Michael Arrington at TechFlash Live. (Stephen Brashear photo)

It's always fun and controversial when Michael Arrington is around, and his Seattle debut at our TechFlash Live event last night was no exception. One of his remarks on stage, implying that he was ready to leave TechCrunch behind, caused a bit of a stir in the tech blogging world today -- with Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider going so far as to make a mostly tongue-in-cheek public offer to buy Arrington's influential site.

In the comments on our post about him this morning, Arrington says those remarks last night were rhetorical and taken out of context. He refers back to his May 3 interview with us, in which he said his move to Seattle wasn't part of any plan to sell the site, and he planned to stick with TechCrunch "as long as the economics work."

For the record, we went back to our recording from the event, and it's hard to interpret Arrington's remarks as anything other than meaning he was ready to move on. His comment followed Jackson Fish Market's Hillel Cooperman saying that he "wants to make software for the rest of my life, with nobody telling me what to do."

Here's what Arrington said to Cooperman on stage ...

You’ve been doing this for how long? Two years? Three years? Yeah, three years.

OK, so let’s see how you feel in ten. Because, I’ll tell ya, I felt the same thing. You know, when I started out. ... (I was) like, “TechCrunch. TechCrunch is a business, and I’m never going take venture capital, because I’m going to do this the rest of my life, and I love what I do.” It’s been five years, and I gotta tell ya, I’m ready -- ready to take that money, whether it’s a success or not, and then see ya later, and then never talk to anybody in this community again.

I’m just saying that, a few more years of this, you might be ready for something more than making software.

Even in the broader context, as a response to Cooperman, it's hard to misinterpret those comments. As Randy Stewart tweeted from the audience at the time, Arrington was making it clear that he was ready to "take the money and run."

At any rate, apparently it was just a passing mood on his part, something said in the heat of a lively panel discussion, and of course this whole back-and-forth with him today isn't really consequential in the broader scheme of things.

Bottom line, it was fun to have Arrington on stage, mixing things up and gracing our corner of the tech world with his special brand of Silicon Valley straight talk, no matter how contradictory it might have been.