Blog This

There are 88,440,980,654,002 blogs now online in the US alone. Three of them are readable, and one is entertaining. Thanks to my enlistment, the latter two numbers will now rise by one each. (editor's note: what am I chopped liver?)

(Check that earlier estimate: the number of active blogs just went up by 61,430)
I once clicked on the "Next Blog" window and was transported through the first five circles of teenage girl Hell. I heard from -- and learned everything there is to know about -- every girl whose first name ended with an I. My slow naked crawl through the burning lake lasted just a few minutes though, because my head exploded and I had to quit (and clean the blood from my computer screen). (editor's note: you know what's weird? If you leave really foul comments on random blogs, they never respond. What's up with that?)

Of course the tittering masses have moved to My Space now, and the blog regime is left to the intelligensia. Welcome to where the elite meet.
(91,000 new deep thinkers just signed on) (Ahem! www.dumbocracy.blogspot.com. cough! sneeze!)

We are a culture of absolute dissolution. It might even be a mistake to call it a culture anymore, since the name presupposes at least some commonality. We are all alone and atomized -- and proud of it. All is autobiography and self-as-metaphor. The very act of writing this -- or anything like it -- in the context of instantaneous worldwide circulation, is self-serving and more than a little perverse. Our mothers would have been horrified by the arrogance, but we feel perfectly at ease with our self-promotion and pitifully bad manners.

What, you think you're a journalist or something? Are you reporting the news? Are you adding an atom of objective or even usable information to anyone's stash?

Well, no. We're just talking here. But to whom? For what?

Now, it must be said that there is no such thing as journalism either; so suggesting that there is some quantity of socially useful information out there which can be added to, or subtracted from, is nonsense. But that's just the point, isn't it? We did agree on the basis for such judgment at one time. We no longer agree on any of that. Were we all wrong then? Was there ever a basis point for socially "useful" as against "useless" information? Or, maybe the difference is in the term "personal". When did that lose its meaning?

FireJoeMorgan.com is the best blog out there. It's informative. It's hilarious.

The most informative style is always the most entertaining, and that site is perfect.

Of course, it's also personal. It's a few guys talking about baseball -- in public. It's the digital equivalent of the corner in the central square in Havana where all the men gather to argue baseball every day. There is no finer social moment -- no more perfect representation of the polis -- than that square and those men using it for that purpose. But there it is. FireJoeMorgan.com has digitally reproduced the essence of democracy (as did the internet itself). Is it the same, though, when we're yelling at each other while sitting all alone?

The other two blogs (Talking Points Memo and Eschaton) are readable but, alas, run by pussy Democrats. Dicklessness is a fatal character flaw, so we read the news and try to ignore the rest - kind of like TV, come to think of it.

(editor's note, redux: what am I, chopped liver?)