more blogging about articles about blogging

The Village Voice has a couple of interesting pieces up. One is on lit blogging and the other looks at the effects of blogging on academia. Too sleepy to comment now. You do it, okay?

G mein D hain, tho...

get that G moving to The Ultimate Blogger challenge.

Mailer, Mamet, Beatty, Keaton, Cronkite, Paltrow, Evans, Brown (Just another group blog)

The Huffington Post isn't here yet. But it's got the Guardian writing about it.

Blogs, or online weblogs, in which opinions and reports are posted on the internet for everyone to read, are to get a dose of celebrity.

Arianna Huffington, commentator, one-time Republican and candidate for governor of California, has recruited a bevy of close friends to create an über-blog that will offer a round-the-clock commentary on our life and times.

Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Walter Cronkite, Gwyneth Paltrow, Harold Evans and Tina Brown are just a few of the 250-plus names recruited.

dishoom!

Have you seen the this page full of India's superheroes? It includes TV-only characters like Captain Vyom (it's Milind Soman, girls) and the hairpiece. Seems pretty comprehensive, and you'll find links to a couple of comic book sites. DOn't see Bahadur, though. And speaking for ourselves, we think that the Phantom and Mandrake should be regarded as honorary Indian comic book characters. What say, people?

Slowly, they're getting it.

Mainstream Media, that is. BusinessWeek's May edition has blogging as the cover story, and they've even started their own blog on blogs, Blogspotting.net.

And closer to home, still haven't seen the India Today story on bloggers that everyone else is talking about, but we're told that a blogger not unfamilar to you gets a passing mention, which you'll miss in the buzz about our more illustrious pals, and the news that Hurree's been unmasked. Oh well. It was good run, and it was bound to happen, old chap girl.

Update: Amit Varma just mailed in a couple of links. This one's got Henry Copeland's take on BusinessWeek covers in general and that one in particular. And this is The Economist on Murdoch's views on the end of journalism as we know it.

In which this blogger shamelessly self-promotes once more.

What do Arundhati Subramaniam, Shobhaa De, Anurag Kashyap, Rachel Dwyer and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni have in common with your humble host? Nope, it's not gleaming, long hair. Mr Kashyap's tresses are, perhaps, luminous, but they're not long. You'll have to go here to read all about it. (Awright. It's just Zig on Blogs and the Writer.)

[Note: that site requires registration. And demands it via an incredibly nosey form that wants to know everything about you, with the possible exception of your credit card number, and that we imagine was an oversight. Really now, Jerry.]
[Note to previous note: You have heard of BugMeNot, haven't you?]

Sigh

As if Samit-who-doesn't-like-being-called-precocious-so-we'll-just-call-him-young-Samit wasn't enough to give us inferiority complexes (to go with our multiple personalities and/or delusions of plurality) about our inability to write anything beyond bite-sized blogpposts at our advanced age, an even younger brat-pal, just out of her teens, forsooth, young Priyanka, has these three wonderful posts about growing up, leaving the familiar and heading off into the wild unknown.

that damn basu boy...

...does it again:

Ei Babli shon na Babli be my labhar Babli
Ei Babli oi oi Babli tell your phathar Babli

Fiddle uith my choshma Babli
Tickle my phat goph
Bhun day bhen youre legal Babli
Bhe two musht elope

read on. We're laughing too hard to comment.

To all the wonderful men in our life: Yes, you can buy us dinner. And a movie's okay too.

The New York Times takes a look at what the writer calls The Man Date:

Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie 'Friday Night Lights' is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.

The article goes on to describe a lot of the dos and don'ts: beer or hard liquor or a glass of wine okay, splitting a bottle of wine dicey; steak or meat-dominated meal great, cooking for another guy (unless its a grill), or candle-lit dinner, nope; going dutch is best. (To which we say, we don't care what we drink; we'll eat anything that doesn't have capsicum in it; and if you insist on paying, we won't sulk.)

Oh yes. Here's the good part.

All men, however, agree that one rule of guy-meets-guy time is inviolable: if a woman enters the picture, a man can drop his buddies, last minute, no questions asked.

We men are such reasonable chaps. 'Enry 'Iggins would approve.

Ah, so.

Finally, thanks to the Wikipedia, we managed to find the source of those wonderful error message haiku we've blogged about in the past. They originate in a Salon Challenge way back in the nineties, where they invited readers to submit three error messages written as haiku poems. And presented this as an example:

Something you entered
transcended parameters.
So much is unknown.

You can read the results of the contest here.

P.S. For a counter view on this, you must read Paul H Henry's A Call for the Complete Elimination of Joke Haiku Production on the Internet.

having it both ways

Nice idea, YaGoohoo!gle. (Thank goodness it doesn't include MSN search too!) Though we're wondering how long it will last before the trademark lawyers pounce.

Hans Christian Andersen...

was born on the 2nd April, 1805, and as Nilanjana S Roy says, "This year will be full of tributes to Hans Christian Andersen, from Tina Turner concerts to symphonic performances of fairy tales, readings and the rest." Hers is here.

That piece got me remembering that Andersen was probably the first name that imprinted itself on my mind under the header "writer." Though I can't recall individual tales at the moment, I remember that some of his stories scared the pants off this young griffin - not, of course, that I would have admitted it. Fuzzy memories of children lost in the snow, a mermaid with bleeding feet...

Anyway, that wasn't even what I meant to blog about. The point was it's so nice to see so many of one's favourite writers putting their columns and articles up on their blogs. Besides not having to weed through what so many publications seem to fondly think is friendly Search to find them, one gets to also peek behind the scenes. Kinda like a "The making of..." section of a DVD. In Nilanjana's article, for instance, we learn that she did this one while battling malarial fever, and has no recollection of having actually written it. Me, if I have so much as a sniffle I put my feet up and abandon all thoughts of work.

Ooh. A mosquito just bit me. Expect higher blogging standards here in a few days.

We got rhythm,

we love music, but to our eternal regret, we have a tin ear.

Thankfully, two of our favourite bloggers have written fascinating little notes on music, and we can read and memorise a few li'l phrases we can drop casually into conversation.