A pot where nothing melts
Lovely Lady Liberty
With her book of recipes
And the finest one she's got
Is the great American melting pot.

The words were sung in 1974, for Schoolhouse Rock, a fondly-remembered series of clever short animated "lessons" interspersed among ABC's Saturday morning cartoons.

Sometime since, and I haven't isolated exactly when, the very idea of a melting pot went out of style. The third century of the American experiment began with a very different set of huddled masses yearning to breathe free without losing any sense of their own cultural identity. The price of success, they felt, was heritage, and it was a price they didn't feel they should have to pay.

The melting pot faded from the lexicon of social studies, to be replaced by multiculturalism. To be sure, America has always been multicultural, and we have always had hyphenated-Americans -- many of whom were not well treated. Some of them, individually, have found their pieces of the American dream. Others are still looking.

The nature of America has always been derived from its variegated heritage. We pick and choose the best of what our citizens bring us, and those differences give us an unexpected strength and a unique national character.

I am uneasy at the continuing trend towards social balkanization, because it leads to... well, to situations like this. Two lesbians in Washington DC wish to have children. Specifically, they wish to have deaf children, because they are deaf themselves.

Several months before [the boy's] birth, Sharon and Candy -- both stylish and independent women in their mid-thirties, both college graduates, both holders of graduate degrees from Gallaudet University [defined elsewhere in the article as "the world's only liberal arts university for the deaf"], both professionals in the mental health field -- sat in their kitchen trying to envision life if their son turned out not to be deaf. It was something they had a hard time getting their minds around.

That is to say, it's very much the kind of issue they had been trained to deal with and resolve -- from the other direction. God forbid these two should permit some busybody like, well, themselves (only with hearing, and *shudder* probably straight besides) to interfere with the raising of their children.

When they were looking for a donor to inseminate Sharon, one thing they knew was that they wanted a deaf donor. So they contacted a local sperm bank and asked whether the bank would provide one. The sperm bank said no; congenital deafness is precisely the sort of condition that, in the world of commercial reproductive technology, gets a would-be donor eliminated.

As my daughter would say, no duh.

So Sharon and Candy asked a deaf friend to be the donor, and he agreed.

Though they have gone to all this trouble, Candy and Sharon take issue with the suggestion that they are "trying" to have a deaf baby. To put it this way, they worry, implies that they will not love their son if he can hear. And, they insist, they will. As Sharon puts it: "A hearing baby would be a blessing. A deaf baby would be a special blessing."

There's a distinction I don't get. They'll still love him if he can hear, but he'll be a "special" blessing if he cannot. I hope he reads this article.

"Mommy? Sis and I are the only children in the neighborhood who can't tell when the ice cream truck is coming. Why?"

Since the 1980s, many members of the deaf community have been galvanized by the idea that deafness is not a medical disability, but a cultural identity. ... Sharon and Candy share the fundamental view of this Deaf camp; they see deafness as an identity, not a medical affliction that needs to be fixed.

Oh, silly me. There's the answer to my snarky question. These deaf -- excuse me, Deaf -- kids are going to be raised in a Deaf community. Nobody will be able to hear the ice cream truck.

And because my wife and I wear glasses, we're going to have our daughter wear glasses that distort her vision so that she can see no better than we can. And I'm overweight, besides: Start eatin', girl, and don't stop if you can still see your feet.

I am not bothered by the desire, which technology is rapidly giving us the ability to enact, to produce the healthiest possible baby. I am not bothered by using that technology to produce a particular type of healthy baby.

But it is a perversion of medical science to set out deliberately to produce a deaf child.

I regret that the deaf feel separated from hearing society. I am delighted that they find a strength in community to replace that which a sometimes-insensitive hearing community unthinkingly denies them.

But deafness is not just another tile in the multicultural mosaic. It is an increasingly avoidable, often curable, almost always transcendable defect. We do no one any favors to pretend otherwise. Especially not Jehanne and Gauvin, children deaf by their mother's choice.

The personals

Thursday Threesome:
Onesome: Red. Color me passionate...what are you passionate about? My wife. My children. Let's face it, I'm not a fiercely passionate person about much else.

Twosome: White. Color me truthful...or is it little white lies? What's the last "little white lie" that's come from your mouth (or keyboard)? I spend most of my life trying to be noncommittal when forced into a position where I might need to tell a "little white lie", and you want me to fess up to it on the Web? (You'll notice I didn't deny I've ever told them: That would be one.)

