Accidental Blogger

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  • When Blogs Die

    I haven't posted here for a while – probably the longest time since the inception of the blog. I don't know how that has affected regular readership. Although A.B. is not a personal blog, this article about slow and moribund blogs or those whose contents change abruptly resulting in the loss of readership, caught my eye.

    Blog death Back in 2004, the blogger known as “Mister Bachelor” was swinging at the top of his middle-aged game — collecting women and readers (nearly 8,000) — with salacious tales of his Lothario lifestyle.

    He was revered and reviled and loving every minute of it.

    Then he fell in love, and with that it was all downhill — for the blog, that is.

    Earlier this year, the once frolicking Mister Bachelor of heavy Web traffic and outraged comments was laid to rest. In its place, The Blog and Chain was born, snarky and sardonic but devoid of sex and drama. At last count, it had fewer than 150 readers, according to the reformed Mister Bachelor, who now goes by the alias Daedalus.

    Personal blogs are like child stars. Some soar too quickly and die too young. Others drop out, lay low for a while and come back stronger than ever. More often, they return reinvented, uninspired and lackluster, missing that special something that used to leave audiences wanting more.

    Blogs are born, blogs die — it’s a cycle as old as blogging itself, said Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming and Why It Matters.

    “Things grow and mature, and then they reach their end,” he said. “That’s the shape of our lives.”

    Blogs end up in the virtual graveyard for as many reasons as they came into being in the first place. Sometimes, the bloggers get out of their system whatever they wanted to say. Or they reach the fame they were after. Other times, they just give up.

    “In some cases people stop because they achieve their goal,” Rosenberg said. “Others stop because they’ll never achieve their goal.”

    …..

    Jessica Cutler has birthed and buried four blogs and is authoring a fifth. But she’s never matched the fame of her 2003 effort, Washingtonienne, which lasted just 13 days but scandalized the nation’s capital by chronicling her liaisons with Washington power brokers. The notoriety led to what she termed a “mini-career” of writing about herself. She penned pieces for high-profile media outlets, usually about sex or scandal, posed for Playboy and wrote a book, Washingtonienne, that is being made into an HBO series.

    Now happily married and pregnant, Cutler seems ambivalent toward her blog-earned fame. When the URL on JessicaCutlerOnline expired, she just let it die. Her latest blog is a hodgepodge of domestic fare and profane but witty observation. Blogs, Cutler has concluded, are “like trees falling in a forest.

    “If no one read them, it’s like they never really existed.”

  • Curious Parallels (Sujatha)

    Every now and then, I see something going on in American politics, and then pause to think "Haven't I seen a similar scenario, before , only a continent away and 10 years ago?"

    Then,regional politics in India:

    Jayalalitha: brought in to 'sex up' campaign of an elderly MGR
    Regional politician (was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu state in India) with national ambitions
    land scandal in 2000 leading to her removal/resignation
    Still a force in regional politics
    Actress background

    "THE
    charges in the first case are that Jaya Publications, in which
    Jayalalitha and Sasikala were partners, bought 3.07 acres of land and a
    building belonging to the government-owned TANSI Foundry at Guindy in
    Chennai at a price much lower than the guidel ine value and gained more
    than Rs.3.5 crores in the transaction. The sale took place when
    Jayalalitha was Chief Minister (1991-1996). Jayalalitha "abused her
    official position at every stage" in the property deal although no
    public interest was involved, the charge-sheet said.     Since Jayalalitha
    was Chief Minister when she bought the property, she attracted the
    provisions of the PCA."

