Ephemera in cyberspace; in defense of rock band Rush

To my mind, such as it is, there isn't enough random chitchat in this world.

You know the stuff I mean. Seinfeldian observations about life. Rants. One-liners. Bull-bleep. It's one of the reasons I like writing this column, because oftentimes the blogosphere is just the place when I can't get down to the bar at the West Street Grill .

Take Jim "Suldog" Sullivan of Watertown. Recently, he used his Suldog-o-rama blog (jimsuldog.blogspot.com) to give us all a little test to see if we could tell real, truth-based ephemera from the made-up kind. Here is how he set it up:

"I'm going to make up some stuff. And some of the stuff will be actual real true facts. It will be up to you to decide which is which. Or you can just believe all of it, if you're really gullible; up to you," he wrote.

This was my favorite one:

"Elephants only sleep about two hours a day, while gorillas sleep about fourteen hours. This means that, twelve hours out of the day, the elephants could be robbing the gorillas blind."

True or made up? (See the end of the column for the answer.)

Rob Sama in Waltham , meanwhile, felt the urgent need to take umbrage with a Fox News online entertainment reporter for characterizing the rock band Rush -- which is in the middle of a reunion/comeback -- as a "big hair, fake falsetto, heavy metal group that made the 1980s so irrelevant musically."

"Big hair? Are they kidding???" Sama wrote in his samaBlog (samablog.robsama.com) in a May 9 posting.

"I tried looking on Google image search for something even approaching big hair and I came up with nothing.

"Rush was best known for a few things: having probably the best drummer in all of Rock and Roll, extraordinarily complex music that was very difficult to play, and seriously libertarian political viewpoints and direct references to Ayn Rand in their lyrics," he continued. "Big hair just wasn't there."

But wait! This important bulletin is just in from Wellesley, courtesy of the Swellesley Report blog (www.theswellesleyreport.com) :

"The Dunkin' Donuts tucked into the Mobil gas station at 453 Washington St. across from Star Market is no more," the posting states.

"No word yet on what will fill the space or whether town officials will fight to stuff a high-end eatery in there. Wellesleyites will try to carry on now with just 3 of the franchises in town."

How's that? Random enough for you? Well, I feel better anyway.

Oh, and that elephants and gorillas thing? Absolutely true.

Actually, The Swellesley Report is getting a two-fer in this column, and thus wins the too-much-time-on-their-hands award hands down.

The reason? The bloggers apparently have nothing better to do than track and tally the hometowns of people pictured in the Globe's "Party Lines" photo feature in the Tuesday Living/Arts section.

This was the score after two weeks:

Brookline: 1

Newton: 3

Wellesley: 4

Weston: 0

Cyberscenes is a biweekly look at blogs written by people in the western suburbs. Ralph Ranalli is a staff reporter and Web producer for Globe West. He can be reached at rranalli@globe.com.