Threesome: Blue. Color me with music...what one piece of music really speaks to you? One piece? Good gosh. Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite". Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue". Nanci Griffith's "Love at the Five and Dime". Burt Bacharach's "April Fools" (the instrumental version, not the Dionne Warwick vocal). Rupert Holmes' "Town Square / The Old School". How can I choose between such radically different musical genres? One piece? ...Fine. One piece. "I'm Going to Go Back There Someday", by Paul Williams, sung by Gonzo in The Muppet Movie.

The Friday Five:
1. What is your favorite restaurant and why? Shells seafood restaurant in Clearwater, Florida. I love a good deviled crab, and most restaurants have given up on it. I don't think of myself as a picky eater, but most restaurants I visit I'm lucky to find one or two things on the menu I want. Everything's good at Shells. (There are Shells elsewhere, and they're nice too, but I really like the openness and decor at Clearwater.)

2. What fast food restaurant are you partial to? Boston Market. I'm also a sucker for a good chicken pot pie.

3. What are your standards and rules for tipping? I start at 20%, then revise it upwards or downwards as needed. Exception: If the restaurant "thoughtfully" precalculates the tip and adds it to the bill in advance, they will not get one penny more than that no matter how good the service was. (Does it show that I tend to travel with a group?)

4. Do you usually order an appetizer and/or dessert? Rarely. I find most restaurants' main dishes quite filling. I only order an appetizer when it's something I cannot resist (say, eggrolls) or I intend to eat light and order only that. I can't remember the last time I ordered dessert.

5. What do you usually order to drink at a restaurant? I am decaffeinated and nonalcoholic. This severely limits my options. Usually it's Sprite (I do live in Atlanta, after all). Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised and they'll have lemonade or 7up: Sometimes I end up with water. You'd be surprised how few waitpersons actually know whether they serve anything decaffeinated or not. This is a big strike against Pizza Hut, whose pizza I like, but the only decaf drink they seem to serve is Orange Slice.

Spring renovation
I told you I'd spring (ha ha) a new template on you.

If my site meter is to be believed, approximately 4% of you will not see it correctly, as you are using older browsers that do not support cascading style sheets (CSS). At my current traffic levels, that probably means two people who were Googling for "nude calendars" or "Ayat al-Akhras video" and didn't stick around when they saw I don't actually have either of those things. It should still be readable, though. And to the other 96% of you, I'll bet you didn't even notice.

While I was at it, I added a few links to the ever-growing list: CowBlog, Brushstroke.tv, Alice in TV Land, TV Tattle, and Manufacturing Dissent.

Under the knife
No, you do not need to surgically modify Koreans' tongues to enable them to properly pronounce their Ls and Rs. The "problem", if you want to call it that, is that the Korean language (like Japanese) draws no distinction between the two, so children growing up with these languages don't learn to hear the difference.

Americans of Korean descent who grow up speaking English seem to manage it OK. Doubtless many Korean adults have trouble with it; others find it learnable. And a lot of us dumb Americans have trouble with the complex tonalities of their language, too, for the same reason: We didn't grow up with a language in which it mattered.

I'm not needed there
Nor do I even feel a need to be helpful and tell you where the Warblogger Watch is (go see Reynolds or Jacobs, they're more generous than I). It's a Yahoo group, although (on a dare from the Professor) the anonymous 'watcher has begun his own blog as well. I popped in, looked around, and popped right back out again. I predict the anti-war group will soon be overwhelmed by bellicose warbloggers, out to see just how far the guy's chain can be yanked. Said Jacobs:

If criticizing U.S. policy is so dangerous, why is Michael Moore making millions of dollars, instead of munching granola bars in Gitmo? Why is Barbara Kingsolver walking free?

I think the point is wasted on him, but I enjoyed it.

I'll just make an observation, as the owner of several Yahoo groups myself: Ms Jacobs said that the moderator -- well, I'll call him the list manager, there's nothing moderate about him -- signed her up on his own initiative. (Apparently she's not the only one, although I suppose Drudge could have signed himself up.) On Yahoo's "Invite" form is a warning to "Use this feature responsibly." That means you shouldn't do it unless you're sure your target wants to be on your list -- Yahoo considers subscribing someone to a group without their permission to be abuse and responds accordingly.

