Suppose that you’ve set your comments up to email you each time one is posted, and you post a comment yourself. Suppose further that an email shows up in your box two minutes later, marked “New Comment,” and you open it excitedly, only to realize that it is, in fact, the comment that you yourself posted two minutes ago. Are you entitled to laugh at your cat when he chases his tail?
I don’t think so.
Ray Sawhill, who writes on culture for Newsweek, Salon, and other hifalutin venues, has a snazzy new site. Start with his interview with Roger Scruton and move on to his appreciation of mad Hungarian Stephen Vizinczey, whose Truth and Lies in Literature can almost convince you that literary criticism is a matter of life and death.
I’m forced to link again to Colby Cosh, dammit, for his superb reply to Michael Fumento’s TNR article about Attention Deficit Disorder. A man who takes Thomas Szasz seriously is a man to be reckoned with. What I want to know is, is blogging a trait or a disease?
Dr. Manhattan essays Bill James and warblogging, and is kind enough to include me on a short list of warblogging statheads. (My friend Mark Riebling should be there as well. Cosh, too, is an admitted stathead, though not exactly a warblogger. By warblogging standards I’m not much of a warblogger either.) Should Bill James switch to politics, as this piece argues, not entirely seriously? Not with spring training opening in less than a month.
And Riebling, while I’m on the subject, claims that posting will be slow because his new book is due March 2. What kind of excuse is that? Just because the guy has a job and writes books on the side doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be posting more often than someone like me, who, uh, doesn’t.
Jim Ryan has an excellent series on Kekes and the problem of evil, at four parts and counting. No, you’ll want more parts, honest.
Mark Wickens is giving Bjorn Lomborg’s critics the what-for.
Homme sans Qualités squares off with Eugene Volokh on intelligent design. They’re both agin it.
Agenda Bender interviews Justin Timberlake.
Cindy’s Guide to the ‘Stans is the best thing on this list; you should read it right now if by chance you weren’t paying attention when Glenn told you to. Sample:
The Kyrgyz are the Welsh of Central Asia. They’re jolly, profoundly democratic, and inhabit a beautiful, mountainous country that no one visits and which has no natural resources at all except for some gold and clapped-out mining. They are divided north and south in lifestyle and geographical orientation, and are widely associated with sheep-related activities. They still practice droving, and have the worst cuisine in the world. Their southern valleys are home to heroin connoisseurs. They have never ruled anything, not even Kyrgyzstan, and don’t really seem to care. They think their neighbours are soft and secretly wish they too were Kyrgyz. Their neighbours rarely think of them at all, except in a comic context, but if pushed will say they distrust them as sly and two-faced. Russian spittle-licking suits them just fine, and hey, Ivan, why don’t you buy some of our lovely smack while you’re here?
Cindy will be annoyed that he generates traffic by quoting someone else at length. Tough; so do I.
The Adventures of Pretentious Vegan Woman. Link from Dustbury.
Valdis Krebs performed a simple experiment. He looked at the “buddy list” on Amazon of several dozen top-selling political books and graphed the results. (Link from BoingBoing.) The result is two clusters, as one would expect, but with one book in the middle, with “buddies” on both sides: What Went Wrong by Bernard Lewis. (Also, arguably, The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington.)
The “cocooning” controversy could be resolved the same way. Steven Den Beste theorized last year about blog clusters but without data to back him up. So the assignment, for someone less lazy than I am, is to create a chart, after Krebs, for blogs instead of books, using for data the top 100 blogs and, say, the first ten blogs in their neighborhoods at BlogStreet. This would be imperfect but indicative. How many clusters would there be? Who would be in the middle? Do people often read blogs that they disagree with or are blog readers, like book readers, blinkered by confirmation bias?
Bloggers can breathe a collective sigh of relief now that the whereabouts of Kelly Jane Torrance have been verified, but is anyone else worried about Wilde? First he’s stirring up linking/delinking trouble, then he stops updating, then a few vague mutterings about ISP trouble and the next thing you know the plug is pulled. Please report in with any sightings.
(Update: Wilde is back, now as American Empire. Stop in and say hello.)
Making a living is beginning to interfere with Arthur Silber’s blogging. Go visit and demand that he get well soon.
(Update: The blogger who cried wolf is posting again! That’s it: next time, no obituary.)