And Robbed Again!

Yes, the conspiracy is still at work. This time we've been locked out of the 2006 Canadian Blog Awards.

How do I know it's the conspiracy?

Occam's razor says you choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. In this case, it's the only explanation.

Minutes: Emergency Meeting 27 Nov 2006

27 Nov 2006 Emergency meeting

Minutes by: I.O.
Redacted by: █████████

Venue: The Usual Place
Present: Agatha, The Chair, Coyote, Fourth Dwarf, The Independent Observer
Absent without good excuse but with attitude: Conch Shell

Emergency: ██████████████████

Coyote: ████ wants to ████████████████ with ████ ?

The Chair: Clearly ██████████████████

The IO: ████ might as well have a ████████████████ me."

Coyote: I'm not sure I want to ███████ ████ .

General discussion of ████████████████

Aggie phones Conch Shell, exclaims "Omigod!" CS tells Aggie to instruct the group not to make any big decisions.

The Chair: The ████████████████ drama.

The IO: I.e. █████████ same as always.

Aggie discusses her plans for more openness on her blog, which may involve yoga and the opening of chakras.
4D suggests Aggie reveal her true feelings about the other ESIs.

Aggie and the IO workshop an idea for the ESI blog based on 4D's draft post ████████████████

The Chair again raises the ████████████████████ ████ ████ .

4D: ███████ ████ up now.

Coyote: More than before. He surmises the change of ███████████████ a ████.

Some honourable bloggers: Can the ████████████ be far behind?

Consensus: We don't want to █████████████████. We would rather continue on as now, with varied topics and the search for a new muse, with Aggie yet striving to fill the role.

Despite the desire to avoid ███████████, we agree the possibilities are rich:
(*)████████████████
(*)█████████and ████████
(*)██████████ connection

Discussion: Have Bob, Minty or Lana █████████████ ? Will "████████████████████████████████████████████████ ?

Specious "theories" of ███████████ are proferred, met with open guffaws and eye-rolling.

Discussion: Who's hotter? "██" or ████? Consensus: Easily ████. Recap of ████ relationship with ████████████. The Chair wonders aloud why he ever wanted to ████ her. Robust analysis of ████████'s finer points.

Agatha: Hello? Sitting right here?

General apologies and rationalizations. In which Aggie's feelings are callously ignored.

Coyote: I revel in my inadequacy.

The Chair: I embrace my inadequacy as often as I can.

The 4D suddenly challenges CS's decree that we cannot make a big decision without her.

Discussion: Should there be minimal posting-frequency standards for continued membership in the blog? E.g. at least one main post a month or five comments?

More discussion: the ████ assertion that ████ does not really know us. ████ is wilfully blind. Maybe ████ should join the ESIs?

The IO: We used to be worried about whether our metablogging would ████████████████, now we worry whether not metablogging will ██████████████.

Discussion of 4D's sketching technique morphs into speculation about a certain Ottawa journalist’s apparent fetish for IT guys and her refreshment habits, as well as her exhusband’s alleged personality disorder.

Aggie: "Personality disorder" is just a polite way of saying "f*ing a*hole".

Discussion of optimal posting length. Consensus: one screen is plenty.

Aggie proposes Elgin Street Nostalgia Week for next April to mark the second anniversary of the blog.

Discussion of ██████████ blog, ████launch, ████, ████and likely sex life.

4D: Given her liberal application of ████████████████████, it looks like ████ is the ██████████ in any relationship equation.

Banter about Venus Envy. Agatha likes it because the sales people are attentive. The others either avoid sex shops or, if frequenting such establishments, would prefer to have a very distracted male cashier serve them. 4D used to buy condoms at Big Bud's but did not relish discussing his purchases with the 16-year-old cashiers.

██████ once bought condoms at Shoppers Drug Mart for a young friend, then promptly ran into a senior colleagueat the checkout. He winked knowingly.

Discussion of the lame XPress Blog Awards.

Oddly, the ████████ was sighted recently at the ████████ with a box of fishing tackle (insert witty remark here).

Uncharacteristically, 4D embarks on a philosophical flight of fancy: Just 'cause you're on a plane doesn't mean you're going toward your destination. The ESIs agree a more appropriate saying, given ██████ recent luck, would be: Just 'cause you're in a ████ , doesn't mean you're going anywhere.

The meeting drew to an unceremonious close.

