There's a practical limit to how much you can respond to comments on other people's blogs. Today in The Vent, that limit is exceeded.

Most of my dreams have long since been dashed into shards, but I'm getting close to one of them: reading all the books by James Lileks. (I doubt I'll ever get to go through all his columns.) Not that this does Lileks a whole lot of good, of course; only one of them — the beautifully-snide The Gallery of Regrettable Food — is still in print. I did make a point of ordering it from Amazon.com through Lileks' own site so he could make an extra quarter or so on the deal. But I'm gradually acquiring the other volumes in the curious Lileks oeuvre: the first essay collection, Notes of a Nervous Man, made its way to my shelf earlier this year, and the second, Fresh Lies, has just arrived. The first Jonathan Simpson novel, Falling Up The Stairs, got here earlier this week, and the second, Mr. Obvious, is due Real Soon Now.

Needless to say, all these titles are worth your while, and worth the effort to track down. Since the publishers don't seem to be in any rush to return them to the stores, I'm taking what is, for me anyway, an unprecedented step: the $22.98 I spent for these used books (shipping via Dawdling Courier, LLC, not included) will be matched by $22.98 stuffed into Lileks' tip jar. It seems like the very least I can do.

It wasn't that long ago I counseled patience with the comments server.

No more.

There are still some tweaks to make, but the future of this site is Movable.

According to IMAO, the Blogger Pro spellchecker chokes on "blog" and "blogging".

What's next? Greymatter refusing color changes in its template files?

If you graduated from that school of thought which teaches that anything that originates online is by definition artificial and unreal, well, here's your reality check. Spoons is getting married, and thereby hangs a tale, which you must read for yourself.

Chris over at Fly Over Country is going through those Second Thoughts that afflict all of us with cacoethes scribendi, and wondering if maybe he should chuck it all and go fire up the PlayStation. Most bloggers, he says, are "hyper-informed people," and wonders if any of them actually enjoy life or are simply looking to score points.

I can't speak for anyone else — often as not, I can barely speak for me — but I am rather fond of the idea of having my own soapbox, especially since it doesn't cost a great deal and doesn't have to get approval through Official Channels. I do occasionally run out of topics, but I think this is true of everyone who writes, with the possible exception of Stephen King. And God forbid anyone should think I am hyper-informed; since I started the daily-update routine two years ago, I have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff I didn't know.

Am I trying for "the next Gotcha!"? Not really. I just call 'em the way I see 'em. And if I don't see 'em, well, I'll try to link to someone who did.

Let me know if this new column color is even more difficult to read than its predecessor.

I happened upon a place called Conservatives Suck. Its foci, in no particular order, seem to be baseball, Bush-bashing, and bare breasts. Not the stuff of legend, perhaps, but a lot easier to read than, say, Bartcop.

John Powers' L.A. Weekly column contrasting the styles of The Nation and The Weekly Standard got some play in the Blogosphere™, and while Powers' conclusion seems inarguable — yes, the Standard is far sprightlier, but the instructions on a bottle of drain cleaner are sprightlier than The Nation most weeks — I have to wonder if this particular dichotomy is also reflected in other subcultures. Yesterday I took a peek at a new blog, posted what I thought was a reasonably wry gibe about it, and watched it soar many thousands of feet over the blogger's head. Are blogs on the left necessarily more drab, less perky, than their counterparts on the right? Has lack of humor become a prerequisite for 21st-century liberal ideology? How come Michael Moore's earlier works are a lot funnier than Stupid White Men?

Powers offers a hint down in the sixth paragraph: "Too much of the writing is muffled by low-word-rate padding and fear of offending the magazine's many constituencies." Well, you can't get much lower a word rate than what is offered in blogdom, which averages somewhere around zero or slightly below — this site costs me, excluding kickbacks, about $275 a year to run — but that "fear of offending" may be the key. Very few centrist blogs, and hardly any on the right, seem to worry about upsetting anyone's applecart. It's no accident that the most common term used for the evisceration of someone devoid of clues is "fisking", a treatment first visited upon Independent columnist Robert Fisk, who has a tendency to tiptoe gently away from anything that might disagree with what post-Cold War Europeans have come to accept as Revealed Truth. Perhaps needless to say, Fisk is regarded as an iconoclast by the bearers of said Truth, a stance which inevitably results in more fisking.

This is not to say, of course, that there are no sources of left-wing bile. But it's almost always monolithic; there's scarcely ever any sense that this stuff has been hashed out by individual minds. It's the Committee-Approved Version. This process would never work on the right, where individuals, however like-minded, count for far more than groups.

And there's one other thing, which I've actually seen mirrored in Real Life. Self-deprecating humor is evidently considered a Bad Thing among leftists, what with its seeming disregard for one's self-esteem, the single most important quality a person can possess. In response to this pervasive belief, Juan Gato bills his blog as "A Bunch of Crap From a Moron," and just to rub it in, tags his tip jar with "I'm better than you. Give me money." Somehow I can't imagine this kind of irreverence displacing the sanctimony of those who "watch" the warbloggers.

It would be possible, I think, to make up a perfectly lovely blog made up entirely of passages from James Lileks. Of course, Lileks himself has already done that, to the delight of all, or at least most, but sometimes he says something that resounds so wonderfully that I can't help but fall into its echo, vibrating with it until the inevitable fade.

And then, of course, I post it here, just to keep the vibration going. What do you think of Jon Anderson? Here's Lileks:

Thank you, kind sir. Yours is no disgrace.

Now that comments for this site have been brought in-house (thank you, Mena and Ben) and work most of the time, I have taken down the Grouse-O-Matic Message Board, which was getting scant use: in two years of operation, it got maybe thirty posts.

The pre-MT log archives are now accessible through a framed (but very lightly framed) page that opens up any of the twenty-odd months from the list on the left. And the MT archives have been resorted to start with the first post of the month, which corresponds more closely to my preposterous notion that the log is actually a secret (possibly even unauthorized) autobiography and should be read in sequence.

As always, thank you for coming.

