ooh that is such a beautiful picture



brings a tear to my beady eyes to think
of a world of light and air and pretty flowers
while i'm stuck under the fridge in the dark
except when i can get to tommy's computer
--tommy is the boy whose computer i use--
and all that beauty makes me think of music too
--you know i have the transmigrated soul of a composer--
and i do wish tommy would put on the music i ask for

now, what music does that scene remind you of...
me, i think of a bartok string quartet
tommy's usually playing the ramones

anyway, speaking of air
tommy's mom got a new macbook air
you know the one you could wrap fish in
if you're not careful
tommy wants one too
says it will eat less space in his back pack
only trouble is i watched mom snap that thing shut
--whap--
i asked tommy how could he make sure
he wouldn't just slam that sucker shut when
i'm in the middle of a comment
he says there's lots of room between the keys
sorta like an old typewriter my great great great, etc.
grandfather had to hop around on,
but could also hide in when the time came
no room to hide near modern technology i'm afraid
my only hope would be to flatten myself out
next to the command key, which has a flower on it

anyway, i told tommy he could just leave me the fish
after mom mistook the computer for a freezer bag

she was wondering if she could get a glass of sancerre
to calm her nerves at the genius bar

I'm touched by the solace of the non-flower on the command key, and I wonder what a tear would look like in beady eyes of a cockroach. How can I show my feeling? I've added a thumbnail of the picture that moved the little beastie and a link to help readers understand his ancestry. A here's one more thing, evidence that I did trouble myself, yesterday, to look into the eyes of the insect...



... with apologies that it was an outdoorsy fellow, with a real flower.

ADDED: Yes, that's a moth, not, as I wrote, a butterfly. I talk about this mistake -- and blogging cockroach -- in the new vlog.

"I don't want to host a party in which a small vitriolic minority consistently tries to ruin the event for everyone else."

Harvard econprof Greg Mankiw turns off the comments function on his blog and explains why: "To put it simply, this blog is a hobby.... The comments section has been, for me, a source of both fun and frustration.... I just don't have the time to police comments and enforce good behavior...."

Glenn Reynolds comments: "Let 'em get their own blogs."

Since I have comments and they don't, you'll have to talk about the controversy here. Unless you want to do it Glenn's way and write on your own blog.

I take it some people like the feeling of a back-and-forth dialogue and the sense you get that this is a place where you can go. Glenn's idea is that the whole internet is that place, but I think a comments section works in a different way. Is it really true that somebody is always ruining it? Is the community so fragile? I know a lot of good commentators have left in a huff... or wandered off silently. Sometimes they come back, and there's always a chance for someone new (and nice) to crawl out of the woodwork — like, recently, "blogging cockroach."

A good commenter isn't just a would-be blogger. He's not just mooching off someone else's hard-won traffic. A commenter may find inventive ways to play off the material in the post. Or, like a cockroach, the commenter may thrive in the background and want only the occasional crumb of attention.

And a blogger who thinks it's worth it to host a comments section — as I do — gets creative stimulation knowing a discussion will flow from the post. I love starting something.

Here are some extra questions to show how much I care:

1. Who are the commenters here that you enjoy? Would you like them better if they set up shop on an individual blog or is there some way that they operate well specifically as commenters?

2. Who would you most like to see expand into blog writing?

3. Why do you comment instead of writing over on your own blog? You could link to these posts and write about the subjects raised here. Why don't you?

4. If I closed down the comments, would you shift into blogging? Would you miss the place that is the comments, or would this blog seem much the same?

***

And let me say — I've said it before — for me, blogging is not a "hobby."

IN THE COMMENTS: Revenant answers question #3:

I tried blogging and it seemed weird. Comments sections feel like a conversation. Blogging feels like shouting in a large, empty room... which of course it pretty much is, until you get some readers. Plus, there's the pressure of having to come up with something to write about every day.