Probably it's silly for me to agonize about blogging. When you get right down to it, the lure of being able to plop words into a box, press a button and publish to the whole world, is irresistible.

Some of you know where I'm coming from, others might not.

Imagine it's 1960 and you've come up with the funniest comic book idea ever. That's right -- Elmo the Talking Fish. But how can you bring this aquarium full of belly laughs to the world, except by drawing faster so you've got more copies to sell on the playground? (Lend the comic out? Did you ever try to finance a jumbo box of 64 colors out of an allowance?)

Flash forward a decade or so and now you've come up with the most brilliant humorous essays since Robert Benchley. (Robert, Nathaniel, Peter -- great writing family til it jumped the shark..) But what then? How to reach an audience? (Sell the damn things? If only editors had had a sense of humor!)

So I did what anyone in my position would do. Bought some ditto masters and cooked up some gelatine and glycerine on the stove, printed the stuff up by hectograph and mailed it to people who weren't afraid to get their fingers sticky. (The yucks were yucky in those days. And the price of paper and postage...and glycerine...!)

Well that was then. Today's different. No more crayon-stub finger cramps. No more purple hecto ink stains in places you wouldn't have imagined possible. It's just press and publish. Too good to be true.

But, you know, as difficult as it was to get my words out in the old days, there's something about it I miss...only I can't remember what that might be.