At first, I thought Gregory Hlatky was having a bad day:

Been there, felt that. Still feel that, to a certain extent. But this post, less than twelve hours later, banishes one particularly-annoying publicity hound to deserved oblivion, and in so doing demonstrates the true strength of the man:

Thanks, Greg. We needed that.

Blogger still is the dominant content-management system for bloggage, with Movable Type coming up fast on the outside, and there are a handful of others, not to mention good old classic hand-coding, which I did for umpteen years. (I still do, on items outside the purview of this blog.)

But there's always room for another one, if it's good, and Marc Lundberg over at Quit That has come up with something called SimCat, which he's using for his own blog. It's still in test mode, but then one could argue that anything blog-related is more or less permanently in test mode anyway.

Eric Olsen, despite dropping back from Tres Producers, is still a busy man. Not only is he doing a nifty job as editor of BlogCritics, but he's made it to Salon.com with a frighteningly-detailed (of course) article about the weirdness that was, and is, American Idol. And it's not Premium content, except in the purely qualitative sense, so people who can't stand the idea of giving money to the likes of Salon can still read it.

I wonder if Mrs Olsen plans to blog this item.

Update, 3:45 pm: She has.

How is it, exactly, that Quana Jones became a hunter? Why, by learning to shoot, of course. It's a wonderful story, and it's not nearly as long and boring as she thinks it is.

A college student is claiming to have silenced Susanna Cornett.

In a related story, a guy down in Thibodaux, Louisiana has posted a No Trespassing sign in order to repel Tropical Storm Isidore.

Never underestimate the power of Silflay Hraka. My little outpost on the far fringes of the Blogosphere™ (and if you can explain how a sphere can have fringe, let alone far fringe, you're doing better than I am) scored about thirty percent more traffic than usual, courtesy of Bigwig's Carnival of the Vanities celebration. I am, of course, greatly surprised at any traffic at all, so this little boost was most gratifying.

David Cassel's LA Weekly interview with the amazing Heather Havrilesky gives a couple of insights into The Writer Formerly Known As Polly Esther, and in the process gives the back of the editorial hand to Matt Moore, whose blog title is misrendered as "The Blog Century of the Week". Oh, well, you can't have everything.

Update, 29 September, 9:25 pm: It's been fixed.

I posted this on the 16th of April:

The figure is now closing in on $200, and the practice has been leaving me with an occasional twinge: "Do I really want everyone to know where I'm making donations?" Normally I prefer the amazon.com tip jar to its PayPal counterpart, because it offers the option of anonymity, though I have since admitted to making a donation here in the blog, and once, while apologizing to a blogger in email, I confessed to having previously deposited a small sum to said blogger's credit and would, in partial atonement for the offense given, make that sum slightly less small.

But even anonymous amazon.com sends out a note from the recipient, which often contains a line to the effect of "Please tell me who you are so I can thank you personally," which, were I to do so, would effectively kill off the whole idea of anonymity. It's not like I'm kicking in such huge sums — two hundred bucks spread over more than a dozen blogs won't buy anyone a beach house — or, for that matter, such meager sums that I'm embarrassed to have my name attached to them.

So I'm just slightly conflicted. I could resolve this conflict by not giving anyone any more money, but this doesn't help the bloggers with real needs, or the ones who just happened to post something I thought was freaking brilliant at the precise moment I had a few bucks to spare.

Suggestions?

Susanna Cornett (with the able and probably surly assistance of Page) has reworked Cut on the Bias once again. Remind me to ask her the difference between "selvage" and "selvedge".

Lynn Sislo is touched by the Fiskatorial Muse, and the first object of her scorn is one James Crabtree, who came up with this humdinger:

Victims, indeed. I don't see anyone silencing the Guardian or Fisk, and it's probably about damn time Krugman started paying attention to detail.

But Lynn isn't going to let Crabtree and his ilk off that easily:

Ask Townhall's Ben Shapiro, who was slapped down by Right and Left.

Lynn's title is Wanted: Common Sense Lefties. You know they're out there somewhere.

In case you were wondering why I didn't have anything in this week's Carnival of the Vanities, it's because I didn't submit anything. Frankly, I can't think of anything I wrote last week that was all that compelling.

Then again, there are times when I can't think of anything I ever wrote as being all that compelling, and this is turning out to be one such time.

I do love snideness, especially when I don't have to come up with it all myself. What follows is a small collection of snarky remarks that have turned up in blogdom this week.

Susanna Cornett, on the possibility that the Green Party's 2004 Presidential Candidate will be that loosest of cannons, Cynthia McKinney:

Bill Quick notes a certain similarity in Microsoft security bulletins:

Frank at IMAO, suggesting an alternate wording for the leaflets being dropped on Iraq this past week:

Finally, James Lileks cashes your reality check:

You gotta love stuff like this.

Here's a seven-year-old with her own domain, running Movable Type yet.

(Muchas gracias: Jessica Parker.)

Freshly squeezed through The Vent: If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some ammo in your belt.

John Scalzi channeling George Michael?

With pictures, yet. (No internal links, sorry; scroll to about the middle, or make the browser find it for you.)

Zeldman on TrackBack and similar blog innovations:

There were days early on (say, most of 1996) when I thought having two or three people reading my site would be Cloud Nine, or at least Cloud 7.62. And present-day tracking services are quite a bit more detailed, and possibly even more accurate, than the old-style Hit Counters.

And I'm happy to send people elsewhere; after all, I couldn't do that unless they got here first. I'm far more interested in giving my readers something worthwhile to look at, whether it's on-site or off, and I suspect the vast majority of bloggers feel pretty much the same way. Traffic hasn't grown much in the past six months — approximately 2,000 visitors per week, heaviest on Mondays — but I'd like to think I've made some progress from the bottom of the blogosphere, and I'm reasonably certain I've made some friends along the way. If I'm at all embarrassed, it's because of something I've written, not because of something I've linked.

It was billed as "A plea from a sick little girl," and it went something like this:

Kim Rollins, nowhere nearly as young as her text implied, was arguably sick, though not fatally so, and this little stunt of hers (now 404, alas) won her a place in the heart of every online prankster. Besides, what in the world would anyone do with all those AOL disks?

You could always ask Dani.

