The deposed Minister of Noodles entered shrouded, round shouldered and avoiding all eye contact. He had agreed to meet me in a coffee shop and sat with his back to the wall like a Chicago gangster, all the while REM-ing the joint for rats, informants, spies and the lowlife spineless bastards who had done his blog in - my Deep Throat, my whistle blower, my inside man - now on the outside, but maybe not for long. "How did you get out?", I asked him. "I complied with the contract", he answered in hushed and muffled tones. This was a clandestine meeting with a man who had had a contract on his head - a man who nearly blogged himself to death at the hands of grimmer reapers than even the souls on death row had to kneel to. We sat in silence as he sipped his coffee under his hood and through his ski mask - damn brave bloke to be wearing that getup in the sweltering Vietnam heat.
To see the once mighty minister reduced to this shivering shadow of a man was indeed sobering - something neither of us had much familiarity with.
As I rose from the table to leave him rest in this purgatory of Thatcher-like censorship, I felt my iPhone vibrate with an incoming Tweet. "Rosebud" it said. "Rosebud". This Citizen Kha'n had just micro-blogged his last word and the final clue to the identity of who had word-pressed his blog into silence. The minister is dead. Long live the minister.
