I confess myself fascinated by the referral statistics to my blog, tiny in number though they may be.
It is partly driven, of course, by a brazen need to find out whether I am being talked about, for good or ill. I even love my trolls. “Let them hate, so long as they talk about me.” (I think it was Seneca who said that. Or Madonna. I can’t remember now.*)
There is also, however, the pleasure of stumbling across a very good writer because both my post and his are linked to in the same thread.
A fine example is Paul Bibeau at Goblinbooks who I came across in a Cracked.com forum thread in which I got a plug. Paul is channeling Ayn Rand, and it is good:
Back in the early 1940s I was living in Tenafly, New Jersey with a guy named Ronnie Hubbard. He was hiding out in his brother’s basement so he could avoid the draft, and I was working at a rendering plant. Most nights we’d lie on this cot he’d found on a curb and drink, fuck like weasels, and smoke opium. I’ll be honest: We smoked a shit-ton of opium. Anyway over the course of a few weeks — it’s hard to piece it all together — we started talking about pranks.
I also get the chance to hook up with old friends, such as AsiangrrlMN who, along with her Angry Black Webmistress, is employing her anger quite effectively:
The second bill is the lovely, “Hey, we’re going to do a completely meaningless procedure before you’re allowed to have an abortion and stick something up your vagina at the same time” bill. It passed the House in VA, 63-36.
Susan of Texas gets Ross Douthat in a headlock and administers some well deserved noogies, while Anita at I Read Odd Books is dumping her 4am findings from the depths of the internet, including a delightfully deranged analysis of bestiality and pedophilia in The Simpson’s Movie.
Meanwhile, TBogg takes James Poulos out behind the woodshed and administers the statutory fifty whacks with the stupid stick (and makes straight vodka come out my nose (which, I can now tell you, is not at all pleasant)):
Yesterday James Poulos writing for Tucker Carlson’s Chronicle Of A Career Death Foretold penned an gaseous belch of a post called “What Are Women For?” which was, offensive title aside, what you might expect if you were to dump two scoops of over-educated rhetorical flatulence, a half-cup of undercooked thought experiments, a few overly-ripe bon mots, and a soupçon of undeserved self regard into a blender set at ‘blather’. The end result is what Empedocles fondly referred to in his Purifications as a “steaming pile of donkey poop.”
Best of all, though, I love the pleasure of stumbling across a blogger or artist who has shown the ineffable good taste to have inserted me into their blogroll. Not surprisingly, most of them turn out to also be talented, erudite and funny (and sometimes quite sweary and a little bit odd).
I adore, for example, The Perils of Palins, particularly when she is channeling her inner troll (with troll doll pictures and added cat):
You never know if you have one or two trolls being four or five people, three or four trolls being themselves, or perhaps just one dysfunctional person.
Also deserving of a look is the lovely and very talented (and neither sweary, nor odd) Jen Hill, who has a book coming out and who drew the delightful dog and cat doodles in this post and kindly allowed me to show them to you.
Now then, what delights have you found (or, indeed, created) on the internets, my dears?
ETA: Congratulations to commenter Dallas Taylor for his wonderful story, and to Dee Loralei who seeks feedback on some musical compositions by her son, Cooper Torode, who appears to have both talent and six-pack abs, the little bastard.
[Cross-posted in a slightly different form at Sarah, Proud and Tall.]* Attributed by Seneca to the playwright Lucius Accius, and said to be a favourite saying of Caligula. Apparently.