For those of you not familiar with “Estranged” by Guns N’ Roses from their 1991 album Use Your Illusion II due to it either predating you, a strong aversion to all things Hard Rock including in all likelihood Cafe (come to think of it I’ve never been in one… but I digress), or a deeply rooted belief that anything more musically aggressive than Bill Gaither is belched straight from Satan’s belly the song starts out with this lyric:

When you’re talking to yourself
And nobody’s home
You can fool yourself
You came into this world alone

Sounds rather like the blogosphere, doesn’t it.

I stumbled across a reference today to an event I didn’t know existed:  Godblogcon.  Seems that every year for the past four or so there’s been a convention where Christian bloggers get together to… uh, listen to each other talk about blogging so they can blog about it.  Or something like that.  Now that’ll change the world.

This year and last Godblogcon was held in Las Vegas.  Ostensibly the purpose was to schedule it at the same time and location as Blog World Expo, but I have no doubt the real reason for this was enabling everyone who volunteered for after-hours street evangelism teams to find the maximum number of sinners at whom to preach.  I haven’t uncovered any evidence of after-hours street evangelism teams or everyone in attendance being encouraged to visit a supermarket in town and buy some goods for donation to a local food bank, but maybe I just missed all that in the advertising.  Then again, considering the price of admission ranged from $100 to $450 depending on when and for what you registered, there probably wasn’t a whole lot of money left over for most people to do much in the way of charity work involving the expenditure of funds.

The speakers at this year’s soiree included such paragons of punditry as Scott Ott, who I imagine addressed the topic of how if you keep churning out attempts at satire and parody eventually you might write something that’s actually funny… but I doubt it, and of course La Shawn Barber probably letting those attending in on her secret for success: if you’re a black female conservative, folk will be so excited over the “look what we got” factor they’ll probably never notice you haven’t got a thing to say.  Nice work if you can get it.

According to the site for said event, the purpose of Godblogcon is:

GodblogCon 2008 fosters community and learning through a combination of plenary sessions, table-talk sessions with web media experts, and meal-time fellowshipping.

Attendees should expect to meet and converse with fellow Godbloggers, form friendships and grow communities, learn from experts to improve their web media knowledge and ability, and participate in vision casting for Christian use of web technologies.

No, I don’t know what that means either.  I think it roughly translates into, “Do and say as we do and we might admit you exist.  But don’t count on it.  And make sure you pay up for even thinking about attending.”  Feel the love, feel the love.

Ah well.  Doubt I’ll ever get invited.  Attitude and that Catholic thing, y’know.  Guess I’ll have to console myself with, oh, comforting and praying for a friend.

Along with listening to Guns N’ Roses.

I’m such a little punker.