Rainer put it nicely: 'Hiatus confirmatus' (Solipsism Gradient).
But Abhik, now firmly ensconced in Johannesburg as part of his sterling service for the Factory, complained on the 'phone that my hiatus here was long even while I was "resting", a time when he expected this log to flourish.
Well, I was busy causing trouble elsewhere. Now that I'm back at AFP there's many a day when I have all of Africa to myself, editing and often translating stories by him and other correspondents all over the continent. And causing trouble.
When I was away, a trade union, a Société des Journalistes which too many people still mistake for a trade union when it isn't (it's a self-appointed editorial 'think-tank') and then a large number of people in the English Service produced tracts and signed a petition, which led to another tract from another labour union.
All this palaver has -- depending on which way you look at it -- either opened old wounds or usefully revived a healthy debate both within and outside the walls of the Factory about the relative standing and role of English-speaking journalists, French speakers and those with other mother tongues in the world's only non-"Anglophone" international news agency.
I won't go into details likely to be of no interest to most other visitors here. Suffice to say that I see the several sides of the row debate and have retired to the back benches of union activity. However, many years' experience of this issue, which used to be a trench war when first I arrived in the place, have left me with strong, non-partisan opinions of my own.
After voicing these views loudly of late, I have been offered political asylum, should I need it, by my friends in the French-speaking Africa news service. I'm quite happy where I am with a non-aligned foot in both main camps, but what with such lively diversions, plenty of jesting and dozens of news stories to report every day, I regret to say that blogging is unlikely to be top of my agenda when I quit the Factory at the end of the day at least until the end of the holiday and silly season.
At present, I'm largely content to visit other people's blogs and leave comments and sometimes encouragement when I feel like it. Particularly encouragement for people like Les Orchard, who is right at the top of my list on the left simply because of the nature and name of his blog.
Les, who is also on 'Hotlinks', wrote almost a week ago that he was suffering from a "dork funk", aka blogger's block.
Somebody saw fit to inform Les that "blogging about blogging" (or "not blogging") was against his number one Rule, which I thought was a snotty-nosed and unhelpful comment to make. Plenty of people write well about blogging, including Les, and if there's one place where rules are made to be broken, it's the blogosphere.
That feller's self-imposed rule also won't stop me from informing Mac OS X users who like linking their computers to "Bluetooth" mobile telephones that the Salling Software people have just pushed laziness to an even finer art with their latest version of Salling Clicker.
"To top it off, Salling Clicker v.2.2 even lets you quickly check for new e-mail or news (NetNewsWire, the full version)."
This is icing on an already very rich cake.
When I told the Withheld Wildcat -- as she henceforth wishes occasionally to be known because of what my telephone tells me when she calls -- about it, she said, in a woman's practical and dismissive way, "But your computer is a few metres from your bed!"
So what? Version 2.2 of this extraordinary piece of software now allows me not only to control more than 250 CDs worth of music from my bed, it also lets me check my mail and read all the BBC and other news headlines, plus hundreds of other people's blog entries, while I am lying in bed.
And if I had an Apple rather than external DVD player, I could even run the cinema from my bed. I think this is fantastic, whatever the Wildcat might think...
The Wildcat is going to want to talk to me again.
Today, she decided there's a special "hell for people like you and me and it's here on earth", for lovers who miss their beloved, and wanted to take me into it with her. I was there last night and think that "purgatory" will do.
Remember that, Abhik? You too were young once!
To try to take my mind off she who shall not be mentioned, I watched 'Jeanne d'Arc' aka 'The Messenger' (darned 'Tomatoes') for the third time and the first on DVD.
And again decided, unlike almost every reviewer featured at 'Rotten Tomatoes', that Luc Besson's version of the Joan of Arc story is high on the list of my all-time favourite films. I can only conclude from what's written by many of those critics that either they saw a totally different film or they were too dim to understand it. This is pretty apparent, in many cases, from poor spelling of French words and historical mistakes, as well as a widely shared ignorance of the identity of the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the closing scenes.
Had they wished to know, either having a brain or lip-reading the credits at the end is required.
All this has nothing to do with the fact that Milla Jovovich sometimes bears a close resemblance to my beloved. This is because the former is modelled on the latter.
11:17:09 PM link 
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