Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
So You Hate Blogs, Do You
What we call “blogging,” is nothing more than a medium of communication. There are people who hate it, and of all the misguided souls in our midst I have come to seriously doubt the existence of a more delusional character than the blog-hater.
Blog-haters are truly amazing people, gifted in the art of using truly amazing logic. It just bowls me over that they can even drum up enough brainwave activity and cohesive, organized thought to get dressed in the morning. I don’t get them. Even the ones engaged in a livelihood put lately at risk, or even in severe jeopardy, by “blogging”; I can understand their motives, but beyond that, I can’t figure ’em out, and I’m particularly mystified by their success at, simply, being. HOW do they work? Each one of them, beat millions of other sperm. How is this possible?
Cold Fury gives a great example of what I’m talking about. USA Today’s Bruce Kluger:
If ever America needed a wake-up call about the mythology of blogging, we got it this month.
On Aug. 8, Connecticut businessman Ned Lamont defeated U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary, a triumph widely credited to the rah-rah racket produced by pro-Lamont armies stationed along the Internet.
Indeed, the bloggers had scored big. They had helped vault a local politician to national prominence and cemented the Iraq war as Issue No. 1 in the congressional elections. Not a bad day.
But their victory was short-lived. Even before the primary, Lieberman announced that, should he lose, he’d still run in November as an independent. This electoral chutzpah effectively rope-a-doped the bloggers and recharged the senator’s fabled Joe-mentum. Lieberman’s still the man to beat in the general election.
If this wasn’t enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, America’s noisy Web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when Snakes on a Plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office.
Before its premiere, Snakes had been the latest blogger darling, as swarms of online film geeks prematurely crowned it the summer’s big sleeper. This hyperventilating fan base even convinced Snakes’ distributor, New Line Cinema, to up the movie’s rating to R, to ensure a gorier, more venomous snake fest.
To see life through this kind of fisheye lens, in which anyone who claims a class membership and wants to see something happen, represents that entire class in this desire, must result in taking in a picture that is unsettling at times. How does this make sense? It’s like saying, a telemarketer called me last night, I told him to fuck off (as I almost always do), so people who talk on the phone must be deeply unsettled at the rebuke I delivered to the telemarketer. What the hell??
Two factors at work here. One: This Kluger fellow perceives his livelihood to be threatened by bloggers. Two: He comes from a world in which, when you’re the protagonist and you want to see something happen, rarely does the occasion arise, nor should you expect it to, where you can use the two hands God gave you to make it happen. No, the only way you can make things happen, anytime, anywhere, is to take all the antagonists who have something to do with stopping it from happening, and write something to minimize them. That’s the only way anything gets done in the world inhabited by people like him.
And so he hates blogs…which makes no more sense than hating typewriters. To make them go away, he becomes a cheerleader-of-misery, rah-rah-ing away when the bloggers get something wrong — and, presumably, muzzling anybody who rah-rahs away if a “blogger” gets something right. Said muzzling, I would have to assume, to be executed by writing something to minimize the opposing-side cheerleader. It’s all just cheers and catcalls; somebody actually doing work, is a foreign concept.
And the bloggers threaten his industry, so they must die.
Oh, it’s all just so much speculation and conjecture. I’m trying to give him the benefit of every doubt. Because the only other theory up with which I can come, is that Kluger is wombat-rabies bollywonkers pigshit crazy.
Does he have a driver’s license?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.