Sometimes funny thoughts dance through your head when your feverish. Thoughts like how all information is simply meta-information, because really--is there an atomic instance of information that cannot be used to describe another bit of information?
Okay, for someone like myself who's day job is Director of R&D at a Content Management System Software company, maybe you don't need to be feverish to consider such things--but it helps.
Then again, so does being a programmer. In a lot of way's we're insane--and we're the guys to thank for all this wonderful blogging technology!
When you think about it, without crazy programmers like me, there would have been no place to post all those wonderful "Delete My Fucking Account, Kos!" Diaries we all laughed at only a few months ago. They of course were followed by a rash of "X My Fucking Y, Z!" diaries.
Now here's where I get a bit meta: X, Y and Z are fin for you mathematician types, but let's be honest here, we're working in a medium developed by programmers, and supported by developers (and programmed by supporters I presume), so we should really replace X, Y and Z here with proper metasyntactic variables, a la:
"Foo My Fucking Bar, Baz"
We could change Baz, to Boz--just so Brian Bozworth doesn't feel completely forgotten--but it would be handier all in all to simply replace Baz with Kos--after all, that's where it all started:
"Foo My Fucking Bar, Kos"
In a lot of ways, Kos could be considered a metasyntactic term for any political blogger:
So I read the funniest thing on Kos today: blah, blah, blah
And you could replace Kos with DailyKos, Atrios, Juan Cole etc, ad infinitum.
Heck, lots of terms we use around here could be considered metasyntactic when you really get down to it. Saying pootie could be metasyntactic for any "living pet-like creature co-habitating your domicile (sex partners not included)". Pie could be metasyntactic for any "dessertish treat" (as opposed to a desertish treat, which is really anything life-sustaining in a desert). In the case of Pie, we could even turn it into a three-letter acronym(or TLA, since we programmer types love our TNAs--and people wonder why porn is prevalent on the Internets?): Please Insert trEat (PIE). This acronym instructs the reader to metasyntaticly insert a treat of their own desire in place of the acronym.
So as you can see, a little late night mind-wandering while stoned on NeoCitran leads us to a place where we start getting meta about meta.
Leaving me to wonder if Foo really does make Meta-Jesus Cry, or is Meta-Jesus a Foo Fighter after all?
Inquiring minds and all that.