Outside the Beltway

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES #31

James Joyner · Tuesday, February 3, 2004 · 4 comments

When Wizbang’s Kevin Aylward started this feature to highlight the worst posts of the blogosphere, he clearly had no idea how much lousy material is out there. Apparently, there is no licensing requirement to start a weblog. There should be.

Anyway, Kevin was finally driven to the brink of madness by having to read all this dreck so he has parceled the task out with the hope that, like radiation, small doses won’t be fatal. This week, I’m testing this theory out at OTB.

WARNING: I read these entries one at a time as they came in. I can not be held responsible for the results of reading them all in one sitting. You have been warned.

In order of submission:

• Jack Rich of life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness gives us his take on a book he hasn’t actually read. He explains why the free market will take care of businesses that kill their customers. Not right away, of course.
• Harvey of Bad Money combines Star Trek geekery with a white boy talking ebonics. Outdated ebonics. It’s not as good as it sounds.
• Helen, aka Goldie, aka Drama Queen lamely urges you to vote for her in the next lame round of the lame blogmadness tournament. Even though she lost in the previous round.
• Andrew Ian Dodge of dodgeblogium continues to prattle on about some German cannibal, adding a weak joke at the end. Plus, to add to the international flair, some fellow from the UK corrects his grammar.
• Erica of swirlspice provides a weak pun followed by a genitalia joke. Both involving Minnesota, no less.
• Ghost of a Flea provides a musical ode to . . . Ontario. Thankfully, there is no audio.
• Sean Hackbarth of The American Mind reports on a new problem with TiVo. Needless to say, the problem wasn’t new.
• Patterico of Patterico’s Pontifications pontificates that people don’t particularly prefer political advertisements during the Super Bowl. Not that they like any kinds of ads during the Super Bowl. Or at any other time.
• Susie of Practical Penumbra has a post about making a short post. The post isn’t short. Or coherent. Or funny.
• The Gleeful Extremist tells us about how after watching “Finding Nemo,” he bought some shrimp for his aquarium. It goes on for several paragraphs. None of which explain why he was watching “Finding Nemo.” Or the proper way to batter and deep fry a shrimp.
• Owen at Boots and Sabers jokes about a news report that pirates are killing sailors. Sadly, the joke did not involve Howard Dean’s Iowa speech.
• Josh Cohen of d-42 spends several paragraphs telling us why boobs and nipples are no big deal.
• Kiril Kundurazieff of Sneakeasy’s Joint takes some bad advice from a book on writing. The result involves birth, zippers, and fainting.
• Interested-Participant explains why organic coffee tastes like urine. And not just at his house, either.
• The King of Fools shows how he got his nickname by trying to make a Groundhog Day joke involving Janet Jackson. Now, Michael Jackson might have worked. Or even Bill Murray.
• phelps of The Everlasting Phelps tells us he eats a lot of bad Mexican food, noting that Mexicans do, too. Of course, most of them are desperately trying to come to the USA.
• Jim of JammerBlog tells the story of an onion eating dog.
• Mark Hasty of The Bemusement Park has a comedic guide to reading the used car classified ads that’s mostly not all that comedic.
• Eric at Classical Values has a really, really long post explaining why John Kerry really isn’t a pseduo-Brahmin anti-American gay gigilo who doesn’t love Jesus. Or something like that–I got bored. Did I mention it was long?
• The anonymous blogger behind Musings from Brian J. Noggle uses a weird news story about yahoos engaging in gunplay over the dorky game of Taboo to brag about his skills at the dorky game Taboo.