The Ramen noodle guy and the Scooby-Doo guy died this week. I was never much of a fan of Scooby-Doo, but Ramen noodles were a major food group in college. My roommate’s mom would send us cartons of the stuff from Chinatown every few months. Every night we would sit down to the hotplate and make ourselves a bowl. I think I got hooked on the MSG and had trouble breaking the habit later on.
Ramen noodles, by contrast, are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically lifelike. A near-weightless assemblage of plastic and foam is transformed into something any college student will recognize as food, for as little as 20 cents a serving.
Le Blog Berube is no more. He’s not willing to squander so much time on the blog anymore. Sissy. No, I get it. As ogged said,
There comes a time in every frequently-updated blog’s life–and it seems to be around the three-year mark–that you have to either make your peace with the fact that it’s the most important thing in your life, or turn it into a paying gig, or make it a group blog. You can tell yourself that it’s "just blogging" only so many times before you can’t ignore the fact that it’s an incredible amount of work, both in terms of time spent and mental energy expended.
Read more from Tim Burke on the 3-year wall and blogging. Good comments, too.
Two nanny stories: LizardBreath and Lisa Belkin.
Apt. 11d 
And even the group blogs have to renew their personnel. Peoples’ lives change, their enthusiasm waxes and wanes, some new folks want to sign up, while others have to take hiatus. And of course the bigger the audience, the greater the implied demands.
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The advantage of a group blog is that when one person needs a hiatus, there’s no need to close shop. I’m getting ready to teach four classes. I’m rather busy and probably need a blog hiatus, but I don’t want to do that. In a couple of months, everything will ease back down and I’ll want to blog again, but all my readers will have forgotten about me. I’m just going to limp along on this blog for a month or two instead.
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