(Swiped from FARK)

Ford Motor Company is in bad need of fixing, and, says The Vent, recovery is Job 1.

Susanna Cornett is not keen on these pointy buzz cuts for men:

Surely she doesn't prefer, um, mullets?

(When we met this past summer, I figured she was looking at me askance because she hadn't been expecting the Pillsbury Doughboy in a polo shirt and chinos. Now I must conclude that she was unhappy with my hair, such as it is. Besides, I'm out of her age range, and the list of further disqualifications would eat up the rest of this column and part of the next.)

I'm finding, generally, that the first day of the Carnival of the Vanities gives this site about a 25 to 30 percent spike in traffic — at least, on those weeks when I manage to come up with something to submit.

(What is the Carnival? This week, it's this, or maybe this.)

I mean, it's a blog in Antarctica, after all. What could be cooler than that?

Well, actually, the logo at 70South.com, the first news site I've seen from Antarctica, is at least decently cool, but so far the blog looks more interesting than the news site.

(Muchas gracias for the blog link: Quana Jones.)

Somehow, I am the #2 site on Google for "paul wellstone illuminati".

You can't keep a good conspiracy buff down.

...does it take to change a light bulb?

M. Giant at Velcrometer takes a shot at it, and at least he does better than I did.

Some people are unaccountably proud of taking Michele at A Small Victory off their blogrolls. Reason enough for me to add her to mine, I'm inclined to think.

And the Professor reports that his October bandwidth was 261.45 gb. For comparison purposes: dustbury.com October bandwidth was 0.651 gb.

Update, 2 November, 9:30 am: Mike at Cold Fury knows exactly what sort of crap up with which Michele has been putting.

After one or two false starts, I am phasing in the Trackback system. For most people, this will make no difference, inasmuch as scarcely anything here is ever linked by anyone, but there's a lot to be said for keeping up with the Joneses. (No, Quana, this is not directed at you.)

The really detail-oriented readers will notice that the shade of blue used for links has varied substantially in recent days. Do not adjust your monitor. I think I'm going to keep this one. And yes, the left-hand column is slightly lighter than it used to be.

Before you ask: No, I'm not putting in a WeatherPixie. Actually, I've already done one, for the perfunctory page I keep at AOL for the benefit of chatters, and while it would be absurdly easy to copy the code over here, I figure my load times are long enough already. Rumors that I would recode the Pixie to look like Susanna Cornett are unfounded and have no basis in fact, and what's more, they aren't true, either.

I am trying to think of a better way to organize the blogroll without getting a third-party application involved. Suggestions are welcomed.

One thing I learned today: I should not be allowed near an anagram generator.

My apologies to the following bloggers:

Cue "Too Much Time on My Hands"....

Michele at A Small Victory is looking for bloggers who are also veterans. If this describes you — it certainly describes me — please let her know.

The last time Susanna Cornett missed anywhere near a whole week of bloggage, it was the week which began on 14 July, when she and I had lunch.

Now I'm scared.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm glad to see Bill Quick back at the old stand.

Yeah, I hate popups too, but I hate losing top-class reading material even more. And unlike most of us out here in blogland, Quick is a professional writer; it's damned difficult to blame the man for wanting to turn a buck once in a while.

Besides, this blogging thing gets in the way of real life now and then. Just ask Toren Smith.

While hands are wrung at the seeming (and, I think, synthesized) return of Osama bin Laden, blogdom turns its attention to what really matters: the Carnival of the Vanities, now in its Mark VIII incarnation.

I have noticed that I tend to plug the Carnival more enthusiastically during weeks, such as this one, when I have no entries of my own. Not that I'm inclined to pay the guy with the really nice leather couch thirty thousand dollars in $150 increments to tell me why.

Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, working for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law, have an ongoing project to document Internet filtering in various forms and fashions. One of the subprojects this fall is the determination of sites blocked by the government of the People's Republic of China. Described as "an experiment in open research," Zittrain and Edelman have worked up a system whereby any URL can be entered and then tested in real-time (within two minutes) to see if it is accessible to Chinese Internet users.

Needless to say, I had to try this out for myself, and by gum, according to this testing regime, this site is blocked. Presumably no one from the Chinese mainland is authorized to view any of my stuff. This explains one phenomenon: an earlier version of the Music Room here was once duplicated, from first byte to last, and pasted onto some Chinese Web site. They even copied my counter code, which is how I found out about it in the first place. The hits (never more than one or two a day, but what the hell) dried up this summer, and perhaps now I know why.

(Muchas gracias: John Little, The Blogs of War. He's blocked too.)

Miss Christine takes a dim view of tip jars:

Possibly even deep-seated, at least from where I sit, but I'm not quite so sour on the concept. Yet. If by some fluke of nature I start pulling 2,000 visitors a day instead of 2,000 a week, it won't cost me one dime more to operate this site. Let it become 20,000 a day (yeah, right), and maybe I'll get worried.

Besides, were it not for self-indulgent rambling, I'd have a lot less to read in the evenings.

I think perhaps most of us have felt this way at one time or another:

Few of my phrases are eloquent, fewer still lend themselves to becoming verse, but there are always going to be things I can say, but won't.

There are always going to be things I did say, but shouldn't have, but that's a tale for another time.

Yes, buoys and gulls, it's time for another exciting installment of Carnival of the Vanities, where ordinary bloggers demonstrate their talent for the extraordinary. (I can say that because I don't have any entries in the Carnival this week; the overall average will lurch upward a couple of ticks due to my absence.) Read one, read all, but read, dammit.

Actually, I won't be standing at that particular intersection at all, but following Wilbert Harrison's lead (by way of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, with a wave to Little Willie Littlefield), I'm going to Kansas City. (Kansas City, here I come.) This is basically a command performance: the children have commanded that I appear, or else. And they're just shrewd enough not to specify the true dimensions of "else".

The downside of this, or perhaps the upside of this, is that there will be a lower level of bloggage through the end of the week.

(See? It's possible to make an announcement of this nature without any reference to a frozen dessert.)

