Thu, March 17, 2005
Diversion—10:57 AM
I've hit upon a bold new approach to wandering the blogosphere. (And yes, I hire an Armenian kid to come in on weekends and type words like "blogosphere" into this site because I flatly refuse on account of the Chocaholic Corollary incorporated into the onebee bylaws.)
Anyway, if you're looking for fun new blogs to read (and who among us isn't – you can never have enough), here's what I do: I think up an imaginary website address, and then later I go online to see if it exists. (Remember whatbadgerseat.com?) Yesterday in the car, I couldn't stop saying the word "fiefdom" – so when I got home, I checked out fiefdom.blogspot.com. Lo and behold – Notes From a Luftmensch!
This is a great way to find new voices online, and it really cuts out the legwork of having to scroll through the links sections of sites you already like and figure out which other sites might appeal to mutually shared interests. (And, by the way, legwork.blogspot.com – not as good.) It's akin to Yahoo!'s old random link generator, except now you know at least the URL will be cool.
As it turns out, Notes From a Luftmensch is written by a young philosopher in Boise, which is very cool because that's something I've always wanted to be. (A philosopher, not an Idahoan – not that there's anything wrong with that.) A self-proclaimed luftmensch ("an unusually contemplative person who has no definitive purpose or steady income"), his writing revels in stone-faced solipsism and often appears to be nothing more than a catalogue of his mind and surroundings – which is certainly no criticism: it's about time someone refined the practice of blogging to its true essence. There's a serendipitous synchronicity in the timing of my discovery, since I'm currently reading John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Luftmensch reads like the experiment of a cheeky grad student: what would Ignatius J. Reilly's blog be like? (In fact, it could just as easily answer the question: what would onebee be like if I left all my friends behind and moved to Idaho?) The writing is so gleefully self-infatuated that at times I'm almost convinced it's like Hot Abercrombie Chick – a meticulous hoax. This is just the sort of thing that the Stove Vegas blog would've been if we'd done it.
And he still hates the Bush administration as much as I did about 18 months ago. Possibly more! So, since I'm doing my best to cut back on the political stuff for the sake of my sanity, I think I'll just refer all those in need of Bush-based invective over to his site. It will be a very smooth transition: he's every bit as angry as I've been, and even more in love with his Thesaurus (if you can imagine such a thing). You won't find as many four-letter words in his rants, but only because he scornfully eschews words that short. He's even got ratings!
