Day: June 5, 2002

There aren’t too many rules here at TTLB, but one I generally follow is this: Make me laugh out loud, and you get a link. So when I hit this:

ORRIN JUDD to think that my article talking about the greater danger posed by neuroscience relative to cloning means that I have something in common with Francis Fukuyama. Well, at an appropriate level of abstraction, I do. We’re both carbon-based bipeds.

it gets linked. Even if it’s Glenn, and he really doesn’t need it. Read the whole note; Glenn is proving yet again why he’s top of the heap: the man can cram more intelligent prose into a minor rebuttal to someone else’s foolish post than some essayists have in an entire collection of works. And I couldn’t care less if that makes me sound like a suck-up; rest assured I’ll be there to tweak Prof R’s tail next time he slips up, too…

You know, some people are plain mean.

Seriously, what’s gotten into them? I can’t understand it; their actions are incomprehensible.

To put it clearly: how could it possibly be that I haven’t said anything obnoxious enough to piss them off yet?

Clearly, I’ll have to try harder… maybe that piece I was toying with on the Ellen Ripley solution to Saudi Arabia might work out after all…

“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. That’s the only way to be sure.”
-Ripley

Since I’m already at it…

Might as well go all the way. Has anybody else concluded that has delegated his blogging responsibilities to one of those mysterious interns he allegedly has?

I know he’s got the juice in him, but really: when was the last time you remember reading something really good on his page? (That he wrote, that is: quoting doesn’t count). And the whole publish-once-a-day thing is just so… old media.

I might feel slightly bad for being mean to a guy who’s obviously branching out and exploring new things and all (i.e., budding career as Shakespearean actor — see below), but heck, he can take it, and besides, I’m on record as saying I think he’s great when he wants to be. Come on, Andrew, show us the magic!

(Well, there goes my chances of ever getting a Sulliblast of linkage… ah well…)

Smack!

The sound you just heard was that of newest Prof on the block openin’ a can of whoop-ass on the latest offhand Sullivan remark o’ the day. Observe:

So I stopped by Andrew Sullivan’s weblog this morning to see what’s what, and was confronted with a short item which read, in its entirety:

SELF-PARODY WATCH: “Special Report: Zambian Copper,” – a headline from this week’s Economist.

.

.

.

Why, I wondered, does Andrew Sullivan consider this–interesting and important–story to be a big joke?

But then I began to imagine what the inside of Andrew Sullivan’s mind must be like…”What wonkish fools those writers and editors at the Economist are! Why are they writing about the failure of neoliberal development strategies in southern Africa when they could be writing about my career as a Shakespearean actor? “

Ouch! There’s more; read the whole thing for the complete effect. But hey: I thought slamming Sully for one-line attempts at pithiness was my beat. Back to the bloated Federal bureaucracy with you, Prof D, before I have to swing up north to Moscow on the Bay and give you a little what-for !

PS – I know, Prof D has been around for a while, but he’s new to me, and that’s all that matters on this page.

Speaking of which: how’s this for a “Duh!” headline of the day (from the AP wire):

House questions Arafat’s trustworthiness

In other news:

Pope May Be Catholic, Bush Concedes

Cheney: Yes, Bears Do Shit in the Woods

tanks are attacking Arafat’s compound.

Update: Lair, in a private email, casually tossed off the following assessment which bears reprinting (with his kind permission):

“I suppose I’ll just have to salute Arafat’s impending demise with a shot of tequila. Just as the Palestinians celebrated the World Trade Center deaths with candy, then I will acknowledge that one evil man’s death with giving treats to the cats and remembering all of the innocents on both sides lost to his bloody reign, and I shall pray for those who have yet to die for those tyrants who would take his place until those that would support them are either crushed by their own errors or made to see the light of reason.”

Amen, brother.

Major Whoops

In an earlier post today I referred to J. Bradford Delong’s weblog, and indicated he was the author of a rather hilarious Corner spoof. This is flat out wrong: Delong was simply quoting / linking it and the true author is Poor Man.

