Yesterday morning, Fortune magazine published its forward-looking top 10 Tech Trends, the first of which is titled Why There's No Escaping the Blog. For those readers new to the term, "blog" is a sort of portmanteau contraction of bog lemming (synaptomys cooperi), a small rodent of the family Muridae, which also includes mice, rats, and voles.

Although Blogs are well distributed in the United States and Canada...

...their population is relatively miniscule compared with others of the genus Rodentia, and economic impact on agriculture and wetland security is practically nil. So why the sudden interest on the part of Fortune?

Although it only hints at the entire truth, the Fortune article is indeed well timed, since it has recently come to light that radiation leaks at several Federal Laboratories previously engaged in nuclear weapons production and storage has seeped into the water table along the transverse subcontinental rift and from there entered the aquifers feeding the southern tier of South Dakota.

The project, called the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project, will be built at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory on the Idaho desert. It is controversial with residents in Jackson, Wyo., who fear emissions from the 90-foot smokestack could be hazardous... DOE plans to treat at least 65,000 cubic meters of plutonium-contaminated waste...

Up to 22 percent of the waste would be burned... partly to destroy chemicals that are too toxic to be dumped in the ground or that pose safety hazards. After the waste is treated, it would be able to go to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground waste dump near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

from: Nearby Residents, Idaho Legislature Skeptical on Waste Treatment Facility by Gene Fadness
source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, 20 February 2000
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2000 Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News

For reasons not yet known to science, this deadly effluent has triggered dramatic genetic changes in one of the smallest inhabitants of the area: the Blog. Specimens have recently been collected measuring up to 30 feet in length and weighing more than the full grown Woolly Mammoths that roamed the same bio-region over 50,000 years ago.

The Giant Hairy Blogs, as they have come to be known, were first discovered in an ATF raid on a right-wing extremist militia compound in Idaho. The skull pictured above -- approximately 10 feet long -- was unearthed under several discarded pickups and a score of broken washing machines. Evidently, the Giant Hairy Blogs have become a favorite game animal of such paramilitary groups, not only for their high yield of meat, but also for their much prized cooking lard.

Now, as Fortune points out with understandable alarm, hunting the Giant Hairy Blogs has spread from relatively isolated acts of neo-nazi eco-hooliganism, and is being taken up by white suburban teens. One group, BloggerBaiters.com, is even breeding Giant Hairy Blogs and importing them in significant numbers into major American cities, where they are released -- for an extra thrill-of-the-hunt -- into Fortune 500 boardrooms.

Merriam-Webster notes the inevitable neologisms this phenomenon has spawned...

Main Entry: blog
Function: verb 
Inflected Form: blogged, blogging, blogger
Date:1999

transitive verb: 
to hunt, or cause to be hunted, the Giant Hairy Blog 
(see also get a life)
intransitive verb: to become stuck, as with a sharp object
such as a spear or spearlike pointy thing

The authors of the Fortune piece note that Bill Gates has appointed Robert Scoble to protect the company from both berzerker Blogs and roving bands of heavily armed Bloggers. "We're glad to have Robert on the job," Gates is reported to have said to a trustworthy source outside a Redmond 7-11 store. "I sure wouldn't want to run into one of these fucking things in the restroom."