    Now, Fourth of July Fireworks of a different sort:

    Sarah Palin: brought in to 'sex up' campaign of  an elderly McCain
    Regional politician with national ambitions
    House scandal (RUMOR ALERT – this may or may not be the reason for her precipitated resignation):

    "A list of subcontractors on the job, obtained by the Voice,
    includes many with Palin ties. One was Spenard Builders Supply, the
    state’s leading supplier of wood, floor, roof, and other
    “pre-engineered components.” In addition to being a sponsor of Todd
    Palin’s snow-machine team that has earned tens of thousands for the
    Palin family, Spenard hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television
    commercial in 2004. When the Palins began building a new family home
    off Lake Lucille in 2002—at the same time that Palin was running for
    lieutenant governor and in her final months as mayor—Spenard supplied
    the materials, according to Antoine Bricks, who works in its Wasilla
    office. Spenard actually filed a notice “of its right to assert a lien”
    on the deed for the Palin property after contracting for labor and
    materials for the site. Spenard’s name has popped up in the trial of
    Senator Stevens—it worked on the house that is at the center of the
    VECO scandal as well.

    Todd Palin told Fox News that he built the two-story,
    3,450-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bath, wood house himself, with
    the help of contractors he described as “buddies.” As mayor, Sarah
    Palin blocked an effort to require the filing of building permits in
    the wide-open city, and there is no public record of who the “buddies”
    were. The house was built very near the complex, on a site whose city
    purchase led to years of unsuccessful litigation and, now, $1.3 million
    in additional costs, with a law firm that’s also donated to Palin
    collecting costly fees from the city."

    Gov of AK
    Still a force in politics (?)
    Beauty pageant/TV background

    Sarah Palin's beyond-bizarre resignation announcement:

    "My choice is to take a stand and effect change – not hit our heads against the wall and watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain in this new environment. Rather, we know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities – and so we will, for Alaskans and for Americans."

    There the similarity stops for now. It's anybody's guess as to whether Palin manages to stage a revival (Jayalalitha did manage it, after all). That's highly dependent on the quotient of true Palin-believers to those who will write her off after her shaky and scared TV performance.

    The confounding factors are many. Jayalalitha had little to no family to worry about, while Palin has her large brood of children in dire need of attention. Jayalalitha was able to still cling to the aura of the 'generous mother' while it might be harder for Palin to do so.

    As Palin famously states in her speech : "Only dead fish go with the flow." The question remains as to whether she is a dead fish or a live one.

  • NCBI ROFL (Joe)

    Bringing new meaning to navel gazing and much, much more, is NCBI ROFL. Am I just giving a shout out to a friend's blog? No — I'm giving a shout out to a friend's blog that posts abstracts from real scientific research articles that are often hilarious enough to have you rolling on the floor laughing. So check it out!

  • Defeat and Victory (Joe)

    1. Minnesota finally has its fair share of representation in the U.S. Senate, assuming we think a system that gives Montana and California the same number of senators is fair. But at least Minnesota's now caught up with important places like Montana, not to mention Idaho, Vermont, and of course, Alaska. But this does mean the Democrats now have 60 senators! Granted, you're only supposed to need 51 votes to pass legislation because the Constitution says so, but 60 is "filibuster-proof." That's a good thing, because it means our legislative agenda can now come to fruition. From what I've read, this evidently means that our legislative agenda is doing nothing about climate change and passing useless, in-name-only health-care reform. Oh, and to keep screwing over gay people despite the costs even to non-gay society.

    2. The U.S. won another important battle in the war on people. Matt Yglesias thinks we should be leaving Iraq with our heads held high, presumably because good posture is important for spinal health, since there's obviously nothing to feel good about. Well, "nothing" is too strong of a word, because now we're more equipped to back up Israel in the upcoming battle in the war on people, to save Iran from all those damn Iranians.

    I forgot where I was going with this. I think (1) was going to be defeat — even with massive public support, a tremendously popular president, and a filibuster-proof majority, Democrats can't do anything useful — and (2) was going to be victory — we did cause the deaths of 1 million Iraqis, after all, which I believe was our military and humanitarian objective — but I lost my train of thought while inserting all those hyperlinks and can't be sure I didn't mix that up. Still, there's always the bright side that since none of us are professional cyclists, we're not destroying our skeletal health as rapidly as we could be!