Somebody tell him to keep his hands off his template
I'm not going for the mutating-color template this time, but a very nice CSS-based template I found at BlogSkins. You can see a preview here. (BlogSpot's banner ad doesn't seem to like CSS, but it doesn't matter: That's just a temporary blog to show me what the page will look like.) The original was white with green and lavender boxes, but I decided to keep my current color scheme, mostly. When the ad isn't present, the pale yellow boxes to the left slightly overlap the darker title banner. Kinda cool.

Unless somebody says "God, no!", I expect to apply it to this page soon.

Advantages: The page should load faster. Disadvantages: I'll be forced to learn CSS.

LATER: You have to write extra code to allow what plain old HTML already does: Allow the person viewing the page to change the size of the text. I haven't found the advantage of this yet. (Unless the point is to prevent them from doing that and screwing up your layout.)

It's not AOL's fault!
A Philadelphia man -- a lawyer, of course -- is filing suit against AOL for defamation of character. Seems there's been a lot of spam originating from his daughter's account since last year, when AOL first threatened to suspend service over it. (!) When the lawyer complained to AOL, they replied (quite reasonably) that either someone had obtained his daughter's password, or her computer was infected with a virus.

He installed anti-virus software and scolded his daughter -- and let the matter drop. Apparently it never occurred to either of them to change the password.

A few weeks ago, daughter told dad that her friends had seen "terrible things" in her member profile. Dad took a look -- and wrote another sternly-worded letter to AOL. This March, AOL finally terminated the account. Now Dad is suing for slander and "identity theft".

It's not our fault. She was asleep when these messages were sent. It's AOL's responsibility not to let this happen!

"The security and integrity of a member's account is up to the member," he said. "If they see an e-mail that asks for their password and billing information, we tell them to never give that out."

Change the password, Dad.

Interactive TV
Emily Nussbaum covers participatory television in a story for Slate. Her use of the internet is exactly right, in that the article is peppered with links to other sites that illustrate her points. And, of course, every mention of a specific site is a link, as Tim Berners-Lee intended.

The series she has chosen to illustrate the close contact that viewers sometimes have with each other, and occasionally have with the creative team behind the series as well, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, of course, she has my attention.

I have no criticism to make of this article. It is thoughtful and well-researched, and Ms Nussbaum is funny and self-depreciating.

There's just one more nudge I might have suggested to make a good article into a definitive one, since we are descending into the depths of geekdom. No mention is made of the unprecedented availability of writer/creator J. Michael Straczynski to fans during the run of Babylon 5, most of which is chronicled at the newly-restored Lurker's Guide. That, I believe, was the first time a show's creator had extensive contact with the show's viewers while the show was in production. As the Web was not ubiquitous as it is now, the medium was the show's Usenet newsgroup.

But I guess Babylon 5 is ancient history now...
(The show premiered Feb 22, 1993, and its final first-run regular episode aired November 25, 1998.)

Nobel regrets
Members of the Nobel committee have expressed a desire to take back a 1994 decision, in which the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. Fair enough, I'd say. About damn' time, I might add.

But wait. It's Peres' award they want to take back, not Arafat's. "One member said Mr Peres had not lived up to the ideals he expressed when he accepted the prize."

And Arafat has?

InstaPundit says, "Words fail me." I can hardly wait to see what the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web has to say: They haven't missed a chance to point out, as the Palestinian suicide bomber count rises, that Arafat (at whose command these bombers operate) is a recipient of the Peace Prize.

In light of what the European opinion-masters have had to say on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict thus far, though, it really shouldn't be much of a surprise. I don't wish to blame the good people of Europe for the lapses of their pundits, but the more I read the more convinced I am that the anti-Semitism that reached its peak with the Holocaust didn't just come out of nowhere, and it didn't vanish when WWII ended. They haven't (quite) said that they think Arafat has the right idea, but they haven't said he doesn't, either.

I see three possibilities: (1) Arafat is in complete control of the Palestinian infitada. (2) Arafat is not trying to control it, attempting to maintain "plausible deniability" of actions with which he is in accord but dare not say so (in English). (3) Arafat cannot control it. None of these positions are that of a worthy recipient of a Nobel prize.

Some months ago, President Bush said "Israel has no better friend than the United States." Obviously this is true. Such criticism as Israel gets in America (and there is a fair amount of it) is nothing compared to its reception in the halls of European government, or the pages of the European press.

