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"You apply for a job and the interviewer asks you, 'You ever write anything about your former boss in a blog?' Of course, they already know the answer. They're waiting to see if you're honest. And if you have posted anything bad? You were knocked out of contention before you brushed your teeth the morning of the interview."
Too much information. Way too much. . . .
Boling continued to type, lightning fast. Finally he said, "Ah, think I've got something."
"What?"
"Tammy posted a comment on a blog a few days ago. Her screen name is TamF1399." Boling spun the computer around for Dance to look at.
Reply to Chilton, posted by TamF1399.
[The driver] is effing weird, i mean dangerous. 1 time after cheerleader practice he was hanging out outside our locker room, like he was trying to look inside and get pictures on his phone. I go up to him and I'm like, what're you doing here, and he looks at me like he was going to kill me. He's a total fr33k. i know a girl who goes to [deleted] with us and she told me [the driver] grabbed her boobs, only she's afraid to say anything because she thinks he'll come get her or start shooting people, like in Virginia Tech.
Boling added, "What's interesting is that she posted that in a part of the blog called 'Roadside Crosses.' "
Dance's heart rate pumped up a bit. She asked, "Who's 'the driver'?"
"Don't know. The name's deleted in all the posts."
"A blog, hmm?"
"Right." Boling gave a brief laugh and said, "Mushrooms."
"What?"
"Blogs are the mushrooms of the Internet. They're sprouting up everywhere. A few years ago everybody in Silicon Valley was wondering what would be the next big thing in the dot-com world. Well, it turned out to be not a revolutionary new type of hardware or software, but online content: games, social networking sites . . . and blogs. You can't write about computers now without studying them. The one Tammy posted to was The Chilton Report."
Dance shrugged. "Never heard of it."
"I have. It's local but it's well known in blogging circles. It's like a California-based Matt Drudge, only more fringe. Jim Chilton's a bit of a character." He continued to read. "Let's go online and check it out."
Dance got her own laptop from her desk. "What's the URL?" she asked.
Boling gave it to her.
https://www.thechiltonreport.com
The professor tugged his chair closer and together they read the homepage.
THE CHILTON REPORTTM
THE MORAL VOICE OF AMERICA. A COLLECTION OF MUSINGS ABOUT WHERE THIS COUNTRY'S GOING WRONG . . . AND WHERE IT'S GOING RIGHT.
Dance chuckled. " 'Where it's going right.' Clever. He's Moral Majority, conservative, I take it."
Boling shook his head. "From what I know he's more cut-and-paste."
She lifted an eyebrow.
"I mean that he picks and chooses his causes. He's more right than left but he'll take on anybody who falls short of his standards of morality or judgment or intelligence. That's one of the points of blogs, of course: to stir things up. Controversy sells."
Below was a greeting to the readers.
Dear Reader . . .
Whether you've ended up here because you're a subscriber or a fan or simply because you happened to be browsing the Web and stumbled across The Report, welcome.
Whatever your positions on political and social issues, I hope you'll find something in my reflections here that, at the very least, makes you question, makes you doubt, makes you want to know more.