  • The Future of Jazz…By Way of South Indian Carnatic Music (Andrew)

    M_08308a3bdb7b482c8922648110835ed4 One of the out-of-left-field suprises in jazz last year was the album Kinsmen, by Indian-American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa.  As a self-deprecating ethnic joke, his brother had given him a CD called "Saxophone Indian Style" — but when Mahanthappa listened to it, he was amazed to hear South Indian Carnatic music played so well on the Western instrument of the saxophone.  Mahanthappa eventually sought out the saxophonist from "Saxophone Indian Style," who turned out to be Kadri Gopalnath, an acknowledged legend of Carnatic music — and proposed that the two make an album together.

    And the results have turned Mahanthappa into a critical darling.  He's been lauded by Gary Giddins, perhaps the most insightful jazz critic writing today, and Kinsmen's been named one of the best jazz CDs of 2008 by NPR, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and the Village Voice.

    So my question for ABers, particularly any that have familiarity with Carnatic music, is what do you think? Is this CD getting overhyped due to the novelty of the concept, or is it truly, as Giddins puts it, "astonishing," "fascinating," and a "momentous achievement that will be around for a long time to come?"

    You can get a taste of the sound of the Kinsmen band for free with the videos on Mahanthappa's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/dakshinaband

  • A more powerful way of naming names (phi-to-the-large-power D)

    It is a just and proper convention we use in naming authors and thinkers that the immortals have only last names. After all, to name an author is to enter into a game where we are to rank them in an implicit list by excellence, profundity and significance. Hence, to Gustave a Flaubert is to commit a faux pas, while depriving a Roth of his Philip sounds odd. I have been using this elegant and delightsome signaling scheme for years now, though in my college years when I hadn’t yet mastered its intricacies I did commit some few gaffes. Still, the skill has now been acquired, so I rejoice in seeing its proper use in others, and police violations diligently.

    And yet, and yet. This venerated scheme is obviously too simple to be perfect. We perforce Emilify and Charlottize our venerated Brontë’s, and this when we yearn so earnestly to deprive them of those cumbersome affixes. Then too, rare names seem to unfairly boost reputations. Hence DeLillo or Dawkins, and this while poor Adam shall never be a Smith. And then there are those annoying writers of whom we know no other name other than the one in common use. Both Aristotle and Adonis are known by a mere single name. What a pity to be unable to mark just and proper distinctions in these cases! And, to get to the very core of the issue, does not the mind of delicacy rebel at the coarseness of a mere binary distinction where so many finer gradations may be fruitfully deployed?

    Allow me these simple suggestions:

    1. Since the great thinker is firstname-to-the-zeroth-power lastname, and the rest are firstname-to-the-first-power lastname, mayn’t we make this explicit? Then we may speak properly of Adam to the zeroth Smith and Nico to the first Malebranche.
    2. Immediately as we recognize this, we are able to shake ourselves free of the binary hypnosis, and perceive the number line in all its elemental glory. For if firstnames are an embarrassment, how much worse it should be to have them repeated, and what an honor it should be to have the first name divided away from the last! Properly, we may speak of inverse-leo-to-the-sixth Tolstoy, Kant by Immanuel-to-the-fifth or Jacques-cubed Lacan. He who is as yet unconvinced needs merely repeat ‘Yann-to-the-fourth Martel’ a few times to recognize the wisdom of our proposal.
    3. The problem of missing firstnames is adequately dealt with by means of introducing the null first name (denote phi). Then, Voltaire by phi, but also phi Cher, inverse-phi-squared Pele and so on.

    Bugs doubtless remain to be fixed, chief of which seems to me the inability of many rendering schemes to properly do mathematical exponents as in 2. Still, at least the explicit accounting of 1. may be achieved by writing firstnames, then striking them through when appropriate. This scheme, if followed, should make discussions of the more intellectual sort rather more exact, and by virtue of its more fine-grained telegraphical nature, superior at concise assessment. Alternately, we might name people pragmatically as we please, but this is less excellent.

  • Moonwalks (Sujatha)



     RIP, Michael Jackson.

    ————

     Buzz Aldrin wanted to be the first Moonwalker, but thwarted, in the final moments, by simple logistics.

