Daily Blague

With well over a year of solid blogging behind me, I'm finding that the experience has taken a few unexpected turns. For one thing, I'm no longer so interested in the links to impish or naughty pages; in fact, I'm not really interested in links per se. I've discovered that, with a moment's thought, I can get to whatever's being talked about via Google. For another, I've all but eliminated single-purpose blogs from my rosters. Blogs that are always and only satirical, political, self-absorbed or preoccupied with any one thing might be useful from time to time, but I can't bring myself to check them out every day. The time that I would devote to Go Fug Yourself - a very funny blog that invariably reduces me to tears by the fourth entry - goes instead to exploring the Blogosphere in search of sites that resemble my own. And there isn't much of such time. Trying to keep up with my the many blogs that I've "bookmarked" since June 2004 would be a full-time job if I were diligent about it.

Which I'm not. I've only just taken a first look at Jasper Emmering's eminently sensible and progressive blog, Hollandaise since September, when Mr Emmering posted some amazingly insightful entries comparing New Orleans to the Netherlands as to flood-prevention and preparation. The author is a physician whose English is just about native, and I don't know where he finds the time to read as widely as he does. (I'm not doing anything besides this, much less tending to the sick.) Nor have I noticed that Ronnie Cordova is writing a lot less these days at Sublethal, where, to be sure, the prose style often suggests slo-mo self-flagellation. Just as self-punishing, bar bouncer Rob, of Club Life, is somehow getting his book written for - Harper, was it? And I'd forgotten the existence of Mr Sun altogether!    

The other day, JR, at L'homme qui marche, proffered a bunch of cool photographic links. JR has been experimenting with "faux lo-mo," Photoshopping his digital images to give them the undernourished look of pictures taken with old Soviet cameras. Turns out that a lot of Flickr patrons are doing the same. Hours fly by! Then Amy, at The Biscuit Report, announces that she's being plugged by a site called King of Zembla. So I visit King of Zembla and have a look at the other plugged sites. One of these, Daai Tou Laam Diary - kept by an American expat in Hong Kong - links in turn to a site that I haven't visited in a very long time, Jesus' General. Scrolling down at JG, I find the General having some fun with a Mr Andrew Longman, born-again contributor to Renew America who is very unhappy about Brokeback Mountain. Mr Longman is, indeed, fun - if unintentionally.

Has it occurred to the great bulk of our people that we need to quit tolerating the forces of internal destruction which work night and day to deconstruct our manliness at a time when our nation faces an absolute need for valor, ferocity, the force of arms, and the defense of the innocent pregnant woman and her children at home? Has it occurred to anyone, anyone at all, that it is immoral to assault masculinity? In a time of war?

The writer wins this week's Mr Patriarch award.

It goes on and on. There's one thing I've learned. It came to me when I was talking about this to Kathleen and she told me about a former colleague who likes the site but who, like Kathleen herself, doesn't always have the time to check in. "I'm a bit behind with The Daily Blague," she said. I told Kathleen to tell her, "Don't worry about catching up!" I used to say - at Portico, and with profound wrongheadedness - "this is not a blog." Now, I say, "this is not a book." You don't have to catch up.