The State of the Blog: April posted by Martin

Friends, paper monsters, chicken-sqwaking parakeets, and CIA agents who were working undercover in Iran on nuclear proliferation before being outed by the (as of this date) still unfired presidential monkey boy, welcome to the state of the blog looking back on April, 2006.

April is a special month. The showers bring flowers, the rain falls on plains (at least in Maine, so they proclaim), but here the great sickness of 2006 was just ending. I, a stalwart and upright fellow—sound of body and mind—not, pray tell, athletic per chance, but nor feeble or prone to sudden illness—I fell under the spell of one wicked and hideous influenza, passed to me by a globe-trotting photographer who is a good man, so shant be named here. On that first day of April where minds turn to fools, I turned mine to the simple task of walking (slowly!) four blocks for a taco. No metaphor lives here—a real, fresh taco, bathed in Blue Water and Chipotle salsa. I made it, this walk, with the accompaniment of my inspiring and faithful companion. It was she that bought me the taco, for indeed—and here’s where you’ll lend me your sympathies a mite—it was indeed the celebration of the day of my birth.

But let’s not dawdle on me—because this experience of Spitball! is about us. Our Google ranking fell, and then rebounded and we’re back on the first page—the only reference on that page not about baseball. If you feel that this Spitball! is more important then, say “Spitball: the Literary Baseball Magazine,” (which appears to be an Angelfire.com site), then please do link to us and help us increase our standing with the processes and bits of binary that we loving call Google. Which reminds me—big shout out to brother-in-law Ron for his new job, at the very same company.

And, I only bring up my illness and birthday because it is the bookmark at the beginning of this shelf of thirty upright days, and let us know run our fingers over the spines of the others and see what we can find.

There were 28 posts in April. We started finishing our decrepit and argumentative Round 9. Oh, Round 9! You bite and thrash when you should lay and drown. It was suggested that we kill both ideas that were bogging us down, but then it was agreed that we would move a proxy forward in place of a winner. We began Round 10 renewed, and energized by some very solid ideas, and both were tremendously inspired to write our character bios. Shockah, in particular, deserves recognition for his truly marvelous, bio-genre smashing sketch of our future fictional president, John Alan Porter.

The last week of April we broke away a bit, and complained about things, and even complained about complaining about things. We felt it dutiful to mention Jim Emerson, whom we both enjoy reading spectacularly.

We discussed, at great length, more needlessly complex® rules, which we love above all else. And now, we forge forward into May—expecting the flowers so promised to use in rhyme.

In the meantime, you might gander at Apple’s hilarious new ads. How is it that a company that size can keep the ads completely secret and launch them worldwide on national TV and on the internet at the same time? And, more importantly, did they use the genius Errol Morris again?

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