Les Enfants Terrible

I'LL CONFESS RIGHT NOW THAT I'VE TAKEN a couple of trips over to the Huffington Post in the last day or so. I even got so far, earlier today, as reading Rob Reiner's post longing for the days of Watergate. When the media wasn't just a "government propaganda machine" for a majority party.

Yep, the Huffington blog is looking like a bona-fide waste of time, unless you care what Larry David has to say about John Bolton or Bill Maher thinks of bio-deisel. Needing a fix of something a little more, shall we say, substantive, I headed over to see what kind of Monday Lileks had.

Immediately it looked as though there would be no escape from Arianna, as James mentioned it in the first five words of Monday's bleat. But it was not a topic I was in search of but substance and Lileks never fails in that department.

That’s the big problem with blogs, of course: who cares what X thinks? It all depends on the quality of the thought, the uniqueness of the product, the value added. In the blogworld, a celebrity name adds no value whatsoever. If the blog’s good, the celebrity may earn some blogcred (oh, Lord, shoot me now for that one) for not sounding like someone who just emerged from the isolation tank of LA culture. But I really don’t care what Larry David thinks about John Bolton. I care what Larry David thinks about the itchy tags on shirts that scrape your neck, because I know that he can make a 12-part TV series that revolves around that detail, and George Will can’t.

It might be hard to imagine that Lileks discusses watching TV upside-down in underwear and explains how Sinatra could get away with wearing "fuzzy orange sweaters" in the same column, but he does.