Hey, This Used To Be A Geek Thing!

Back in the Stone Age when I started Kitabkhana, blogging was the nerdy, slightly disreputable, amiably seedy activity of choice. You blogged because you were bored, or you were trying to brush up your HTML skills, or because you were sick of the airhead news presented by the mainstream media. Or, in my case, you blogged because a) you needed somewhere to dump the links you wanted to return to some day and b) because it provided the illusion of anonymity and novelty that accompanied the early days of the Internet. It was a nostalgia thing. And bloggers, we were the Good Guys. We had no audiences, no ads, no money, sometimes no jobs. We flaunted our independence, we let it all hang out. It didn't really matter who got more hits, or who was more equal than the others.
Then it all began to change. People did articles on the blogging phenomenon, and the beginning of the end of the blogging phenomenon, and perversely reassuring pieces on how geeky the blogosphere still remains (it's so geeky that we use words like "geeky" and "blogosphere"). And now, blogs are Trendy. (This doesn't mean me, with the kind of audience over at Kk that is euphemistically described as "small but dedicated"--it means them, and them, and them, and of course them, and (yeah Maudie!) She Who Must Be Read.
Now this profile of the man who runs Gawker makes him sound as Cool New Corporate Flavour of The Month as any piece written about any media/ publishing big hitter. There's a piece about bloggers with book contracts (this has upset some bloggers, who are sensibly waiting to finish writing their books before signing pieces of paper, and who really didn't want the attention). And (how much more mainstream can you get?) there's this piece about People Who Blog Too Much.
The Babu isn't sure what's more depressing than this: to learn that his tiny attempt to be part of the underbelly of something or the other has failed as he (and Zigzackly) are dragged kicking and screaming into the mainstream, or to know that even when the mainstream decided to tickle the underbelly into emerging into the light, the little itchy spot it missed was, sigh, the Babu's blog.

The Man Who Would Be King

"The first American in Afghanistan" is not the phrase that comes to my mind when I think of Josiah Harlan--one of the finest specimens of the rogue, rascal and freebooter there ever was--but then I'm always behind the times. George Macdonald Fraser had a wicked sketch of Harlan in Flashman and the Mountain of Light, where the good doctor did a cameo as a man who played both sides false, in style.

Calling Lewis Carroll!

A giant three-tiered mushroom which measures a metre across and was found in the tropical forests of the Republic of Congo has left experts in the capital Brazzaville scratching their heads. "It's the first time we've ever seen a mushroom like this so it's difficult for us to classify. But we are going to determine what it is scientifically," Pierre Botaba, head of Congo's veterinary and zoology centre, told reporters on Thursday.
They didn't mention if it had a caterpillar on it.

Burgering Off

Also known as "why you don't want fries with that". Morgan Spurlock says he "felt disgusting" as he stuck to his script, which required him to eat three meals at McDonald's every day for a month. But the good souls over at The Onion dreamed up an even worse alternative scenario: want lunch, get a prescription.

And Number One on the Wishlist is...

I'm late with this one and very untrendy too: after a certain age, confessing that you still love Linus, Lucy and gang is like hanging on to your stuffed toy collection. All the same, this is what I want for my birthday. It goes perfectly with the tattered Snoopy-as-the-Red Baron poster we handmade for a school festival that I've saved all these years. Good grief. I'm a sap, Charlie Brown.

Sontag on the Abu Ghraib pictures

"Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word 'genocide' while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib -- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide."
Susan Sontag analyses the postcards from Abu Ghraib in detail:
"There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show...
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. ... [Most] of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate."

Send in the Clones

"A Japanese bull famous for siring more than 350,000 offspring now also holds the distinction of being the first large mammal to have two generations of clones." And researchers are discovering that the second generation clone appears to be quite fertile, in contrast to the first. Steak just got a whole lot stranger.

Who Wrote You?

Jane Austen wrote you. You are extremely aware of
the power of a single word.


Which Author's Fiction are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

It's okay. On my second try, I was rewritten by Flannery O'Connor.

Gladiabot

Fighting robots are here, sort of. Look at the picture carefully: "Honey, they shrunk Russell Crowe..."

Jhumpa Lahiri...

...has a short story out in the New Yorker. She can over-explain the Bengali ethos (hey, I'm the Babu, I'm supposed to complain) but I love it when she focuses on the right, evocative detail: "He noticed the two or three safety pins she wore fastened to the thin gold bangles that were behind the red and white ones, which she would use to replace a missing hook on a blouse or to draw a string through a petticoat at a moment’s notice, a practice he associated strictly with his mother and sisters and aunts in Calcutta."