One does keep busy under these circumstances. Last night, we took a drive through something called Christmas in the Park at Longview Lake Park in Lee's Summit (remind me to find out just who the hell Lee is), with 160 or so animated displays using a quarter of a million lights. I decided the following: (1) I really, really hate daytime running lights on automobiles, and (2) there are some immensely-talented people in these parts.

Today I met up with Miss Christine, who runs the Narsissy blog. She was at work, but I caught her fairly early in the day, before she'd had time to get incensed at the sort of goofups (see 21 November) who insist on doing industrial-strength shopping on days like this, so she came off as incredibly likable — no surprise to me, of course.

Back home tomorrow, barring catastrophe.

Ravenwood, in the process of complimenting a blogger (who shall here remain nameless) for astutely-chosen article titles, observed:

The real question here, I think, is "Will a really good title bring attention to an article?" I believe that it will; in fact, although I read The Greatest Jeneration fairly often, I would probably have skipped over this item were it not for its title, which is so good I'm going to have to wait a discreet interval before swiping it. And if I had skipped it, I would have missed a good, solid Jen rant.

John Hawkins at Right Wing News has posted, for the third year, his list of the 20 Worst People, Places And Things On The Internet, which begs the question:

"Only twenty?"

I might quibble about the final rankings, but everything there, in my opinion, certainly deserves to be there. Nice work, Mr. H.

When this site was launched in 1996, one of its pages was devoted to whining about my incredibly bad luck at picking Playboy's Playmate of the Year; up to that point, I had been completely wrong for thirteen years straight.

Now it's nineteen years straight, and I have no reason to think I'll do any better this time around, but inasmuch as the January 2003 issue is out with the annual Playmate Review, it's time to make a fool of myself once more — mainly because this page draws about five percent of the site's traffic, mostly from people looking for pictures pirated from Playboy (which I don't have), and I hate getting "Why haven't you updated?" letters.

The lovely and talented Michele at A Small Victory is happy to host the first Traveling Edition of the Carnival of the Vanities, your first look at stuff you would have read when it came out if you had had the time or had known where it was. As always, I recommend it highly, especially since none of it is mine.

George Lang churned out a five-page piece about blogs for the Oklahoma Gazette this week, with quotes from Joshua Micah Marshall, Andrew Sullivan and Joe Conason, screen shots from all of the above plus one from Glenn Reynolds, and the obligatory interview with a journalism professor — in this case, Mark Hanebutt of the University of Central Oklahoma, who opined:

Reasonable enough. But George, couldn't you have found it in your heart to talk to so much as one blogger actually in Oklahoma?

To commemorate this site's 200,000th visitor, a minor facelift.

In the whirling world of blogdom, picking up two hundred thousand visitors in a few months isn't so unusual. It took me eighty months. No matter. I'm grateful to each and every one of you.

And to the nonexistent Jennifer Hawkings, who infested enough mailboxes over the weekend to send scores of people scurrying to Google to find out what was going on, I thank you as well: this day will likely be the busiest in the site's history.

I think everyone's seen a blog that would benefit from this.

728 visitors viewing 1,110 pages yesterday. Half again the previous record.

And without any assistance from Glenn Reynolds, who remains unaware that this site even exists.

404, of course, is the error code generated when you request a Web page that does not actually exist. Servers feed a 404 page to give you the bad news, and usually it's fairly generic.

I said "usually." Blogdex has been all over plinko.net's best 404 page ever, which seems only reasonable if it's truly the best.

For myself, I kind of like Lileks' variation on the theme.

The worst? Why, it's right here.

It's an even dozen for the Carnival of the Vanities, where the best of the blogosphere jumps up and slaps you in the face like a damp fish. Read it. Learn it. Take it to heart. Complain about it for issue #13 next week.

There is something disconcerting about the current flurry of activity regarding the new set of photographs of author/blogger Virginia Postrel. While I freely admit I'm not entirely immune to purely-visual stimuli, I find this sudden shift of interest away from the way she thinks to the way she looks is rather offputting. There is no justification for this sort of leering objectification, and omigod omigod look at her just look at her omigod shes so freaking gorgeous i dont believe shes actually posting these holy mother of god look at that dress i bet it stops a lot closer to denton than university park if you know what i mean that mouth that mouth why are we wasting time on the likes of ann coulter are these gonna be on the next book jacket please please tell me are any of these gonna be on the next book jacket holy cow shes so beautiful i cant stand it i just cant stand it I am disappointed that the blogosphere would expend so much effort on it when there is so much work to be done.

The blog formerly known as Poet and Peasant has freed itself from the surly bonds of Blogspot. Lynn Sislo's new digs have been christened Reflections in D minor, and they're open for your perusal even as we speak. Or type.

No, it's not "O Lord, we beseech thee, grant us an Instalanche."

Actually, it's based on a theme first enunciated by St. Thomas More, and given a voice by Fritz Schranck. I'll quote just one line:

Thanks, Fritz.

Just wafted through The Vent:

Is it possible to repeat your emotional reaction to Sixties "underground" radio if you're approaching your own sixties?

At some ill-defined point between Then and Now, my Web host made the curious decision to (1) drop a Perl module essential to the operation of Movable Type and (2) tell no one about it. The easy fix, of course, would be to set up an extlib and install a copy of the module there, but since when have I ever done anything the easy way?

So I backed up the 500 or so files in the archives (itself a tedious chore) and decided to install the 2.51 upgrade and the extlib. This actually worked on the seventh, maybe eighth try, after I'd wrecked my directory structure two or three times trying to get everything to fall into its canonical position. I really think installing 2.21 originally was easier than doing this upgrade. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

If nothing else, staring at this screen for however many hours today has (temporarily) cured me of the notion that I'm overdue for a redesign.

So you thought there were half a million blogs out there, with half a million people busily typing and Googling away?

Sorry, Chucko. They're all written by Susanna Cornett.

(Except this one.)

It's time for the seventh annual Chaz Awards, worth nothing to the donor and even less to the recipient, but it does fill up a page of text, and isn't that what it's all about?

Don't answer that.

Fourteen weeks on and still without a single fatality, the Carnival of the Vanities stops this week at Ravenwood's Universe, where you can sample all the delights of the Blogosphere™ that you unaccountably missed during the last ten days or so.

