THE THEORY OF BLOG EVOLUTION: I don’t mean to complain, which you already know is a lie, since anyone who says that they don’t mean to complain invariably follows this statement with a complaint about something or other, but once upon a time I was a flappy bird in the Truth Laid Bear system. I liked being a flappy bird; I could imagine that I was a blue jay or a cardinal, well, maybe not a cardinal, not after all those scandals, but some other bird of that sort: small, colorful, and without the pretensions of a raptor or the Brobdingnagian proportions and endangered status of a whooping crane. Every so often someone would like one of my posts and my status would upgrade, if you can call it that, to adorable little rodent. But in the long run, I would always return to the avian fold and I would be content with my lot there.

The Truth Laid Bear, however, not content with his system, has changed the manner in which he orders the ecosystem, and I am no longer the happy, flappy bird I have been recently, but have sunk down the evolutionary scale to the crawly amphibian that I was eons ago. I suppose he has every right to do this; it is his system, after all, and I am just along for the ride, but I must say that this sort of Darwinian upping and downing is hard on the knees as well as the ego.