This is a long one. Buckle in.

South African inventor creates "rapex," the anti-rape condom.

I usually try to come up with a personal essay or something to post, but I've been depressed and uncreative lately, and this made me laugh. So I share it with you.

A Moving Personal Essay. By a Goat.

Enjoy.

If there's anybody out there who cares, here's a quick heads up--I'm turning off the "auto-publish comments" function on this blog. I'm getting spammed to hell and back over the weekend with "Texas Hold 'Em" links, and it's easier for me just to leave them languishing in non-published hell than to have to delete 20 of them every Monday morning.

So if you decide to comment on my blog, or on one of my stories (and by all means, please do), be advised that it won't show up immediately--not till I read it, approve it, and foist it on the public. Don't worry though. Instant gratification ain't all it's cracked up to be.

I just wanted to let both my loyal blog readers know that I have found religion. No, not that religion. One that much better explains the world and everything in it, and offers much greater rewards for its followers.

I refer, of course, to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Since I haven't been awash in personal essay ideas lately, I'll just give those interested a quick update on happenings in my life. Recently I've been doing some freelance editing work for City Slab magazine.

Not to start a political discussion here, but then again, why the hell not? I saw this on MSNBC's Altercation and thought it was too good not to pass on. And since I'm not a big believer in forwarding emails to everyone in my address book, and since I've got this blog space just sitting here doing nothing, and since I'm a godless Liberal myself, here's as good a place as any. If it engenders discussion, great. But really I just like it, and want to post it.

Well, I've been back from vacation almost a week now, and I regret to report that one of the Standridge cats has suffered an injury. Alexei, the youngest feline member of the family and the middle-child pet-wise, was apparently hit by a car a couple of nights ago and suffered a fractured jaw. He survived, and looks set to make a full recovery, but knowing that fat orange tabby as I do, I'd say that's entirely a function of luck rather than the operation of primal survival instincts.

Alexei, you see, is not a smart cat.

Well, I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks. I know, what a disappointment--everyone's addicted to my blazing rate of blogging here. :) Anyway, take some time to look around, read my fiction, bask in the glory. And don't expect any updates until late in the month, at least. I'm putting the comment functionality on "approve," so that I don't get spammed to hell and back while I'm away from a pc. So if you comment, it won't show up until I stamp it, whenever I get back from NW Arkansas, land of my heart, home of my inlaws, haunt of my friends.

Now get on out of here. You're messin' up my lawn.

I had been toying with the idea of writing some deep, soul-searching blog about how at the end of my 34th year I'm looking back and taking a personal inventory of my life, looking at goals I made for myself that I had accomplished, goals yet to be accomplished, and reflecting philosophically on the passage of time in a finite existence and how inertia and vertigo war with one another to render us both frightened to move and terrified of standing still.

But thinking along those lines just made me feel pretentious and depressed, so I decided to go for something completely meaningless and silly. Which, if you think about it, could be a comment on the meaninglessness and silliness of our existence and our presumption that it should mean something big and deep beyond the day to day vagaries of finding food, reproducing, and ultimately dying. But then, you'd have to be thinking WAY too hard.