…from about 8am until about 3pm, local. Not one e-mail, Comment, tweet, or other contact from the outside.  I began figuring maybe I had screwed my incoming mail. But spam was arriving, though less than the usual 20 an hour.

Paranoia set in. I began to think maybe my recent troubles with that pseudo reg-cleaner had screwed my account. I started trying System Restore. This never ends well—but at least it doesn’t end badly. The simple truth is I have had System Restore as an option since around, oh, 2000, 2004, something like that. And I must have tried it 20-30 times over those years, and the answer is always the same: Cannot Restore. I’ve had system crashes. Can I restore? Never. I create a Restore Point an hour ago—can I restore to it? Nope. System Restore is a Microsoft Myth. It doesn’t exist. It never has existed. It never will exist. Don’t bet the farm on it.

Then, after 5 tries at different restore points including 3 made this morning, I gave up.

Then I got a tweet. And an e-mail. Weird.

Either it jarred something loose on successive reboots, or it was just coincidence. You know that the Universe was created at 20 minutes after the hour, and this is why, wherever people gather in bars and at parties, a silence automatically falls at 20 after the hour. It’s also the minute at which the household cat will spot goblins and take after them. And at 21 after the hour, noise resumes, and the goblins vanish.

It was like that. Somewhere an alternate universe was created, I expect, and for a while we had goblins.