"It crawls across the Internet, in the manner of Eric Carle’s very hungry caterpillar, attempting to make a copy of every Web page it can find every two months, though that rate varies."

It = the Wayback Machine, the awesomeness of which becomes clear in this New Yorker article by Jill Lepore "The Cobweb/Can the Internet be archived?" I've already linked to that — in "When I met him, I was struck by a story he told about how he once put the entire World Wide Web into a shipping container" — but I want to link to it again because I'm just realizing how important it is to me. Sometimes I worry that this blog will become unavailable at this URL — perhaps because Google ends Blogger or because some day this blog becomes inactive and Blogger deletes inactive blogs. The archive will still be available in the Wayback Machine, complete with all the comments. That gives me a great feeling of security!

By the way, if you're ever reading an old comments thread and see a place where someone has deleted their comment — sometimes making a significant thread incoherent — you can retrieve the intact conversation in the Wayback Machine. I'm also relieved to know that the comments threads are not so vulnerable to one person's destructive impulse. There may be some cases where a commenter had a sympathetic reason for excising something. You should realize that retrospective deletion doesn't work, and since the commenter name remains visible when you delete, you might only spur the kind of curiosity that would send a reader to the Wayback Machine.

I know: I'm assuming people read old comments threads. I assume that because it's something I do. For example, for some reason I can't recall, early this morning, I was reading a December 2005 post titled "How political is that 'gay cowboy movie'?" I'd said:

I've made fun of the Oscar ads for the movie, because of the way they emphasize the relationship between the men and their wives. This ad campaign is laughable for intentionally hiding the nature of the central love story. Nevertheless, the story of the wives interests me greatly. And the political argument inherent in this part of the story is, I think, especially strong. Those who would try to prevent or inhibit men from forming lifetime bonds with each other ought to give more thought to what happens to the women they marry. Those who think a man should struggle against his sexual orientation and find a way to form the classic marriage relationship with a woman ought to think about what they are advocating for the woman: a lifetime relationship with a man who has only feigned sexual attraction to her.

And there's Meade (my now-husband, whom I wouldn't meet in person until 2009) near the top of the thread saying:

Right. If feigning sexual attraction in order to secure the benefits of marriage is wrong, there have been plenty of wives guilty of the same offense you ascribe to some gay cowboys.