    "In the end the decision came down to logistics. The lunar landing craft's hatch was located on Armstrong's side. It would have too cumbersome, and perhaps even dangerous, for Aldrin to have climbed over his mission mate, so Armstrong went first."

     ————-
    Here's a Mr.Bean who is a real artist, as opposed to a mere curator.

     "It has been nearly 40 years since Alan L. Bean walked on the moon as an Apollo astronaut, but he still wrestles with the experience every day, trying to recapture what he and other astronauts saw and felt in the medium of paint."

     

    (The original Mr.Bean is of course, the one and only Rowan Atkinson.)

     —————-

  • Bloggers Under Scrutiny

    Bloggers can continue to rave and rant about anything that suits their fancy. But now the Federal  Trade Commission plans to monitor their claims, especially if money or freebies are changing hands.

    Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon.

    What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews can be tainted: Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.

    The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers – as well as the companies that compensate them – for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts

    It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer – and getting commissions for any sales from it – would be enough to trigger oversight.

    "If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk," said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC's division of advertising practices. "Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and … they have an economic motive for what they're saying, that's information a consumer should know."

    The guidelines also would bring uniformity to a community that has shunned that.

    As blogging rises in importance and sophistication, it has taken on characteristics of community journalism – but without consensus on the types of ethical practices typically found in traditional media.

    Journalists who work for newspapers and broadcasters are held accountable by their employers, and they generally cannot receive payments from marketers and must return free products after they finish reviewing them.

    The blogosphere is quite different.

    More here from the Associated Press Report.

  • Estivate, Baby. Estivate.

    Hot_thermometer Summer has arrived early in Houston this year. June, usually a much cooler month than July and August, is sizzling. Most years around this time, it feels more like late spring or early summer with temperatures in the mid to upper 80s. Instead, the thermometer has hovered around readings more reminiscent of broiling mid-summer for the past several weeks. After a long spell of near 100 degree temps, there is still no respite in sight in the coming days. We've also not seen any rain for the last one month, a rare occurance in the coastal city. 

    I am no new comer to blazing summer heat, having grown up in North India during pre-air conditioning days. In those days ceiling fans and desert coolers provided some respite inside the home. Outside, we carried umbrellas and tried to stay in the shade. From April onwards until the refreshing monsoon showers broke the enervating spell in early July, folks adjusted their lifestyles to accommodate the unrelenting assaults of heat and dust. We learnt ways to survive the inferno with simple, common-sense coping methods  - frequent cold showers and change of sweat soaked clothes, avoiding the mid-day sun, wearing cotton, sleeping in the open air at night (on roof-tops and courtyards), drinking cold drinks made with yoghurt and roasted green mango and eating light, bland, torpor inducing foods. (see my last comment on this post) Air conditioning has improved things in India, at least for those who can afford it. But people still treat north Indian summers with prudence and resigned caution.

    Houstonians too have their own ways to deal with the persistent summer heat. In principle, they are not very different from what we did in Delhi. The bottom line is that those who must put up with extreme heat, sometimes wish for a prolonged sleep of oblivion. Some surely wish they could escape the weather through estivation.  From Saturday's Houston Chronicle:   

    Summer officially starts tomorrow, but in fact, the season oozed up weeks ahead of schedule, the way it always does in Houston. And just as predictably, it’ll refuse to leave in September, when the calendar says it’s fall’s turn. Summer here isn’t the fleeting visitor so beloved in more temperate climates. It’s the overbearing roommate you can’t evict, the unwanted house guest who decides to move in. It is the season that tries the Houstonian’s soul.

    You know the drill. You leave a super-chilled building — an airport, the grocery store, your office — and walk into air warmer and more humid than your exhaled breath. You open your car door, stepping back to avoid the oven-like blast of heat. You swat a mosquito, then wipe your own blood from your hand.

    Summer is the season of warnings: air-quality warnings, hurricane warnings, warnings to your kids that if they don’t do something besides play on-line games, their brains will melt and leak out through their ears. You’re warned to avoid the heat of midday, to exercise in the morning, to water your plants in the evening.

