I wondered what had happened

The Little Green Footballs meltdown.

During my longish hiatus from blogging, I didn't do much blog reading either, with the exception of the Fug Girls, Project Rungay and my beloved Manolo. I was pretty much done with politics, so outside of a weekly perusal of the Corner, I wasn't really paying attention to the rest of the blogosphere.

Then a couple of months ago I followed a disparaging link to LGF from some reliably right-wing blog--I forget which one--and was amazed at what had become of the place. Now I know, sorta.

Like Ann Althouse I was always vaguely repelled by LGF and only read it when others linked to it. But I can't say I'm flabbergasted by this turnaround. LGF was always sort of an echo chamber with all those "lizards" kissing the blog proprietor's ass. Not surprising, then, that Charles Johnson would start delinking when he came across people who disagreed with him.

But the Belgian stuff is kinda weird. Or oddly prescient.

Brevity is the soul of wit

Snoopy challenges me to write a memoir using only six words. I accept the challenge:

Wears heels even in rocky patches.

I dare these bloggers to accept the challenge:

1. Akaky Bashmachkin


2. Chaz


3. Jonathan


4. Miriam


5. The Llama Butchers


6. Kevin and Patrick

Photo by salto14.

Which is which?

Top secret blogger meeting with Jonathan from ChicagoBoyz, fellow Boy David Foster, who also posts at Photon Courier and gentleman blogger Eric Scheie of Classical Values. If I revealed anymore, I'd have to kill you.

(Photo by Jonathan)

The unbearable triteness of political blogging

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while have probably noticed that I'm doing fewer and fewer political posts, much to the detriment of my traffic. I'm just all politicked out. Some day, probably sooner than later, I'll get interested again. Just not now.

This is not to say that I'm not--at least vaguely--aware of the issues of the day. It does mean, however, that I no longer spend hours clicking back and forth between combatants like these guys, trying to figure out who said what to whom first in the never-ending left/right blogosphere game of one upmanship. In the past, I'd spent whole days reading everybody's posts on the latest fray--partly because if you fall into one of these things in medias res it's really hard to figure out what's going on and partly because it's kind of like watching a trainwreck. I seldom got into the fray myself. The big boys seemed to have it covered, plus by the time I'd read what everybody else had to say I'd find that everything had already been said. Or I'd become bored with the whole thing.

And that's what it is: Boring. It's also petty and stupid. And it generally goes something like this:

1. Right-wing bigshot says A.
   
2. Left-wing blogosphere gets all up in arms, parsing every syllable of the bigshot's remarks.
   
3. Right-wing blogosphere makes fun of left-wing bloggers, adding that blogger so-and-so had no problem with the much more vile statement three months ago made by left-wing bigshot.
   
4. Left-wing blogosphere retorts that right-wing blogger is homophobic and hates brown people.
   
5. Right-wing blogosphere takes umbrage, occasionally flashes his civil rights credentials.
   
6. Left-wing blogosphere calls original bigshot a faggot and implies that right-wing blogger Mr. X is probably a latent homosexual.
   
7. Right-wing blogosphere muses that the left-wing blogosphere is supposed to really like faggots.
   
8. Left-wing blogosphere brings up incident several years ago when a certain right-wing blogger was mean to a faggot.
   
9. Right-wing blogger brings up old incident in which left-wing blogosphere verbally attacked attacked a black person because he happened not to agree with them.
   
10. And on and on and on.

It's like a Eugene O'Neil play without the booze.

It's not that I don't like a good exchange of invective. I always enjoy it when Ace goes after Andy Sullivan; I also love reading his commenters. Ann Althouse does good takedown. Althouse also occasionally goes off the deep end herself, which keeps things interesting.

But I'm pretty sick of the rest of it.

Has it only been 6 years?

It seems like longer--and I mean that in a good way. I don't remember when I started reading Glenn, but I know I checked into his blog many times on September 11, along with Drudge and Andrew Sullivan. It seems to me that most bloggers who came after Instapundit were following in his footsteps, not just these guys. I know he influenced me.

In fact, the same-sex partnership of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds likely spawned hundreds, if not thousands of blogs. Unfortunately, the relationship ended in acrimony before it could receive the blessing of the state. Hell, it started crumbling even before Massachusetts sanctioned gay marriage. Oh well, at least us kids were spared a long drawn-out battle for custody.

Chaz as you've never known him

Ladies and gentlemen: The Normblog profile of Charles G. Hill.

Too good to check?

Michael Goldfarb wonders about a recent (subscription req'd) piece in The New Republic written by a pseudonymous soldier serving in Iraq.

It recounts several instances of gross misconduct by the men in his unit, some of which are, to echo the title of his piece, deeply shocking--If they are true--a big if, according to several people with experience in Iraq. One described it to me as sounding like a "pastiche of the 'This is no bullshit . . . stories soldiers like to tell."

The first episode puts "Thomas"'s unit at a "chow hall" at an unnamed base. A woman eating there is wearing "an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn’t really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor." The woman's face is described as having been "more or less melted, along with all the hair on that side of her head," by an IED. She sits down for lunch next to the men. Here's how "Thomas" describes what happens next:

We were already halfway through our meals when she arrived. After a minute or two of eating in silence, one of my friends stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes and left it there.
“Man, I can’t eat like this,” he said.
“Like what?” I said. “Chow hall food getting to you?”
“No—with that fucking freak behind us!” he exclaimed, loud enough for not only her to hear us, but everyone at the surrounding tables. I looked over at the woman, and she was intently staring into each forkful of food before it entered her half-melted mouth.
“Are you kidding? I think she’s fucking hot!” I blurted out.
“What?” said my friend, half-smiling.
“Yeah man,” I continued. “I love chicks that have been intimate—with IEDs. It really turns me on—melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses . . . .”
“You’re crazy, man!” my friend said, doubling over with laughter. I took it as my cue to continue.
“In fact, I was thinking of getting some girls together and doing a photo shoot. Maybe for a calendar? ‘IED Babes.’ We could have them pose in thongs and bikinis on top of the hoods of their blown-up vehicles.”
My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground.

Read the whole thing. Goldfarb asks milbloggers to look into the allegations. Does the story smell funny to you? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Via John Podhoretz.

Who cares?

Bloggers offended by this year's choice of entertainment at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

It's like me caring about the DJ my neighbor's sister's friend hired for her son's Bar Mitzvah.

Via memeorandum.

You're smelling very bloggy today

There's a top note of freshly laundered pajamas, along with a hint of stale pizza and compressed air. Calvin Klein launches perfume geared to "technosexuals."

The CK in2u bottle, designed by Stephen Burks, is made from the same materials — white plastic and glass — recognizable in an iPod. (Fabien Baron designed the original bottle.) The name is written in the shorthand of an instant message, a casual invitation to sex so immediate as to imply there was no time to spell it out: “in to you.”

“We have envisioned this as the first fragrance for the technosexual generation,” said Mr. Murry, using a term the company made up to describe its intended audience of thumb-texting young people whose romantic lives are defined in part by the casual hookup.

Last year, the company went so far as to trademark “technosexual,” anticipating it could become a buzzword for marketing to millennials, the roughly 80 million Americans born from 1982 to 1995. A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: “She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now.”

Valleywag creates an ad using actual bloggers.