And now this fresh insult from Norway.

Just last night, all over cable news (well, Fox anyway), American interviewers were trying to get Peres (Israeli Foreign Minister, then and now) to answer provocative questions: Peres, in every instance, gave the right, statesmanlike answer. (I am paraphrasing.) Is Arafat a terrorist? It is not for me to say. I would say he has not done everything he could do to achieve peace. Should they take back his Peace Prize? It was given for good reason at the time. Should you even attempt to negotiate with him? It is for the Palestinians to choose who they wish to lead them.

Not to go Reuteresque on you, but I'm beginning to think we are overusing the word "terrorist". I have a feeling that's why the President didn't use it yesterday, choosing instead to say "They are not martyrs. They are murderers."

Words mean things
In what way is DirecTV simplifying my programming options when they offer me Total Choice, Total Choice PLUS, and Total Choice PREMIER?

How can there possibly be such a thing as Total Choice PLUS? If it's Total, there's nothing more to add to it. And if Total Choice Premier is really totally, er, total, then plain old Total Choice isn't Total at all, is it?

I wish this were unique.

Oh, I know, I know. The reason the dish companies dazzle us with options is to obscure the fact that the one option we really, really want -- true a la carte choice, channel by channel -- they're not going to offer. I'd love to get a package of twenty to thirty channels that we'd actually watch, without having to take thirty to seventy more channels that, for our tastes, are just taking up space on the dial.

I mean, obviously the technology is there, they could do it (they can do pay-per-view, after all), they just won't. They make money selling us those unwanted channels, so that isn't going to change.

The personals

Tuesday Too:
1.) If you're not too paranoid go post your photo on Andy's Sunny Pose. You must be kidding. I'm wa-a-ay too old for this.

2.) What do you think about the relatively new phenomenon of student rioting after games? Inexcusable.

3.) Show me your googlewhack. If you don't know what one is go here. I never whack my google. And if I did, I wouldn't do it here.


Thursday Threesome:
Onesome. Love. Ever felt that "unconditional love"? Tell us about it.... Of course I have. I have children. I know how feeble that sounds if you don't, but the parents out there know what I mean, right?

Twosome. Labors. What was your first paying job (not counting baby-sitting)? Grocery bagger. Hated it.

Threesome. Lost. Have a knack for losing things? Is there something you lose "all the time"? I do have a knack for locking my keys in the car. Does that count? Typically I keep an extra copy of my car key in my wallet, just in case.


The Friday Five:
1. What are the first things that you do in the morning to start your day? Some days, I hurriedly drag my clothes on and shove the children out the door to school. They are generally capable of getting ready to go themselves, requiring only a loud enough parental voice to keep them moving until they are fully awake. (Because I work a late shift, I do not do this every day.) Check my e-mail; check blog comments. Take the leisurely bath I referred to last week.

2. What are the last things that you do at night before going to bed? Brew a gallon or two of iced tea for the next day. (We drink a lot of iced tea around here.) If needed, toss three cups of flour etc. into the bread machine and turn it on. (Home-baked bread is better than anything you can buy in the stores. Bread machines make that possible again.) Read an actual dead-tree-style book until sleepy. (Just finished Coloring the News.) I try not to check the e-mail at night, because I will stay up too late reading blogs.

3. What daily routine have you recently added to your day? Hmmm... Can't think of anything.

4. What routine do you wish you get rid of? Driving to work. It's about an hour each way.

5. What's the one thing that makes you feel like something is missing if you don't do it some point within your day? I could give several answers to this, but they all boil down to "see my wife and kids". My work schedule being what it is, I often don't see them at all during my Thursday-Monday work week: Only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays do I get to catch up with them, a little.

Nothing is Real
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an article in the Wall Street Journal (link requires paid registration) about voice-tracking, a new technology being used by radio stations to allow a single DJ to host shows on several stations at once.

Now you can see a similar story for free, thanks to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Chances are this link will only be good through Wednesday 4-10: The AJC doesn't keep its archives freely available.) (Or you could try this.)

Clear Channel Communications, which owns numerous stations here, is the biggest offender, but far from the only one. Of the thirteen FM music stations the AJC checked, only three had live DJs all the time. Some had relatively small percentages of voice-tracked programming, something many stations do overnights or on weekends. (But then, nobody is pretending that Casey Kasem is live and local.) And then there's The Max 105.5 (not coincidentally, a Clear Channel station), which has exactly one live/local DJ. Fox 97.1 (a Cox Communications station) is darned close to all-"Randy & Spiff" all the time.