So now you have to go visit both of their sites.

Apologies for the error, and thanks to Jeff over at Protein Wisdom for pointing out my blunder.

I’m debating whether to rename the Hall of Link Sluttage.

I don’t mind tweaking PC sensibilities for a good cause, but I’m not convinced the joke is actually all that funny.

Comments? Thoughts? Alternative taxonomies are most welcome — you where to send them.

Okay, minor digression from my bottom-up blogrolling this week: if you think the major American newsweeklies suck (and who doesn’t, because after all, they do) you must check out Bleat o’ the day, in which he delivers a thorough thwacking to the ‘zines and the cretinous fools who waste barrels of perfectly good ink on their pages.

Note: This post was seriously wrong the first time I wrote it, so it has been rewritten heavily. Sorry!

Ok, I’m still examining Bradford DeLong’s weblog to see if it gets the totally-un-sought-after, not-particularly-valuable, and overall generally dubious honor of being the TTLB Leftie Blog of the Week, but he definitely gets a link for his referral to The Poor Man’s post The Cornier, in which TPM shows us what the conservative bloggers over at NRO are really thinking. A small sample:

SLATE – OF PHONEY TRAFFIC STATS![James W. Whitesides IV]

Slate claims to get 3 million different hits a year. Well, I’m certainly not one to begrudge another’s success, but whoop-dee-doo-da! I mean, Slate just gives away all their content free! I mean, so do we, but Slate gives it away on a Microsoft site. If The Cornier was on Microsoft, we’d get like 3 million hits every single day! Probably half the people who go there are fat middle-aged housewives trying to go to MSN’s Special Valentine’s Day Soft-Focus Soap-Opera Porn Sex Quiz, but too drunk off of Arbor Mist lemon-lime Chardonney at four in the afternoon to hit the right link. And Mickey Kaus is gonna regret it when MS goes under and he lives in a box under a bridge. Maybe he can write his blogs on a cardboard sign he uses to panhandle traffic on the interstate! Try THAT information superhighway, sell-out! Not that I’m jealous at all. And not that there’s any such thing as homelessness.

Beautiful. Surely someone must have linked to this gem before me, no?

Addendum: By the way, lest you think Prof. Delong is simply a goofball, he also provides quite a bit of serious political & economic analysis as well. Not suprising, since he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the Clinton administration.

Hey !

And everyone else. I’ll repeat a few basic principles of the ‘ecosystem’ thing, just to keep them clear in everyone’s mind:

1) When links are counted on your page, only the links you have to other bloggers on the list are counted. So you can have links to CNN, Yahoo, AOL, etc — but none of those will count in your total, or have any effect on anybody else’s total inbound links.

2) Conversely, your total number of inbound links only represents the links you are getting from other weblogs on the list. If there are twenty other blogs that have links to you, but none of them are on the list, you won’t get ‘credit’ for them.

3) Keep in mind what others have observed, which is that strictly speaking, this is not the whole blogosphere by any means — it would more precisely be called the ecosystem (and map) of the political blogosphere (and who knows, maybe only a small chunk of that). As I mentioned in the original post, I started with Glenn and Stephen’s lists — hardcore politicos both — and worked out from there. So if your blog is a hardcore technical blog, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t rank that high on this list — because right now, at least, there aren’t many other techie blogs on the list to give you links that would be counted. You may have the most linked-to blog in the technoblogosphere, but that only helps if all the other techies get on the list as well.

There are several other interesting projects going on that are doing similar work to mine in ‘mapping’ the blogosphere; I’ll do a post sometime today with a roundup — there’s definitely some cool stuff out there.

Anyway, getting back to the political vs. techie distinctions: I’m toying with another idea that may explore those “subworlds” of the blogosphere in a more interesting way, so there may be Part III of the ecosystem project up sometime this week.

But I really want to do some writing. Honest. Damnit, my left brain and right brain keep pulling me in different directions. Interesting geek project or meaningful prose? Please fate, don’t make me choose!