Whatever Happened to Baby Bagel?

As you can tell, sir, the commune is back and better than nothing. Also, better than we previously were. I for one am quite chagrinned at our long absence from the Internet, and anyone who knows me can tell you it's very difficult for me to be chagrinned because of how much I hate using the word "grin" in a sentence. And now I've used it three times. I won't need to use it again until 2010, and I make that pledge to myself now.

Many of you are undoubtedly wondering what happened. Or, speaking completely honestly, most of you are wondering how you got here from your friend's blog, just because you clicked on the underlined words "cheap imitation" or the like. I know, though, that commune fan Emil Zender and his many followers are asking what the hell happened to us last year, and I haven't been sleeping on the job in finding out either. Honestly, I haven't slept since maybe November, and then it was only a quick nap. You'll all be happy to know, those who care, that my thousands of dollars invested in discovering the problem have discovered the problem. It's a fine feeling, like when you go looking for your car keys and you find them in the last place you look—usually for me the bathtub, where they were playing stand-in for the sailboat.

I had the good fortune to hire renowned private investigator Pierre Banjo. If you haven't heard of him, I'm not surprised, he's not that kind of renowned. He's only renowned with the people he tells about his illustrious career, and I was fortunate enough to meet him in a bar and ply him with alcohol until he revealed his fame to me. This was circa June, which happens about a month after regular June, and I was well in the throes of panic about the many emails I received regarding the missing updates of the commune. All from Emil Zender. If we didn't get issues of the commune up and running again, we would have to return all our sponsor money to our sponsors. Assuming they ever found the website and realized we weren't updating.

It was an expensive quest, let me tell you that, but no problem is too big for me to throw money at. Finally, just before Christmas, Dr. Banjo called to inform me he had discovered the problem in our missing new editions. He had actually uncovered the source of the problem during a visit to my home office several months earlier, circa July proper, but did several months worth of follow-up investigation at my expense just to be sure he found the right problem.

You see, as part of my investment into the 2006 commune improvements, I bought myself a laptop. I forewent the expensive iMacs I had heard so much about and bought a iRoc. I thought it would help support the poor Iraq terrorist cells our government has had on the run for long months, but it turns out they're called iRocs because they're all using the licensed image of actor Charles S. Dutton. But all this is only column filler. While the iRoc laptop helped me work from home and connect to the internet, I still didn't have the expertise to put it all on the Internet the hard way—not much of a web-designer, doesn't run in the Bagel blood. And driving to the office once a week seemed like a complete waste. Fortunately, the man who sold me the iRoc also sold me a Magic Internet Scanner—you plug it in and scan the printed columns in and they automatically go onto the Internet! In retrospect I probably should have checked out the website to make sure they were updating when I used the machine, but thatseemed like a lot of extra time, and I've had trouble finding the commune on the Net. Like all our readers.

So as you may have guessed, the Magic Internet Scanner didn't work right. It was instead shredding our columns into confetti each time I ran one through. The word "shredder" on the top turned out not to be an affectionate nickname for the machine. I'm also starting to doubt I had it hooked up correctly and thinking maybe Tony Z. sold me a terrible bit of goods.

But even the best of us—me—can fall for a conman occasionally. Now that we've crossed that dark period for the commune, I look forward to spearheading the best year yet for the little news site that could. Expect the best in 2007. I even met a guy in a bar yesterday who swears he can get our White House press room credentials back for only $5,000. How can you not put your faith in a man named Smitty?

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