Blogs

It's 11:39 a.m. EDT and I'm about to tap out my first "blog post" of the day. As I wait to connect to the Internet, I scan the front page of the Sunday New York Times when my eyes come to a screeching halt.

The hairs stand up on the back of my neck - even though I went to the barber last week, and they're shorter than normal. A headline sets my heart racing - "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop."

That's right. Someone - or something - is killing America's bloggers.

It was in the Times - above the fold, as they say in the newspaper business. It had to be true, right? I mean, it's not like the Times is ever wrong, except for the Jayson Blair stuff, and the articles they ran about John McCain and a female lobbyist and the fake stories by Lynette Holloway on rap music and bilingual education. Say it ain't so, Mr. Sulzberger!

No, this story is too big for them to fudge the facts, and it hits home for me and every other blogger in America today. Our lives are at stake. We've got to figure out who - or what - is killing America's bloggers before it's too late and we can't redeem our promotional points on a pair of left-handed tweezers with compact mini-fridge at Brookstone.

I've got a few suspects in mind. Let me parade them before you, police line-up style.

Print journalists. Every time a blogger taps out a post in America today, he or she depresses the market for paid journalism. "Why should I pay you?" a modern-day Perry White yells at cub reporter Jimmy Olsen. "I can get content for free on the World Wide Web!"

As a result, wages for print reporters have sunk from poverty levels to sub-poverty levels, prompting concerned residents of Sudan to send relief packages filled with crunchy-style dung beetles to AP stringers across America. I know how hard it is to survive on news industry wages. As a reporter just out of college writing a story about welfare, I discovered that I qualified for food stamps - I was my own scoop!

Turtles. Don't be so quick to count out our slow-footed "friends." Box turtles are America's most popular free pet, as kids bring them home after an afternoon of crawling through storm drains, give them inapt names like "Skippy," then put them down in the basement and forget about them.

But turtles are most dangerous when they're the most adorable. During the first five to six years of their lives, they are carnivorous - how do you think they catch the insects, snails, slugs, worms, fish, frogs, salamanders, rodents, snakes and birds they live on? Let me give you a hint - they don't need a Segway.

La Cosa Nostra. Preposterous? Don't kid yourself. With legalized casino gambling sweeping the country and increased recycling cutting into trash-hauling profits, the Mafia needs new sources of revenue every day. What better way than to muscle in on the lucrative business of blogging. Here is a redacted excerpt from an FBI surveillance tape recorded by a "wired" blogger at a WiFi hotspot in an Italian restaurant in Boston's North End:

BLOGGER: taptaptaptaptaptap . . .

TONY "THE ICEPICK" GRAVANO: Uh, Mr. Blogger, the boss read your post about Mafia nicknames.

BLOGGER: Great - would you mind commenting on it? It will help put me on the front page.

GAETANO "JOEY POCKETS" DISALVO: Here's his "comment." It was stupid.

BLOGGER: Did he read the terms of service about "flaming?"

GRAVANO: He didn't read no terms of service. He don't need to.

DISALVO: We notice you got an on-line screen name - "Gerbil."

BLOGGER: Yeah - cute, huh?

GRAVANO: How'd you like to wake up someday with the bloody head of a gerbil in your bed?

Aliens from the THX 1138 Spiral Galaxy. There's been a conspiracy of silence about UFO sightings in America since the 1950s, long before the notion of blogging ever seized the American imagination and forced it to post its most intimate thoughts on a medium that can be accessed by highly evolved beings through mental telepathy.

Still, exponential growth - estimated at 50,000 new blogs per day - has resulted in a volume of useless information that threatens alien immune systems. "Either shut down LOL Funny Schnauzers," according to a message received at the International Space Station, "or we reverse Earth's gravitational field using hand-held Quark 'n Gluon Dustbusters."

Angry Spouses. Criminologists say 70 percent of all murder victims knew their attackers, and bloggers represent particularly vulnerable targets. "Bloggers in pajamas can't run," says Merle Walker, head of the On-Line Crime Unit of the Missouri Highway Patrol. "They're self-absorbed, sipping their coffee, glued to their screens, so they're sitting ducks for angry spouses who sneak up and apply chokeholds from behind," he notes. "When we survey the crime scene and read what the victims were about to post, the motive is clear."

- Con Chapman

Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer whose works include The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Yankees-Red Sox pennant race, 10 published plays and two novels, Making Partner and CannaCorn (Joshua Tree Publishing). His articles and humor have appeared in magazines and newspapers including The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe and The Christian Science Monitor.