Man versus germ

I spent the weekend ravaged by disease. I have courageously overcome it, however, and assure the VCA that I will soon be my old self, or something closely resembling it. I have little to report, since my head was in a vise, as they say, since Friday. I couldn’t even watch television; thank God for podcasts. Plug Nano directly into brain and lie there dying listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me—it’s a great way to go.

Nevertheless… the Legion of Doom is a most curious beast. When I finally moved myself into the living room yesterday to collect what I expected to be voluminous mail on two issues, I was rather struck by the lack of voluminosity. First, I’ve canvassed the board for their help getting the tournament policies accepted in their regions, and second, I was, as I mentioned not long ago, trying to drum up business for a Legion blog. Totally mum on the former. As for the latter, while the general opinion, such as it was, was that the communications device, be it blog or board, should be limited to legionnaires, and there were a couple of actual suggestions of where and how to do it and offers for same, it became clear from the ensuing inertia that the bottom line problem was that there is no real authority in the Legion, i.e., no one to say yea or nay. Granted that it is not so much an action group as an advisory group, but even bloviators have to have a chief bloviator to announce that this bloviation, whatever it may be, is the bloviation that counts. Every posse needs a sheriff. The two facilitators of the group, Eric the Ex-Sailor and Smilin’ J, aren’t it. The board isn’t it. The membership isn’t it. Personally I think everybody is just too busy for this stuff, although they believe in it strongly, and I can understand that, but it’s a lousy excuse nevertheless. Given the Legion’s founding premise that LD is committing suicide and that the Legion was dedicated to making that not happen, it would seem that the need for action would intrinsically trump any other impulses, especially when that action is creating a forum for ways to prevent suicide. As the poet said, it’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma served on a bed of field greens with a lemon vinaigrette…

For fans of DMV, the site should be going into its student-of-the-minute mode soon. Termite is out there, soaking up the California sun. No doubt he’ll be student-of-the-minute eventually; by my calculation, two weeks of minute-by-minute students should insure full coverage for all. No doubt we’ll be seeing his picture in the masthead, picking his nose or something. (I hate it when they rotate to my picture. It’s like if Dick Cheney’s picture rotated on my website: I wonder how it got there and contemplate the inherent contradiction of face and content. At least I’m not picking my nose.) Still, I’m fond enough of OC to send him a present, and I just tucked it into the mail. With luck it will survive the journey, and on arrival, pull him away from his Intergalactic Posting Computer long enough to give the rest of us some much needed relief.