Rant: BLEEN

(Because if you have a blog and you don't post at least one rant, ur doin it rong.  I wrote the original version of the following to the owner & founder of another blog, which might be modestly more popular than mine.)

You know about the whole net-brat "FIRST!!!" thing, right?  It's like the President addresses the nation live to announce, oh, something big, right?  Like Osama bin Laden has been captured alive, in an Undisclosed Location (presumably playing Texas Hold 'Em with Dick Cheney).  Flashes are going off in the room, there are 300 microphones on the podium, the President is all triumphant and Presidential, completes a short rah-rah TelePromTer speech, and starts a Q&A session, which as usual sounds like feeding time at the kennel, until he points to some earnest-looking press pass in the front row.  Cameras swing over, the room quiets, the world is watching... as the reporter jumps up out of his seat and yells "FIRST!!!"

Poo cake.

So when it happens on Cute Overload, I've sometimes taken a cue from Fark, but with my own spin.  Rather than substitute the word "BOOBIES" for "FIRST", I've done things like rearrange the spelling (hence "FRIST" etc.) or throw in extra nonsense words (et voila, "BLEEN") in order to underscore teh EPIC STOOPIT that it surely is.  Yes, hello, wow, you win the internets, you festering buttsore.  Congratulations.  Next time, oh I don't know, try *saying* something when you talk.

Wenis.

Only... people started doing it on their own.  Like, folks didn't get that I was trying to make them see how ridiculous they sounded by amping up their own duh.  Wssssht, right over their heads... and "BLEEN" somehow became the cool thing to say.  It's been quite a while since I've dropped the ol' bleen-hammer on anyone, because peeps are merrily whacking themselves.

And the other thing that folks don't get, of course, is that THERE IS NO $&^@#*% BLEEN!  To quote MC Humpty Hump, I use a word that don't mean nuthin, like "looptid" -- which is my whole point, beginning, middle, end, and subsequent derivative works.  But every time someone says it, two or three other people unfailingly ask what it means.  Today it reached a new level of metabsurd -- somebody actually asked why nobody answers when somebody asks what bleen means.  This is my world, you know?

So yeah.  Bleen.  My one-syllable eulogy to satire, itself lost in the spinning cacophony of blog comments.  But maybe that's cool; it was never meant to mean anything anyway.

(Next time on This American Life, David Sedaris sings classic television commercial jingles in the style of Billie Holiday.  I'm Ira Glass, and I'm not shitting you.)