Breath easy internet, I have returned to my blogging post. Over the last week and a half I’ve been journeying up the Pacific Coast with Bear Hunter . As it turns out, when I try and write on my laptop while in the van I start to puke all over my band mates — hence, my absence from Synthesis Blog. Over the next few days I will be recounting my harrowing journey (in between fascinating posts about pop stars getting busted for drugs, children with weird growths on their bodies and general paranoid-paranormal fodder). Get ready, dear readers. Get your asses ready.

Yeah, I just wanted to post this before Brittany did.

The Associated Press is reporting the discovery of a deer with one horn, much like a unicorn, located in a nature reserve in Italy.

“This is fantasy becoming reality,” Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. “The unicorn has always been a mythological animal.”
The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed “Unicorn” — was born in captivity in the research center’s park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said.
He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.

Sweet. Now discover me a hydra. Now THAT would be worth blogging about.

I hope you appreciate what we here at this blog do for you. There are plenty of dangerous jobs out there, but did you know that blogging can kill you? Information Week’s Cora Nucci just found out, and she did what any good blogger will do. She blogged about it.

Three well-known tech bloggers have had heart attacks since December, and a story in the New York Times suggests that the high stress of blogging may be a cause.

The article she’s referring to calls the blogosphere “The digital-era sweatshop.” Here’s some more (just in case you’re not signed up at Nytimes.com (and why the fuck aren’t you — it’s free) or just too lazy to click the link and read the whole thing yourself):

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

So see, folks? Blogging is serious business. Leave the posting of barely researched Internet rumors, stupid memes and YouTube videos to the professionals.