AM and I went to a Chinese restaurant this evening in Windemere. In and of itself, there's nothing too special about that, though it was a nice meal. At the end with coffee, we got a fortune cookie each. In mine was a message that said "You will be the parent of a famous child" - OK, at 47, I suspect this one may have been a little overdue, but what the heck. AM got a fortune cookie containing precisely nothing. This fits in nicely with her personal view of life. Coincidence? I think not...

Not an obvious title for most I grant you, but he has cropped up in my browsing twice in the last two days, before which I'd never heard of him. Sisyphus was cursed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, for all eternity as a punishment from the gods. My first encounter was as a comment on a photograph by Joannablu over at flickr yesterday. The second was at a blog post called Commuters Exchange Interaction. Now in and of themselves, neither on their would have raised an eyebrow - it would have just been something new I'd learned. The unusual thing is that both of the ladies who raised this mythological individual are listed in my blogroll here. Admittedly, it's only very recently that The Daily Smoke has been added to the list, but it was before Sisyphus ever got mentioned.

It got me thinking about the kind of connections that blogging makes and I finally think I twigged why so many people do it - it is those coincidental and unexpected links between people that join us to the rest of the world - it should be stated here that I'm referring to personal rather than business related blogs. Where the pace of life and the promotion of the individual over the collective have given us the disintegrated society we witness today, blogging somehow recreates the connections and sense of community that have been lost in most of our daily lives, albeit a community linked electronically rather than geographically. Now I'm no student of social anthropology and can offer no evidence to back up this supposition, but it seems to me to be one of those ideas that just makes sense. Does this explain the rush to follow a cause and support fellows individuals perhaps in BlogWorld? I don't know, but it could happen.

Wonder whether Sisyphus knew what he was starting...