Crib Chronicles

Bon Stewart’s latest post on CribChronicles should be mandatory reading for all new bloggers.

The fifty odd comments that follow it are like a crash Drivers Ed course for newbie bloggers, a reasonable alternative to the period of lurking before blurting required to absorb blogging tradition and protocol. I took the pill. If it dissuades my motor mouth from launching a five-hundred-and-fiftieth edition of the Hair-Channel for Men, we could even dub it blog-control!

I gave up classical guitar when I heard Andres Segovia. Then I gave up writing mystical essays when I discovered that Rainer Maria Rilke had bequeathed a little prose to the Western Canon too, not just poetry. Now Bon Stewart's blog makes me feel like trashing mine... almost.

She’s that good.

I guess I’m older-than-that-now, as the song says, so I’ve decided to persist awhile with two motives in mind:

First is the cold fury I feel at reporters and pundits who try to fool us with opinion disguised as questions, declarative sentences disguised as interrogatives. Philosophers call them Logical Fallacies, but to the rest of us they are just plain lies. Carefully embedded outrageous lies. They drive me nuts!

Remember when Lou Dobbs was on CNN every night? He violated the subtlety constraints of ‘embeddedness’, became the laughing stock of US journalism and had to be canned. He was too obvious and Fox News isn't far behind. More troubling is that the rest of our mass media are nearly as dishonest; they only disguise it better.

A rising tone on the final syllable does not a question make!

Nunaview and Influential Liars are two blogs intended to neutralize some of that poison. One is dedicated to Nunavut affairs, the other to broader national and world affairs.