Is there a shortage of people who can do this kind of work? Between voice-tracked music shows and syndicated talk-radio hosts, one gets the idea that the average city only has one person who knows how to do radio.

Doesn't that make it much harder to get into the business, if there are so few local positions open? Where will the next generation of DJs come from?

If you don't think listeners will care, why not tell them the show isn't live?

It matters to me. If I'm going to invest my time in listening to the radio, the station can by gum hire a human being to speak to me live.

Is this CD enhanced or protected?
Sony has just released the new Celine Dion CD. It features copy protection technology.

What does that mean? Well, not only will it not play in your computer's CD drive, but it'll probably crash the PC as well. Good luck getting the CD out.

Okay, okay, I know, I read Photodude, I know that silencing a Celine Dion CD can be seen as good citizenship. Just check every CD carefully before you buy. The last music store I visited bore a sign saying they would not accept a CD for return if the seal on the jewel case had been broken. What if you get a CD home that won't play, and the store won't take it back?

For myself, in such a situation, I break the CD in half, send half to the store, and half to the label. The cover letter would explain that "this is the final CD I'm buying from you".

But then, for myself, that doesn't mean much. I buy maybe four or five CDs in a year.

Hey, Sony? Remember DIVX? Some people never learn.

"A new phase in the legend"
Who does this remind you of?

Now more than ever in the entire lifetime of this most remarkable democratic experiment in the history of civilization have the instruments of our Constitution been more important to us.

Well, that sentence loses its way, I think. Perhaps he forgot and thought he'd started the sentence with "Never before...": I'm also not sure what's meant by "instruments of" the Constitution, a document that has provisions and sections, articles and amendments, but no "instruments". Obviously Constitutional thoughts do not come easily to the speaker.

But would you have guessed that it's Phil Donahue?

As you may have heard, MSNBC is continuing its remake from documentary programming to opinion programming, having lured Donahue out of retirement to host its prime-time flagship hour at 8pm, opposite Connie Chung and Bill O'Reilly. It seems obvious to me that, once this new schedule is in place, women will have a tough time deciding between Chung and Donahue, leaving the men all watching O'Reilly. But what do I know?

Taking advantage of the shuffle, MSNBC will also move Alan Keyes to 11pm, safely away from Greta van Susteren. Ashleigh Banfield takes his place at 10pm, a canny move given that Banfield is MSNBC's hottest new face these days and van Susteren is mopping the floor with Keyes. Chris Mathews will move to 9pm (and will no longer time-share with CNBC); Brian Williams will move to 7pm.

When it was mentioned that a 66-year-old host is an odd choice to target the 18-49 demographic, Donahue replied, "When you think Phil, you think hip-hop." When I think Phil, I think hip replacement.

"I've just been blogging." "Get any on you?"
Alex Beam of the Globe doesn't get it. Or doesn't want it, or something. But Norah Vincent of the Los Angeles Times does. Look for the blog wave (God, what a mental picture, like rivers of snot or phlegm falls) to continue flowing through dead-tree-type newspapers, since each market will want its own version of the essay.

Those bloggers who actually write professionally should consider leaping to the forefront and "breaking" this story in their markets. Eh, Mr Lileks?

LATER: Alice in TV-Land is frustrated at the frequent disparaging tone that many print columnists take when they "discover" blogs. "Good God, are newspapers that paranoid that bloggers will take over the world?"

Well, yes, they are that paranoid. But their negative attitudes towards bloggers (when they have them) are also attributable to Professional Writers' Ego, which tells them that if we were any good, we'd be getting paid for writing. Therefore, blogs suck. (And many of us do, so "proof" isn't difficult to find.)

Why blog II
Den Beste is having, well, not exactly growing pains: As he points out, he owns his server, so many of the traffic issues that occasionally take down other sites (like all of us at BlogSpot.com) don't affect him. Call it a blog's midlife crisis, I guess: His site has grown so popular that other blogs now ask to be linked from his, to share the attention his writing justly commands. And because he is a generous man, this issue causes him some conflict. You can't link to everybody.

It must be rather like being the fastest gun in the west, being called out on the street by countless wanna-be gunslingers.

