no news is no news

(6 comments)
2005.12.30
Great Jumpin' Jimminy Crickets! Today is the FIFTH Anniversary of this site in its current daily update form! Happy birthday to it!

I remember purposefully starting the last few days of 2000, just because I thought 2000 sounded like a cooler start year than 2001, and the math would be easier, its age is just the last two digits of the current year. Now I kind of regret it, in the archive by month I have this lonely December just hanging out on the left holding a meager pair of days.

The first two entry titles weren't too inspiring... a new thing and am i a 'blog?. Also, as always, I should get back to including more doodles. It was meant to kind of complement for (but then supplanted) my Palm-based quote journal, which got its start in February or March of 1997, so I suppose in a bit over a year I should celebrate a decade of this kind of recording the interesting bits of the world I encounter.

It seems so odd that I've been doing this website longer than I was in high school or college, and that when it started I was still working at Event Zero as those stormclouds were starting to gather over those crazy dotcom days. And that while technically one day I couldn't update the site on the site itself because of a server glitch, I really haven't missed a single day in all that time. (Maybe on June 21st I should celebrate my 2000th entry...yeesh!)


Passage of the Moment
Of all the ridiculous expressions people use--and people use a great many ridiculous expressions--one of the most ridiculous is "No news is good news." "No news is good news" simply means that if you don't hear from someone, everything is probably fine, and you can see at once why this expression makes little sense, because everything being fine is only one of many, many reasons why someone may not contact you. Perhaps they are tied up. Maybe they are surrounded by fierce weasels, or perhaps they are wedged tightly between two refrigerators and connot get themselves out. The expression might as well be changed to "No news is bad news" except that people may not be able to contact you bescause they have just been crowned king or are competing in a gymnastics tournament. The point is that there is no way to know why someone has not contacted you, until they contact you and explain themselves. For this reason, the sensible expression would be "No news is no news," except that is so obvious it is hardly an expression at all.