(Disclosure: I have an entry in the Carnival. Don't let that stop you from enjoying the good stuff.)

Once upon a time, there was a blogger who decided to move his blog, and....

I never was any good at these things. Go read Fragments from Floyd. Fred tells the story far better than I could. It is, indeed, a tale most hideous.

Michele at A Small Victory is seeking nominations for The Ten Most Intriguing Bloggers of 2002.

What's that you say? Nah. Don't even think of bringing my name into this. I locked up Least Intriguing Blogger of Any Conceivable Year quite some time ago.

Zee at RoadSassy looks for her place in blogdom:

A staggering number indeed. I marvel at the sheer diversity (in the real, not the Democratic National Committee's, sense of the word) of the people who bring us these words on a more-or-less-daily basis. Of course, the real worry is that in an effort to pigeonhole ourselves, we'll eventually fly straight up our own archives:

It's already changed the nature of journalism. Dead-tree writers are catching on to the idea that their asses can be fact-checked. The days when Big Media could just hand out stuff and expect it to be swallowed whole grow ever shorter. And this happened before the orgy of self-absorption, while we were, well, just frigging writing.

Will blogs become less effective as they become more numerous? Maybe. But the best blogs will always have an impact far beyond their regular readership, and the worst — well, I'm still here.

About the only thing I'm sure of in Michele's Ten Most Intriguing Bloggers of 2002 competition is that whoever nominated me wasn't paying attention, or something.

Since we're supposed to cough up a list, here is mine, in no particular order:

• Victorine Sclafani-Drachenberg, Liquid Courage (intellectually curious and frighteningly attractive)
  
• John "Akatsukami" Braue, Rat's Nest (as thoughtful a grouch as you'll ever see)
  
• Marc Lundberg, Quit That (writing his own blog software ensures his inclusion here)
  
• Scott Ott, ScrappleFace (the funniest man alive, possibly even after he's dead)
  
• Edward, lactose incompetent (a gentleman and a scholar, and a man with a past or two)
  
• Susanna Cornett, Cut on the Bias (like the onion of yore, no matter how much you peel, there's still more)
  
• Fred First, Fragments from Floyd (imagine Garrison Keillor with a sense of humor and a sense of priorities)
  
• Jessie Rosenberg, Discriminations (she posts so little that she invites curiosity on that basis alone, and besides, she's a 16-year-old college junior, which ditto)
  
• The pseudonymous Cinderella Bloggerfeller (an intellectual, a European, and yet not a leftist goofball)
  
• Arthur Silber, The Light of Reason (fears no argument from anyone, anywhere, on anything)
  

I have duly submitted this list to Michele, who is free to discard it.

To help ease the pain of that abrupt shift from 2002 to 2003, Solonor's Groovy Grove of Mystical Wonders is providing the appropriate shade for this week's Carnival of the Vanities. For those keeping score, this is installment #15.

And speaking of ongoing features, there's a new Vent. For those keeping score, this is installment #323.

Well, I'm not, but Andrea Harris certainly seems to be: she's blogging at a new address in Spleenville under the title Too Much to Dream.

Personally, I always thought she was too young to be thinking about prunes — er, um, dried plums.

An old friend of mine used to sign into the local dialups as "Dull N. Boring". (I asked him once, "What's the N for?" "Null," he said.)

Mr Boring has no real input into this site, but clearly it is informed by his spirit: on the splendid table that is the Blogosphere™, I'm purveying, at best, a can of sub-Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee pasta-like substances. A dented can, at that. Still, this isn't the dullest Web site in the world — it's only a tribute.

(Muchas gracias: LilacRose, now in new digital digs.)

Those wonderful folks at Blogcritics come up with some truly excellent original material.

And then there's their new link button, which says "You're entitled to our opinion," which is also truly excellent, but which, alas, is not original.

Oh, well, you can't have everything.

Were this television, the audio would be compressed into one indistinct mass, and cue the voiceover: NOW That's What I Call Blogging 16!

Mercifully, this is not television — if it were, I'd have been cancelled years ago — so instead I shall merely suggest a trip to Carnival of the Vanities #16, this week hosted by The Eleven Day Empire. Not available in stores.

It's said that if you're twenty and you're not liberal, you have no heart, and if you're forty and you're not conservative, you have no brain. What does this mean as fifty arrives? I have no idea, and I prove it in the latest issue of The Vent.

Edward reports that a friend of his was sacked for less-than-kindly remarks about his (unnamed) workplace on his blog.

On this basis, by now I probably should have been disemboweled, pounded into a paté, ground into powder and poured into a sewer grating.

A quick run through the last thousand entries or so reveals that I toss off the term "snarky" or some variation thereof with the same sort of heedless elan as a four-year-old who's just learned a cuss word. What, in fact, constitutes snarkiness? Here's my take:

If you blog about Pete Townshend's interest in child porn, that in itself isn't snarky.

If you title that blog entry something like "The Kids Are Alright", that's snarky.

Two thousand three will apparently be the Year of the Dead Pool. Laurence Simon's Amish Tech Support Dead Pool has over 100 contestants, and I suspect that the simpler Indo-Pakistani Deadpool, in which all you have to do is guess when the first nuke is dispatched from Islamabad or New Delhi, may draw even more.

Of the various sites purporting to list just where one's blog falls in the general scheme of things, I find myself most often at BlogStreet, not so much to see my blog in the Top 500 (where it has never been and likely never will be), but to see some of the weirder artifacts derived from their database.

The one that perplexes me right now reads as follows:

That's only about three links per blog.

Three links!

Maybe I shouldn't be kvetching about my lowly position (1657th) after all.

Update, 14 January, 11:00 am: Evidently I misinterpreted that little factoid - see Comments.

It appears we will no longer be able to experience The Spoons Experience; Spoons, citing the usual Real Life concerns, is going to give it a rest.

He's not retiring entirely, though, so watch for him in a comment section near you.

Well, it was just seventeen,
You know what I mean,
And the way it looked was way beyond compare....

