Don't know if you had previously heard the news about the fox and the dog, but this is a sentence I learned as a young child. Now I've heard and read lots of sentences in my lifetime, of course, but there is a reason that I've remembered this one when so many others have, as poet laureate Billy Collins once put it, "retired to that little fishing village in my brain" to be remembered no more. This sentence was special, I was taught, because it contains all the letters of the alphabet. Now, not being a sentence myself, or any other grammatical structure for that matter (though I have been called an expletive once or twice before), I probably can't fully grasp the significance of this sentence possessing such bragging rights, but it is not hard for me to accept that something that contains a measure of completeness (as in containing the complete alphabet) can be thought of as "special". For that reason, I have chosen this sentence to be the first of what I hope are many that will appear in this blog.
There is another reason that I wanted to start things off with this sentence, however. This is my first foray into the world of personal blogging, and, not unlike others who have gone before me I would imagine, this first post comes on the heels of much thought as to why exactly I wished to blog in the first place. When I considered how much information already exists out here in the blogosphere and the fact that I have nothing truly special to add to said information, I was tempted to forgo the whole operation, but then I started thinking about that sentence...
What makes it so complete? Certainly the fox is the star of the thing. He's quick. He's jumping. He's brown. But you can't escape the fact that, despite the fox's all-around awesomeness, if it wasn't for the laziness of the dog, this sentence would have long ago gone fishing with the others. You see the dog brings the "z". Now it's true that he could have done so by flying a zeppelin, slaying a zebra, or learning to play the zither bassoon, but somehow it just seems fitting that this dog, whose color is apparently not even worth mentioning, brings the last letter of the alphabet in the most undramatic of ways...and only then is everything complete.
That's why I'm here. I don't imagine that I'll become one of the "foxes" of the blogging world. I have no particular agenda like saving Hell from Rob Bell or returning the arguments of the "new" atheists to their proper place of having been satisfactorily answered at the turn of the last century. I have no funny slant like reporting on the favorite activities of white people or Christians (though I am a member of both crowds). I am just a guy who reads indiscriminately and apparently is wired to process what he reads when he would be better off sleeping. And this blog is simply my outlet for these thoughts, both processed and not. I guess what I am trying to say is that I am just a lazy dog trying to bring the "z" to the blogosphere conversation.
And who knows? Maybe with God's grace, one of these z's will finish a sentence for some fox somewhere...
What a great introduction. Anxious to read more. Glad you are new to the blogerhood.
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