India killed the blog star.

"They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.
Oh-a oh"

-The Bugles "Video Killed the Radiostar"

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a beauty mole, but I believe I'm getting old. New technology, all about communications, has stopped talking to me. The Little person. The Getting Older Person. The 25 year old person Who is probably aggravating The Old People by complaining before her time. Harharhar.

But the point is that I've been surfing through the features afforded me by my friendly webhotel, casa du frére, and I understand nothing. N-o-t-h-i-n-g. Take statistics, for example. What is does is that it displays some information about what sort of..something the visitor is using. One of these randomly chosen users is described as using - "KHTML, like Gecko". Which is just so gosh-darn dandy now.

While I'm strangely touched by the fact that millions of people somewhere in India are using their nimble little fingers to keep track of who has seen my little space in the world - and that they are taking the time offer to some sort of explanation about my visitors - "KHTML, like Gecko", well it only serves to frustrate more. KHTML - what is that? Gecko is a what? "KHTML is like Gecko" is a whowhatnow?

Now compare and contrast to KTH's language translator, very useful if your mother tongue is English and not Swedish, and you stumble over that one swedish word you don't recognise - or vice versa - and the additional information it offers! Sometimes it has exactly the same effects as this statistics-taker on my site. It makes you feel extremely unsmart. While checking up the swedish word "härjar", which means 'ravage' or its equivalence in english, the service also offers a few examples of how the word might be used. The swedish term for "The flu is going around" - "Influensan härjar" is transformed into - Drumroll - "FLU IS RIFE".
'Rife'? Rife like Gecko?

FLU IS RIFE! Sounds like something you'd put up there on a plaque, right next to "The end is NEAR!". And for some of us technological dinosaurs desperately clinging on to and trying to understand the strange bleepings of our Nokia 3310's, for those of us helplessly screaming "E.T! PHONE HOME!" into the wrong end a little too often for comfort - I suppose the end is near.