Chain Forwards on the Web

Well, I've been tagged.

Back in 1996, I used to receive (and ignore) email messages with these kinds of instructions all the time, but this is the first time I've ever seen it outside the context of email. In honor of the fact that it's the first time, I'm actually going to attempt to play along somewhat. This time only.

I am currently reading Greenspan's book, and happen to have it sitting within eight inches of my keyboard. It's a fascinating read by the way. I'm on page 339 at the moment, but backtracking to page 123 (which just happens to be the first page of chapter six), here are sentences 6-8:

...In the process, the demise of central planning exposed the almost unimaginable extent of the rot that had accumulated over decades.

But the biggest surprise that awaited me was an extraordinary tutorial on the roots of market capitalism. This is the system with which, of course, I am most familiar, but my understanding of its foundations was wholly abstract...

That part was easy. Now the business about sending it on to (err, tagging) five more people, that's another matter. My blog is kind of atypical. Almost all visitors find a specific post (most commonly this one, as it happens) through a search engine, in the same way one would find content on a traditional website. I guess you could say I'm on the fringes of the (do I have to hate myself for using this word?) blogosphere. Naturally, the two people whom I have some reason to believe might occasionally drop by just to see if I've posted anything lately have both already been tagged.

Very well, there's nothing in the instructions that says you can only tag people whom you're confident will read the post and know they were tagged. So, in the spirit of following the letter of the instructions and ignoring the intent, I'm tagging Andy Jentes (a friend who, as far as I know, does not have a web presence at the moment), Dave Gable (another friend, going by the handle randomneuralfirings over at Xanga), Derek Lowe (a biochemist over at pipeline.corante.com), Dan Ritter (a hardware reviewer from down under -- dansdata.blogsome.com), and, umm, Tim Vroom (of perlmonks.org fame). Hey, why not?

Testing, testing... Is this on?

I'm working on a template (because the available ones all seemed terrible to me), and I can't really see properly how it looks without having at least one post. So here's a test posting, just for that purpose. Since it serves no other purpose, you may note that it is not, in terms of literary quality, terribly substantial. Be that as it may, having this here will allow me to have a look at what my template does, so that I can tweak it.

One supposes I'll get around to posting actual content later.