    Use sunscreen! Stay hydrated! Never leave your dog in the car! In other places, it’s winter that kills. Here it’s summer.

    To survive, we go to ground. “Estivate” is the word. A zoology term, it means “to pass the summer in a dormant or torpid state.” It’s the hot-weather version of hibernating.

    In humans, estivation involves long naps, tall iced teas and shade. Icehouses, movie theaters, swimming pools, hammocks: They’re our versions of the cool, safe hole in the ground. No-brain TV shows, shallow summer movies, paperback thrillers, Popsicles, margaritas: Count them as aids to mental hibernation, necessary to lull your brain into a survival-enhancing state of rest.

    Sooner or later, summer will end. We forget that it will, but it always does. The kids quit running through sprinklers and go back to school. The mosquitoes die. Hurricanes give way to northers.

    On some crisp morning, months from now, we’ll no doubt return to our old productive selves: Full of projects, full of plans. But that bright day is a long way away. Right now, we’re in the teeth of summer, and we’re struggling to hang on. Wake us up when it’s over.

  • Hand – Eye Coordination

    If only the problems of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine, N. Korea and the Republican right were as easy to swat away! (Link via a friend’s e-mail)


  • Green Revolution? (Sujatha)

    Stonethrow Much discussion is on in the media and blogosphere over the violent clashes in the aftermath of the Iranian elections. Was the election rigged or not?
    A collection of interesting links and stories:
    In which Juan Cole thinks that it's highly likely that the elections were stolen: A list of possible indicators that the results were fraudulent, followed by a disclaimer of sort.
    "So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.

    What I've said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be."

    In which Nate Silver thinks that a statistical analysis doing the rounds does not prove fraud, though he believes that fraud occurred and might not be evident from the statistics.

    ""Still, though, would it really be all that hard to rig an election in a way that would be hard for statistical analysis to detect? Suppose that you're Ahmadinejad, and that you become convinced based on the actual vote totals that you're on track to lose by several points. Could you not simply take every tenth vote, or every fifth vote, that came in for Moussavi, and count it for yourself? This would preserve an element of randomness and would make the province-by-province results look reasonably correct relative to one another.

    My point, I suppose, is this. Out of all the things you'd need to do to rig an election, coming up with a set of results that managed to avoid easy statistical detection would probably be one of the easier ones. So I'm skeptical that statistical analysis alone is going to turn up evidence of fraud. But I'll be keeping an eye out for other approaches, particularly from those who have a deeper understanding of the Iranian state than I do."

    NYT's Bill Keller:
    "On the street, the speculation focused more on how the election was manipulated, as many voters insisted it must have been for Mr. Ahmadinejad to score such a preposterous margin of victory.

    One version (from somebody’s brother who supposedly knew someone inside) had it that vote counters simply were ordered to doctor the numbers: Make that 1,000 for Ahmadinejad a 3,000.

    Others pointed out that the ballots seemed designed to lead opposition voters astray. Voters were obliged to choose a candidate and fill in a code. Though Mr. Moussavi was candidate No. 4, the code No. 44 signified Mr. Ahmadinejad.

    One employee of the Interior Ministry, which carried out the vote count, said the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country.

    They didn’t rig the vote, claimed the man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. They didn’t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it."

    A Leftist view of Moussavi's earlier stint in the government:

    "As prime minister from 1981 to 1989, Mousavi oversaw social austerity measures imposed to finance the Iran-Iraq war. At the time, he was a proponent of normalizing relations with the US and recognizing Arab regimes. In the lead-up to the American Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s, as the US and Israel sold weapons to Iran, Mousavi organized arms purchases from Israel and oversaw the repression of opposition to the negotiations with US officials on weapons—including the execution of prominent Iranian politician Mehdi Hashemi, who had led a Tehran demonstration against these covert arms deals."

    The article contends that Khatami might have been a more radical rival to Ahmadinejad had he not pulled out of the election, but that he did so in hopes that Moussavi would be able to collect a larger proportion of the centrist as well as progressive vote.