That's right, it's the seventeenth edition of Carnival of the Vanities, now playing at Greeblie Blog. Your heart will go Boom.

As of this week, dustbury.com in its Movable Type incarnation (which began in late August 2002) is actually averaging (slightly) more than 1.0 comments per post.

This is, of course, no great shakes — delightful extroverts like Rachel Lucas can pull dozens of comments on every single post — but there's some small comfort in knowing that I'm not just talking to myself here.

What you want is Carnival of the Vanities #18, hosted by the estimable Meryl Yourish and embellished with an all-new rating system that's absolutely, um, keisterrific.

Now go read, dammit.

Okay, the first question on your mind is probably not "What if Star Wars had been set in Scotland?"

Well, move it up a few notches on the brain pan, and see the vector the one and only Gregory Hlatky has found connecting Alderaan to Edinburgh.

Bigwig scores today's Spiffiest Blog Article Title award with a piece on the perfidy of France, called Hoist by Their Own Petain.

You can't get much more apropos than that, n'est-ce pas?

According to Dean Esmay, who knows about this sort of thing, UUnet had some major problems last night, which might have been the result of a Denial of Service attack. As a result, Net traffic was snarled, and some data packets never went anywhere at all. Indeed, there was about a 30-percent reduction in overnight traffic at this site.

Tonight, however, there will be a 100-percent reduction at this site: my little row of the server farm is being physically relocated, as in "Okay, load that box on the truck, Jim," some time around midnight CDT. How long this will take, I don't know; I expect to be up and running Sunday morning without incident.

(Update, 6:30 pm: Apparently it was a DoS, but not aimed at UUnet; it was an exploit of an existing security hole in Microsoft servers that not everyone chose to fix when the patch was issued. And this explains why I was still getting traffic: this site runs on a Linux box.)

As a prominent member of the D list, I have the honor of occasionally finding A-level stuff and pointing you toward it, usually with words of praise.

For this, I can find no words, except that you must read it — and that you will never, ever forget it.

Total downtime was about five hours, which wasn't too bad, all things considered. Normal operation, to the extent that any of this can be considered "normal," was restored slightly before 5 am. Planned downtime, to be sure, is much more pleasant than unplanned downtime — and it's easier to schedule, too.

While your father's perfecting ways of making sealing-wax, the rest of us are reading the nineteenth weekly edition of Carnival of the Vanities, this week hosted (because he said so) at Ipse Dixit. As always, it's the best of the blogs, plus a few snide comments from yours truly, and is not to be missed.

Last night someone wandered into last February's log entries looking for "anal barry manilow lettuce".

Not exactly a true-blue spectacle, but okay, if you say so.

(Also posted to Disturbing Search Requests)

Thanks to 150 (!) referrals from Carnival of the Vanities, this site hit the 500-visitor mark yesterday for only the third time ever. I don't know whether this should be credited to the ingenuity of C. Dodd Harris IV, who wrote up the descriptions, or to my own indecisiveness — which article to send? — which led me to turn in two submissions, but being the sort of person who ducks credits for things (thereby simplifying the task of ducking responsibility when they go wrong), I'm going with Dodd.

You can definitely tell that Oscar Jr. is starting to get into the groove here; he's churned out a piece which is called, so help me Hannah and her sisters, A Preliminary and Shoddy Statistical Analysis of the Heights of the Blogosphere.

Crunching data from the Myelin Blogging Ecosystem, Oscar has determined that, on average, ten extra blogs in your blogroll will get you four extra links in return. I'm not sure exactly when you're supposed to add those ten to achieve the desired effect, and I have some general qualms about futzing with blogrolls — the ninety or so blogs I list are there because they are regularly read, not because I think I stand to gain anything from their presence — but it's an interesting statistic nonetheless, and I'd like to see someone do a study on how many links you can garner from delinking someone or from demanding that someone else delink.

Note: this is not a link to Silflay Hraka.

Seriously.

(Before you ask: Yes, I've seen dustbunny.com. It's great.)

There's a whole lot here to read, some of which is actually worthwhile.

If you'd like to improve the odds of finding a good read while you're surfing, Bill Peschel keeps a list of Best Internet Essays of 2003, and he's averaging about five or six a week. A couple of them have been linked from here; one of them actually originated here.

And if you've seen all the Carnival entries and all the other ephemera of the blogosphere and would like to do this sort of thing yourself some day, Tim Dunlop has some excellent advice. (How excellent? It made Peschel's list.)

Thanks for coming.

Jeebus. Yesterday the meter on this site was running, if not 18 times the speed of light, certainly faster than it's ever run before. And instead of the usual 350 or so for a Monday, the spreadsheet shows a startling 1699.

I could, I suppose, characterize this event as yet another step on the long journey from Completely Unknown to Deeply Obscure, but once this flurry passes (and that CNN goofup falls off Blogdex, where it climbed briefly to #51), I'm gearing up for resettlement in a moderately-priced area of Oblivion Heights.

For those of you who were here, however briefly, on a day more than twice as busy as any I've ever seen — the previous record for 24 hours here is 728 — thank you for making possible something entirely unexpected: a veritable Instalanche without any participation by InstaPundit. In the immortal words of Marx: That's the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of.

Regular programming will resume shortly.

There's a lot of cute blog schwag out there, but if you're going for maximum cute, you want the Rachel Lucas "Imagine" mug, guaranteed to hold your favorite hot beverage without once complaining that the top ten percent contains as much warmth as the bottom 90.

I'm sure this will tide me over until Susanna Cornett finishes up work on her signature lingerie line.

Carnival of the Vanities Episode 20 is now being screened at Plum Crazy; as always, this is where you catch up on the best bloggage of the week, and we won't even mention the stuff I wrote.

I'm not quite sure what's most annoying about this San Diego Union-Tribune piece about blogging: the rendering of URLs without making them clickable, the scattered typesetting commands that weren't screened out or converted to HTML, or the definition of "blogrolling" as "linking to sites that tend to share similar ideologies." On the far reaches of the political spectrum, maybe, but not for most bloggers within screaming distance of the mainstream.

On the other hand, Neal Pollack's characterization of bloggers as "lunatic pamphleteers shouting into the wind" — that I'll buy.