Book Review: A Guide to the Mannerly Wooing and Winning of the Object of Your Affection

When I opened the door this morning, I found an unmarked manila envelope on the welcome mat. I've had bad experiences opening unmarked containers in the past, but this one looked thin enough that I figured any explosion would only take off the outer layers of my beard. But it was no bomb, instead it was:

A Guide to the Mannerly Wooing and Winning of the Object of Your Affection by Ms. Matilda Manners and Ms. Edwina Etiquette.

It is a well-packed little volume that purports to tell a person how to get themselves that all important first date with the object of their affection. There is an especially large section that our friend Agatha should read titled "The Object of Your Affection at Work". Here is an excerpt:

6. On Flirting

Anthing involving sexual innuendo is strictly off limits if your Object of Affection is working. There is an inherant power imbalance in the server/served, retail whore/customer relationship. You, the customer, hold the power: your Object of Affection must be nice to you or risk getting fired. Your Object of Affection cannot leave if they do not like you.

This guide is not perfect. For example, in the section titled "On Managing Your Peer Group and Your Object of Affection," the authors suggest that if you meet your OA at an event that your friends are attending it is only in a restrict range of circumstances polite to blow off your friends These circumstances include having "established some kind of prior agreement or code" allowing for the OA to take precedence.

Huh? If your friends are too stupid to know that an OA automatically takes precedence, the best way to show them the hierarchy is to blow them off on that rare occasion you have a shot at an OA. They'll figure it out.

I suspect the authors are a pair of hotties who find themselves in situations where there are OAs so often that they'd never spend time with their friends if they didn't set certain limits. They aren't approaching the situation from the perspective of a less-than-tall, more-than-slender, under-employed mineral-extraction-specialist.

That they are hotties is also apparent in the flow chart that constitutes the centre of the volume. Don't get me wrong, it is a major piece of scholarship in dating theory. However they have paths in the chart that lead to boxes that say "Politely request contact information (and then use promptly)". These boxes have only lines that lead to "Date". I can assure Ms M and Ms E that there is another entire module that needs to be inserted after the "Contact Info" box and that "Date" is not the only possibility.

Snog&Blog -- a short primer

Snog 'n Blog -- it's the new Kiss 'n Tell. And our recent back 'n forth in this area suggests a need to open discussion on some kind of further metablog standards for ourselves.

The intimate sexual confessional has been around a helluva long time -- anybody who cares to, may check out the Biblical Song of Solomon. More recently, we have the mutual erotic gotchas published by Henry Miller and Anais Nin in the '30s and '40s, or the differing intricacies of James Joyce or Lawrence Durrell, or the blunt force of D. H. Lawrence. Panting sexual description that shocked at the time, but these were actual literary works, covering more emotional ground than the kind of people who bookmark only the dirty bits ever give 'em credit for. I'd say this enterprise ain't interested in that. We ain't looking for porn, either. It's plain boring, often creepy, and way over-represented on the Web, already. Anybody who wants that sort of stuff has only to knuckle a few unimaginative terms into Google, or answer spam.

Considering how long we've mulled our own search criteria, and how difficult we're finding it to uncover someone similar to the 5th Muse, (You're good in your own right, Aggie, but quite different) our needs seem more subtle and complex.

We've already mentioned that the Muse never really blogged sex, per se, anyway. She was (and probably still is, somewhere) more about chronicling a very personal interior landscape, hoping to understand herself (and, at one point not too long ago, hoping to finally find a date that didn't appal. The two were linked) Her talent is in emotional confession of a sort that is raw, sometimes painful to witness, but that doesn't actually reveal all. It was highly open to interpretation, and interesting because of that, a quality that attracted our metablog in the first place.

Her abilities in this sort of edgy emotional striptease -- I've labelled it 'breathtaking', for too many reasons, too many times already -- seem to have made it hard to find a parallel. We've quite often thought the Muse's own analysis of her writing was way off, but, boy, she leads a rich and strange interior life, and she put a unique slice of it out there. It's about emotion, selective revelation, and relationships. We're real relationship junkies...

Unreasonable demands

A number of demands have been made on me as the new muse that I deem to be unreasonable.

1) That I disclose details of my sex life. The 5th Muse rarely disclosed details of her sex life except to complain that she wasn't getting as much as she'd like because of M's asexual issues.

2) That I blog more. Yes, the 5th blogged a lot. But, she also took breaks when she was busy.

3) That I talk more about my relationship problems. Unlike our original Muse, I'm not aiming for the happy ending. But why are problems so interesting? Do you really think you can learn from my problems? Aren't you interested in hearing about all the things that are going well?