For the record: I have not asked anyone to link back to my blog -- at least, I don't remember doing so. Nor do I ever intend to. I'm flattered that people do, of course, but I'm not in this to watch my page counter roll over. I'm pleased to observe many of the same people returning regularly (Hi, y'all!), which is reward enough.

And the tinfoil hat goes to...
Thierry Meyssan, author of 11 Septembre: L'effroyable imposture (commonly given English translation: The Frightening Fraud), which contends that the Pentagon was not, in fact, hit by a hijacked aircraft on September 11, and any reports you may have seen to the contrary are the result of an American conspiracy to conceal the operations of a truck-bomber -- and what his real target was.

I really want to believe this is someone's idea of an April Fool prank. But if Amazon.fr is to be believed, not only does the book exist, but it is the number 1 best seller for French Amazon, and among French brick-and-mortar bookstores as well. (There is utterly no mention of it, or its author, on the American site.)

Snopes.com documents Meyssan's claims, and refutes them effectively. I'm particularly puzzled, though, by "Where are the wings?" Snopes doesn't point it out, but it's my understanding that the wings contain the fuel tanks -- and aviation fuel, as we have all seen at length, burns real good.

Plus, there were witnesses.

File it with the books on crop circles and moon landing fakery. And remember how hard the French are falling for this, just in case we need to judge their credibility on other issues.

Assuming the book really exists.

LATER: It's worse. Damian Penny reports that the book has a lot to say about "the hidden agenda behind the war in Afghanistan and the secret aims of the "War on Terrorism"".

Why blog?
I've decided there really isn't any need for me to separate my comments into a "serious" blog and a "personal" blog. Each blog would just be updated half as often. So I've copied what little content I'd placed in the second blog into this one here. The other one will disappear soon, if it hasn't already.

Glenn Reynolds, Steven den Beste, and James Lileks are among the best there is at what they do. Their styles are disparate, as they should be, given their differing backgrounds, interests, and goals, but I admire them all. When I compare my own hunting and pecking to their mastery of the form, I feel... unfocused.

What I finally realized was that I was in danger of forgetting why I blog in the first place.

I write. It is not, and never has been, what I do for a living, but it's what I do. I've been writing for an APA (amateur press alliance) for over twenty years now, and in that time I've only missed one deadline. Much of what I put on this page finds it way into my APA pages as well: This is, in many ways, a "first draft" for that.

My goal is simply to present a point of view. It's what we all owe to the ongoing human conversation, in which we each perceive the world we share and describe it to each other -- hopefully to better understand it, each other, and ourselves.

If this page seems unfocused, it's because I am. It's by design, on purpose. I don't have the desire to impose sufficient dicipline on my writing (at least, not this writing) that the question "What is this blog about?" can have a simple answer, other than this: It's about me. It's about the world I see myself at the center of. Sometimes it'll be about the war. Other times it'll be about what's on television. I might mention the latest stupid politician quote (we never seem to run out of those). I might mention how much I enjoyed the "Amazing Spider-Man" Coming Home trade paperback.

Hope that's OK.

On rereading this post thus far it seems rather sophomoric, like college students at 3am discussing how they can know that those parts of the world they can't see are still there. Oh, well. Like Georgia weather, the atmosphere here is unstable: If you don't like it, wait five minutes.

How to make a reputation
For weeks to come, possibly months (which is as far forward as I'm prepared to predict anything in the Wacky World of the Web), this Boston Globe article by Alex Beam will certainly be regarded as the landmark, the quintessential example of "real-world journalism takes note of weblog phenomenon and Doesn't Get It". Even Dvorak the Mighty has faded from memory, but the legend of Beam will live on.

Though, possibly, not as he had intended.

That said, better minds than mine have put him in his place. You'll find a comprehensive list at InstaPundit: Keep scrolling upwards from the linked entry, though. Just when you think it's all been said, there's more...

The article has numerous flaws, but I think the biggest "kick me" signs were painted by Beam himself, in the snide, condescending e-mails he wrote to a handful of the biggest-name bloggers offering them "a chance to reply" before he savaged them in print (as he clearly intended to do all along).

Selling out
Well, now that Glenn Reynolds, and about 200 of the biggest names in blogopolis, have been acquired by AOL Time Warner, that leaves me as one of the foremost independent blogs in the country.

At least, until Microsoft buys Pyra Labs and closes us all down. (Coming soon: All-new HotBlog!)