I was sitting on a curb, drinking my morning coffee about a hundred meters down the hill from my house when an electrically-charged, transparent orb appeared in the middle of the street. As it faded away, a naked man appeared who looked suspiciously like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was shocked when I saw him punch the lights out of nearby Filipino, just to take his clothing from him. I'll bet you didn't know there were Filipinos as large as Arnold. Well, there are.

Wishing to avoid trouble, I stood and started walking up the hill toward my home. The person who looked like Arnold yelled out for me to stop. I stopped. He looked at me and asked me if my name was "RT". I said it was. Wow! He sure sounded like Arnold. He then said, "I am from the future. I have been sent here to give you a warning." Remembering all of the Terminator movies as well as the TV series, I replied, "I think you're in the wrong place and looking for the wrong person. I mean, you're a Terminator, right?" He replied, "No, I am a Bloginator. I am a cybernetic blogger hand-picked for this mission." Terminator, Governator and now Bloginator? What the heck? I need to get out more.

"I'm curious. What exactly does the future look like?"
"I am from 2012 and it looks almost exactly like 2008. The global economy doesn't get any better and more people than ever are out of work."

"Okay, so what's the warning?"
"You must upgrade your WordPress software to version 2.5.1 immediately. You must upgrade or die!"
"But I already did!"
"Really?"
"Yes."

"Damn it! Someone is playing Google tricks at the Bloginator facility again. Our alternate timeline search results showed you failed to upgrade your software, remained a nobody, and then died of boredom. I was sent back to ensure you completed the upgrade so that you could continue on your path as a successful and outstanding blogger and change the course of events in 2011, altering our own timeline for the good of all mankind. I must return to 2012 and find out what really went wrong."

Timelines confuse me. Quite frankly, I was just glad I wasn't going to die soon. As a new, transparent orb started to appear around the Bloginator, he asked, "Why do we blog?" "For many reasons" was my answer. Just before he disappeared, he told me he was designed to develop market insight but would like to be programmed for more. After he was gone, a pile of clothing was all that remained on the street.

I don't know quite what to make of that encounter, but at least the Filipino dude got his clothing back.

* * * * * * *

This is first time I've linked out to other blogs using a short, fictional story. Only a few of the outbound links came from my ongoing simple and fun Twitter contest. Okay, I know it's lame, but I hope you enjoyed it enough to consider participating in the contest so that the next one will be better.

The "UV" in the post title is short for Untwisted Vortex, just in case you didn't figure that part out.

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