Robert Vibert on Silliness

If you have a sense of humour (i.e., you usually get a joke and don't need to use extremely obscure and artificially important-sounding words to demonstrate your auto-diagnosed exceptional intelligence and relevance to the world at large, most of which couldn't care less about those types of posturing anyway), you may occasionally find some of the stuff I write slightly amusing. This is wonderful and is encouraged (in a restrained sort of way, as we don't want you to get in trouble with the human-like forms surrounding you at all hours of the day), as far too many people in the world take themselves so seriously it is a wonder they don't get a cramp from the positions they adopt (I have photos, but I need to preserve the PG rating of this site).

Looking at this again, as I am wont to do from time to time, I realize that people put themselves into the most amazing postures. Then again, as I once spent some time learning yoga I really do need to be careful to distinguish between the postures which are considered part of a yogic practice and those which are merely contortions adopted to avoid dealing with the real world - you know - the one outside our pre-conceptions, biases, rationalizations and obsessions with wombats which only serves to distract us from looking inside and seeing what's going on.

In a bizarre twist of fate, if you believe in that sort of thing, or not, I've actually taken a sort of sabbatical from yoga in the physical asanas sense, which of course causes the neighbors to comment on the fact that I need to get back on that treadmill and slog around so that I stay in shape, a completely un-necessary point of view considering that I burn up at least two or three watts of energy every day while thinking and writing - hey updating this page alone must have burned up the greater part of one watt. Maybe not. Please stop staring at the scale and making those little "tisk, tisk" sounds.

These fine run-on sentences have not been touched by any editor, run through more than one spell-checker, or subjected to grammar verification of any sort. Crude and unrefined, they get longer every time I revisit them (really, they do! - well only because now I feel obligated to make them longer and although I've tried to get help for this affliction.. it has not helped) and if you come here more than once a year, you'd already know that, but only if you actually got this far without getting bored, falling asleep and then waking up to wonder why on earth anyone would read this stuff for more than ten seconds.

I'm told (by a source I cannot expose for fear of something I can't remember) that this is all part of a masterful ploy to get people to return to this site and increase the number of hits, but I don't believe it for a minute. I know that you are really here for the wombats, so stop pretending and get with the program, if you want or go on pretending that you don't care about them. In any case, what do I care about more hits on this site? There's almost no advertising here, just one click-through banner to other sites. Well, obviously, when I first wrote this text, there was only one ad. Now, there are a whole whack of them. I've chosen them carefully, based upon the phase of the moon, the circumference of the earth and other secret, you-don't-need-to-know reasons. In any case, you don't pay any more to shop via the links on these pages and I do use the trickle of money to support the Humanity In Business effort. That and buy ice cream for a certain daughter of mine. Well, she's certain...

(OK, OK so you've spotted the link to Amazon et al - they don't pay anything for site visits, and only a pittance if you actually buy something there after starting from this site, so throw that theory out the window - mind the people walking by in the street below).

So, the more hits this site gets, the more it complains to me in a quiet, electronic sort of way - not really; I made that up, just so ai could start a sentence with the word so, which is almost guaranteed to be a faux pas in Anglish. Yes, people often think I'm French-speaking because my last name is Franch (you know the way people who don't speak the language try to pretend that they do by pronouncing an English word in the French way, sorta). This applies to most Brits who think that because they invented cockney they can say "Fraance".

I really don't know why anyone would want to get hit - you'd think they'd come up with a better term for this concept. Did you get lost and have to backtrack up to the beginning of the previous paragraph? Tisk Tisk. Anyway..., you know, the number of times someone visits a site...looks at something and the special monitoring software used on all web sites reads where their eyeballs are looking for more than 3 seconds and files that info in a database for future marketing efforts. Smile for the little green light on your monitor. You do know about the little green light, don't you?

A long, long, time ago in a galaxy where people paid attention to this sort of stuff, this page was made entirely from recycled electrons. It no longer is, as I seem to have misplaced them somewhere. I popped down to the corner shop for some fresh electrons and the nice lady there told me to be more careful in the future. Yes, she did sell me some fresh ones, and if you knew how far it was to the corner store from my house now that the other one closed, you'd have a real appreciation for this sort of thing.

I promise to use only recycled electrons in my new pages, as soon as I can find them again. I'll look behind the couch again - Maureen St. Germain (not her real name, I suspect) says they could be in the fourth dimension and you really must look more than once...If you believe all this, I've got a bridge and some lovely waterfront land in the Everglades for sale.

Some times, the muse hits me about the head and shoulders and causes the out-pouring of discourses of a silly nature. Such is life, I am told. So, on these pages, you'll find a bit of silliness. You'll also find more silliness on other pages. But I hide it better on those.