Sunday, September 23, 2007
Being in the Wrong List
I find myself incandescent with rage this morning because of this. My incandescence is not caused by the fact that I am seventeenth in this list but by the fact that I am in the list at all. This list is of media blogs. Media! Good grief! In what way, exactly, is this a media blog? I am in the media, of course. At a stretch, any blogger might claim as much. But I very seldom write about the media. Like the Westminster soap, the subject is just too staggeringly boring. Being in this list makes me sound as though I have become one of those indescribably sad types with curiously deformed hindquarters who have been condemned to spend their declining years analysing circulation figures and DVD promotions. In Japan they'd be called 'window men'. But this does make me wonder in what list this blog could be included. 'Elite' blogs? 'Cultivated' blogs? 'Fantastically Smart' blogs? 'Bored' blogs? 'Angry about Nothing in Particular' blogs? 'Too Clever by Half' blogs? 'Seldom read' blogs? 'Futile' blogs?
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
"indescribably sad types with curiously deformed hindquarters"
ReplyDeleteI'd appreciate a little respect here when you talk about me.
HahAHa
As for what kind of list Thought Experiments belongs to, how about "Insatiably Curious and Sardonic" blog?
'In Blog We Trust' err ...blog ?
ReplyDeleteslow deep breaths. a link is a link is a link.
ReplyDeleteI'd have you at the top in the Double Acts Blogs, second only to Ant & Dec.
'Disabusing' blogs. The Effie thing, deary me!
ReplyDeleteBlimey the Effie thing - is that still going? Perhaps we could be an Effing Blog. Might be number 1 in that list... What, by the way, is Dad Blog doing in a top 30 of political blogs? Isn't it a case of the only 30 blogs Dale's readers had heard of?
ReplyDeleteExcellent, they're shooting rabbits on Countryfile - you don't often see that. More later (maybe).
Got it - the Ineffable Blog!
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ReplyDeleteAt the risk of sounding sycophantic, how about 'readable blogs', 'worthwhile blogs', or 'not-up-their-own-arse-in-boring-political-minutiae blogs'? I didn't even make the top twenty Welsh blogs and I suspect I wouldn't even make the top twenty written by people called 'Dale'. I can only assume that this book will be eminently untrustworthy and the highest recommendation one might have is by avoiding being mentioned in it. Blogging has become the playground for political activists, who, if we are to judge from what they write, are self-indulgent local-party workers with underdeveloped personality glands and a panache for writing sophomoric drivel. Do any two words in the English language combine more easily than 'tax' and 'initiative' to send a person to sleep? Given the choice, I'd rather have no readers than have to write about Gordon Brown's policy for bluetongue disease and its impact on EU farming policies.
ReplyDeleteA 'Blog' sounds like something you pick up and clobber people with. You first anaesthetise your reader using mind-numbing inanities and then dash his brains out with self-absorbed bullshit delivered in lifeless prose before dispatching him to an everlasting blog hell where every day is Sunday, and it's pissing down, and he's standing, even with a ticket, on a Virgin train all the way from Euston to Crewe, but the journey never ends, and his legs ache, and the Mother with three horrible screaming kids keeps saying "don't do that" but they do, because she's hopeless, and he wishes he was dead (Oh, he is!). Which all goes to remind me, I must pay a further visit to Jeffrey's blog.
ReplyDeleteOf course, none of this applies to 'you know who', but whisper it because he hates gushers'.
The idea of 'genres' in blogging is misleading. i read a fairly wide range of blogs & am only interested in prose that i enjoy reading. The actual subject matter is of little interest to me. Many people write readably enough, but without giving any pleasure: i'd only read them for pure information.
ReplyDeleteHow about 'An Enjoyable Blog'? To give pleasure is a worthwhile aim, in everything. i believe Frost said somewhere, "it begins in delight and ends in wisdom", well for me delight is enough, wisdom can shift for itself.
In the comments to his original entry, Ian Dale says of another blog he's tagged as "media": "[X] is indeed a media blogger. He's a journalist who happens to write a blog." So ID's classification is pretty meaningless. Mr X could just as easily be a writer/dad/polar explorer who happens to be a journalist.
ReplyDeleteAt a guess (it's your blog), what you enjoy is stated explicitly in a good title that gets straight to the point, imho - "Thought Experiments". And although I don't know, that could easily be quite a good phrase for Google listings too.
If people pay more attention to "The Blog" element than to "Thought Experiments", then that really is their loss. The last thing a blog is interesting for is being a blog, a mistake all these attempts at lists and rankings seem to make.
Perhaps Thought Experiments is a media blog because it cannot be pigeonholed like so many others. A bit of this, a dash of that, a smattering of the whimsical, and the odd genuine thought-provoker, to seize just a few examples from the recent past. Some might contend it is rather like getting the best parts of the Times without having to wade through the engineered fluff, self-important twaddle posing as serious contemplation, and endless speculation masquerading as legitimate news.
ReplyDeletePull yourself out of this pit of despair over being misunderstood, Bryan! Always look on the bright side of life.
Oliver Kamm deserves to be in a special category all by himself - "blogs by people who affect to despise blogging." Is there any sense in a man who thinks wikipedia is a threat to western civilisation devoting so much time to his own blog?
ReplyDeleteWell thanks for all the kind words and the sound advice, Ronin. I still thin about you tidying the room while waiting for the ambulance.
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ReplyDeleteNow Bryan - I confess I told Iain you should have been higher up the list. Did I do wrong?
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