(Muchas gracias: Becky at Paradigm Shifts.)

Well, it was nice while it lasted — 1699 visitors Monday, 1166 Tuesday, 604 Wednesday — but apart from some Carnival traffic, things are pretty much back to normal around here.

I was slightly amused by a thread at Café Utne which linked back to that CNN screenshot, in which someone wondered why there was a goldfinch on the page. I duly copied the pertinent paragraph from the site to the thread, and somehow managed to refrain from asking "How come you couldn't find this?"

Still, I got a couple of new readers out of all this brouhaha, and, as John Lennon once observed, you know that can't be bad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neal Pollack, you may remember, tagged all of us in blogdom as "lunatic pamphleteers," a term with lyricism enough to compensate for its barely-veiled sneer. Pollack, of course, has his own blog; people who don't, don't bother with the veil. An example:

And that was the kindest thing he said.

Jeff Jarvis suggests that it's "a desperate urge to get links from webloggers," and he may be right. Fortunately, whether it's desperate or not, it's at least reasonably amusing. And since I am intimately familiar with the process of trying to be both desperate and amusing, and mindful of the Second Commandment of Blogging — well, what the hell, he gets a link.

Everyone knows the canonical collective nouns, even the weird ones like a murder of crows or a pride of lions or a clutch of mechanics or a graft of politicians or a gaggle of Googlers.

So how shall we denote a multiplicity of bloggers? The first thing I thought of was crash, but then it occurred to me that in this context, "crash" equates to something properly single, and a proper noun at that: a crash of Blogger. Okay, there are a lot of such, but as Bono might have said, we still haven't found what we're looking for. (And Bono apparently has no qualms about finding prepositions to end sentences with.)

If you have better ideas than I — and who doesn't? — please pop open Comments and expound.

You may remember Behind the Mantle, operated by a blogger who was sacked (Bite me, King Stan!) for having a blog. (I mentioned it briefly here last month.)

Now working for someone less anal, he's back blogging at entrebat.net.

(Muchas gracias: Edward Ocean.)

I tend to pay close attention to anything Andy Crossett does, since Mr Crossett is the proprietor of The Celebrity Legs Gallery [not necessarily safe for work], a biweekly glance at some of the world's major-est Major Babes from here down. And it was inevitable, I suppose, that he should open a blog.

As a skirtwatcher of long standing, I consider this sort of thing noteworthy. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

No, not you, Kevin.

The previous entry, reports Movable Type, was number 666.

It caused the database server to error out, and had to be reposted.

Hmmm....

(Mental note: Write to DavidMSC up in Montana and see if he can get me one of those Helena handbaskets I've been hearing about.)

The site has actually been up, but anything requiring cgi — for readers, this means the comment windows and whatnot — has been down most of the morning due to Actual Hardware Failure, as in "Geez, isn't it about time we got rid of this piece of crap?"

In the meantime, someone Googled his way here looking for susanna porn. Uh, not here, pal.

I honestly don't know if everything is fixable at the host end; they seem to be fumbling a lot.

Unfortunately, I'm paid up through the end of the year, so I am loath to move — at least right now.

John Ray's Dissecting Leftism (it's dead and on the lab table?) is the host for the 21st edition of Carnival of the Vanities, with scads of high-quality bloggage for your reading pleasure. As always, you miss this at your peril.

Fametracker has a lovely feature called "The Fame Audit", in which a celebrity's perceived level of, well, celebrity is contrasted and compared to where, in the opinion of the auditor, it by rights ought to be. An example: the Audit of Leonardo DiCaprio, which, after fourteen paragraphs and a pair of boxes listing Assets and Liabilities, concludes that while Leo is Up There with Brad Pitt, he really belongs in Jude Law's neighborhood.

Inasmuch as the Blogosphere never metadata it didn't like, something of a Blog Fame Audit would seem inevitable. But where to do the math? While fumbling for the shampoo this morning, it hit me, and rather painfully so.

So say hello to the Blog Overachievement Factor — for various aesthetic reasons, we can call it the B.O. factor — which is defined in terms of BlogStreet data: the Blog Importance Quotient (BIQ) divided by the BlogStreet rank. The BIQ, says BlogStreet, is based upon how many high-ranking blogs link to your blog.

Auditing Glenn Reynolds for B.O., we find that he has a rank of 1 and a BIQ of 1, which puts him at a B.O. of, well, 1.00.

To pick a few not entirely at random out of BlogStreet's Top 100 or so:

USS Clueless
 rank 13; BIQ 5; B.O. 2.60

Lileks' The Bleat
 rank 14; BIQ 9; B.O. 1.56

The Volokh Conspiracy
 rank 20; BIQ 4; B.O. 5.00

Tim Blair
 rank 22; BIQ 8; B.O. 2.75

A Small Victory
 rank 49; BIQ 61; B.O. 0.80

PejmanPundit
 rank 52; BIQ 17; B.O. 3.06

Amish Tech Support
 rank 82; BIQ 75; B.O. 1.09

Cut on the Bias
 rank 102; BIQ 31; B.O. 3.29

In a check of the top BIQs, the B.O. leader was Aint No Bad Dude: rank 277, BIQ 29, B.O. 9.55.

My own B.O. computes as follows: rank 2282, BIQ 531, B.O. 4.30.

If all this means anything — and I'm almost certain it doesn't — I'm punching a class or two above my, um, weight.

(Update, 11:25 am: This data was originally in a table, which I scrapped after deciding its appearance was even more preposterous than the numbers I had plugged into it.)

So it's come to this: fisking thirty-year-old songs by Joni Mitchell.

Then again, were we truly happier when all we had to fisk was Fisk?

I know, you'd read Lileks anyway, but today he's got a lovely little piece that touches on the thoughts running nonstop through your head when you visit an unfamiliar church.

And what's more, he's got a gorgeous picture of a bathtub Nash, postwar automotive aerodynamics at its best. In its time, perhaps the finest highway cruiser we had, though in town it tended to be a handful, what with a fifty-foot turning circle because of the skirted front wheels. And we won't mention the infamous fold-down seats.