    A skeptical voice (Abbas Barzegar) who mistrusts the story pushed by the Western media:
    "As far as international media coverage is concerned, it seems that wishful thinking got the better of credible reporting. It is true that Mousavi supporters jammed Tehran traffic for hours every night over the last week, though it was rarely mentioned that they did so only in the northern well-to-do neighborhoods of the capital.
    Women did relax their head covers and young men did dance in the street.

    On Monday night at least 100,000 of the former prime minister's supporters set up a human chain across Tehran. But, hours before I had attended a mass rally for the incumbent president that got little to no coverage in the western press because, on account of the crowds, he never made it inside the hall to give his speech. Minimal estimates from that gathering have been placed at 600,000 (enthusiasts say a million). From the roof I watched as the veiled women and bearded men of all ages poured like lava.
    …
    In the last week Ahmedinejad turned the election into a referendum on the very project of Iran's Islamic revolution. Their street chants yelled "Death to all those against the Supreme Leader" followed by traditional Shia rituals and elegies. It was no match for the high-spirited fun-loving youth of northern Tehran who sang "Ahmedi-bye-bye, Ahmedi-bye-bye" or "ye hafte-do hafte, Mahmud hamum na-rafte" (One week, two weeks, Mahmoud hasn't taken a shower).

    Perhaps from the start Mousavi was destined to fail as he hoped to combine the articulate energies of the liberal upper class with the business interests of the bazaar merchants. The Facebook campaigns and text-messaging were perfectly irrelevant for the rural and working classes who struggle to make a day's ends meet, much less have the time to review the week's blogs in an internet cafe. Although Mousavi tried to appeal to such classes by addressing the problems of inflation and poverty, they voted otherwise."

    BBC's latest: a solid and succinct analysis.

    AP: not too bad, either.

    Not tired of links yet? Check The Lede for practically hourly updates.

    Though, the comments are more entertaining and possibly illuminating, as is Reza's smart zinger:
    "Comment:
    Reza
    Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:13:19 GMT
    Are you people high or just uneducated, brainwashed people? A.) The ballots are done by hand in Iran, not electronic and somehow they have counted the majority of the votes this fast?! B.) Iran is not a real democratic country, the president has no real power. This is a joke and so are the majority of the delusional people that are commenting."

    So we have the puppet master manipulating the strings behind, hewing closely to Stalin's dictum that"He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything."

    In the US, we've had the Supreme Court in their black robes 'pick' winners of our elections before. Iran has Supreme Leaders in black robes who still 'pick' winners of their elections, the will of the people be damned.

    I think that the Obama administration will monitor but not interfere in what is happening with Iran, unless the CIA has a mind of its own and continues with shenanigans a la Mossadegh coup.What must be will be, and has to be organic and coming spontaneously from the people. If they have the numbers and support, maybe it will be the new Green Revolution in Iran.

  • Publius (Joe)

    Some snippy conservative twit outed Publius, of Obsidian Wings fame (measured relative to the blogosphere, of course, which still puts him WAY behind that guy in his mother's basement who suggested some baseball player in Philadelphia might be using PEDs, let alone people anyone actually cares about). He's some law professor, not that it matters (although it matters to him, obviously, since he blogs/blogged pseudonymously).

    Anyhow, I'm saddened over the loss of Publius's pseudonymity. Not because of the larger debate about pseudonymity and outing pseudonymous bloggers (Leiter goes off here, for example, making points about consequentialism, fairness, etc. Typical of a law or philosophy professor, of course, Brian fails to mention that the only reason Whelan outed Publius is that Whelan is — and was particularly being — a snippy twit. An annoyed child acting out of spite. I think this is also a deontological fail for Whelan, but again, the petulant child/brat angle is what actually stands out to me).

    Instead, I'm sad because that's one fewer blogger I can claim to be. Thank goodness there's still Giblets. And, in a pinch, Michael Bérubé.

  • Once more on Sotomayor and judicial temperament (Joe)

    I just love this quote: "How dare she be smart and aggressive?  Wait, she’s a lawyer and a judge."