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SometimesTruthIs
StrangerThanFictionVille

Once, long ago, I really got into it with a fellow former denizen of the Whiskey Bar (the bar is closed now, but its whispers will live on forever).

Our discussion was about the true meaning of blogging.

He thought that it was all about the writing and that everything else was detrious.

And in the latter category, he figured the most foul thing was the hitcounter/bloglog, mostly because he concluded that it led to little more than lever-banging of the most Pavlovian kind.

Which is a hard thing to argue with on its most basic level.

But in the end I disagreed.

And not because I don't think that the bloglogs aren't filled with spam traps, mindsweepers, and lots of outright crap.

It's just that even in the most craptacular recesses of the fireswamp and/or your own not-quite-yet discarded memories you can always stumble across something really interesting if you look hard enough.

And one of the things I always enjoy stumbling across is this:

Continent	:	Asia
Country	:	Japan (Facts)
State/Region	:	Chiba
City	:	Chiba

Why?

Because it means I've had a visit from 'the rev'.

Who I've always thought of as a slightly off-kilter character from a William Gibson novel.

And I mean that in a good way.

But all that changed when he put up this post:

People here often ask me "Reberand Paperboy-san, why are you come to the Japan?" -- I usually tell them "I came for the waters" When they don't get that I explain that within the span of a few months I got wrongfully fired from a job that provided me with a large part of my identity, had a serious relationship split up, turned 30, watched my friends suffer an unspeakable tragedy, crashed my car, absconded with the church funds, ran off with a senator's wife -- usually they like to think I killed a man, its the romantic in them. Guess how long I've been here as of this month...

Now, to top it off you've got to go see the clip the Rev has attached to his post.

It's better than the one from Cassablanca embedded in the text above and it will make you laugh pretty darned hard.

Of course, all of this makes me think of the Rev in a very different, much less fictitious way, which is just as good.

If not better.

And certainly not Pavlovian.

OK?

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