About one month into this Web thing, I was scratching around for topics — rather like now, as a matter of fact — and I decided to post something about one of my more ignoble distinctions: the fact that every year, I take a stab at predicting Playboy's Playmate of the Year, and every year, that stab catches some of my own flesh.

At the time, I'd made thirteen consecutive wrong guesses. Now it's nineteen. You'd think this would be the year, huh? Not on your tintype, Binky. My secret sources within the Mansion (yeah, right) have informed me that my twentieth annual pick is every bit as prescient as its predecessors, which is to say not at all.

I'm not going to be posting the official results until the actual PMOY issue (usually June) arrives, since I don't really know who the PMOY is — only who she isn't. I am, however, going to take some extra time this year to frown and pout and mutter and grumble. (Last year, I didn't start FPMG mode until the 27th of April. On this topic, anyway.)

(Aside to SWINTBN: As His Purpleness might say, "Nothing compares 2 U.")

The lovely and talented Rachel Lucas offers the "definitive word on trolls and assclowns", and this is the bottom line thereof:

For myself, I have had no such problems up to now. The nature of trolls and assclowns is to desire the maximum exposure possible for their irritating drivel; this site actively thwarts their desire by going largely unread, thereby reducing exposure, and by containing a high percentage of irritating drivel itself, thereby reducing contrast.

Still, it's probably a good idea to have something resembling a policy on such matters, and when I get around to concocting one, it will probably look a lot like Rachel's.

Almost live and indirect, it's the Carnival of the Vanities, episode twenty-two, emanating from the People's Republic of Seabrook, Texas, bringing you the finest bloggage from all over the civilized world. (I didn't check to see if there were any entries from France, but, well, write your own joke.)

"Don't say that."

There are 48 words/phrases/bits of vernacular shorthand that are not to be used within earshot of the Jodiverse.

(Actually, there are rather more than that, but let's take them a few at a time, shall we?)

(By way of Cyberangel, who has been known to utter a few of them herself.)

Not that anyone notices these things, but I have given a general facelift to the items in The Vent. This makes the fourth redesign of these pages since Day One (today is something like Day 2,509), and I hasten to point out that it does not hint at a future redesign for the blog.

Not much, anyway.

Well, actually, Jane Galt mentions only thirteen, but every single one has been used, perhaps even abused, either in her Comments boxes or in her incoming email, and there are good reasons to eschew them:

This phenomenon, incidentally, is not restricted to one side of the political aisle, either:

I, of course, strive mightily to preserve idiocy in the center.

(Update, 9:30 pm: Make that 51 ways. You've heard of forgetting to close a link? It's also possible to forget to open one. Sheesh.)

You know these folks. There's Steven, the analyst; Charles, the front-line reporter; Jane, the chief financial officer; Glenn, the head of distribution; Laurence, who is, well, Laurence. And there are plenty of others who've earned their place on the first team.

And then there's Susanna Cornett, who over the past year has become the unofficial conscience of the Blogosphere, the still, small voice who pipes up to remind us that some things are more than simply inexpedient: they are wrong, and there's a reason why.

Today we celebrate one year of Susanna's cut on the bias. And if you're wondering just what kind of person she is, well, as that Lee Ann Womack record says, "Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance/And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance/I hope you dance."

Susanna dances. She always has. And she always will.

And not a strawberry in the bunch. This week's Carnival of the Vanities is hosted by Kesher Talk, and once again, if you miss out, the management cannot be held responsible for your failure to keep up with the Best of the Blogs. And it should be even better this week; I'm not in it.

Asked "What separates your page from the pack?" by the ever-reliable John Hawkins, Tim Blair answers:

It's a nasty job, but somebody has to do it. (Though I thought I was.)

Two songs, actually.

Go see what McGehee hath wrought, or hath writ, or anyway hath posted.

Somebody got here last night via a Google search for "mister rogers" illuminati.

Fnord.

It's Carnival of the Vanities #24, brought to you by the one and only Acidman. This week's edition features nearly three dozen articles by bloggers near and far, annotated and collected in fine style with just a hint (okay, maybe more than a hint) of that patented Gut Rumbles reflux. As always, miss this at your peril.

Two words: bacon martini.

Bless you, Weetabix. ("Pretty hot, but in a Ned Flanders kind of way?" Now that's descriptive.)

I figure, if I'm going to drone on in my usual monotone, I ought to have a backdrop that is closer to monochrome.

Besides, in tests on a 33.6k dialup, it loads 0.4 second faster.

Once upon a time, there was Poet and Peasant, hosted at Blogspot, and it was good.

Then there was Reflections in D minor, running Movable Type, and it was better.

Now there is the new and improved Reflections in D minor, and it's a pMachine.

One thing about Lynn: she's determined.

What's the appropriate gift for the 25th anniversary?

Right you are: linkage.

Jay Caruso's Daily Rant hosts the 25th edition of Carnival of the Vanities. As always, it's the best of the blogs, compiled and unedited, and this week it's guaranteed CGH-free, since I didn't send anything.

In the absence of anything useful from this corner (like that's news), let me point you to an example of what happens when Susanna Cornett of cut on the bias brings out the industrial-strength Fiskars. To be sheared: a Dowd-y fellow from the Lexington Herald-Leader who (1) really, really doesn't like the President's war plans and (2) mixes metaphors faster than Tom Cruise mixes drinks. You really need to read the whole thing to get the full flavor, but since it's traditional to provide an excerpt, here's her explanation of why France is not our friend:

I guess she's not going on vacation with Rod Dreher. No matter, though; she's in her element, and the offending scribe from the old weird Herald will never be the same.

Now you know why I fear her so. :)

Silflay Hraka's Bigwig has been lately plying his Muse with brewskis or something; whatever the circumstances, the result has been some scathingly good tunage. Most recently, he's unveiled a sea chantey for 21st-century pirates (you know who you are) and a not-quite-lighter-than-air followup to Madonna's "Vogue".

I hope he and the Muse get along better than, say, Miles Green and Erato, or at least Albert Brooks and Sharon Stone.

An impatient Tim Blair declared last week: