David Akin

A million blogs in the night

I've got a professional interest, of course, in figuring out how many blogs there are in the blogosphere. (A blog, for purposes of this count, would be something that looks and feels and reads like this and not something that looks and feels and reads like, say, Slashdot).
Tom Coates, the Brit behind one of my favourite blogs PlasticBag, has a piece in the Guardian Online in which he says there are a million blogs out there. He cites no source.

Michael Moore

Like a lot of folks with too little time and too many books on bulging books-to-read lists (my lists are at about 3,000 and counting but that's another story), I give an author 50 pages. If you haven't got me by then, I'm not going any farther and I'm moving on to the next one on my list. So I buy Michael Moore's New York Times bestseller Stupid White Men. I think he's kind of funny. And generally, I'd agree with his politics. Hell, I'm from Canada -- we let gay people get married up here!
So I buy his book -- the expensive hard-cover edition, no less -- but I'm sceptical that I'm going be able to sit through that whiny, smart-ass tone of his for nearly 300 pages. It works for a couple of hours in a movie or, even better, in that highly distilled version during his brief TV show. Still, I'll give the book a try. One of the blurbs on the jacket applauds Moore for "great journalism" and "great research" and early on I read that George W. Bush didn't really win the 2000 election. Hmm. That ain't research. That's called reading the daily paper. But, as Moore notes, nearly 90 per cent of Americans do not read a daily newspaper so I suppose for most Americans, what Moore did is, in fact, great research. As for "great journalism" -- well, all I know is if I turned in a story that was nothing more than a list of George Bush's cabinet with a couple of grafs of catty comments after each one, any editor I've ever worked for would hand it back and ask me to actually write something interesting.
But I plowed on. He's supposed to be a funny guy.
I moved on past the critical page 50 mark but I was looking for excuses by this point. Give me an excuse to keep going, I asked of my author, because I'm looking for an excuse to stop.
So now I'm 80 pages in or so and I get to the chapter Idiot Nation. This is where Moore makes fun of Americans becuase they're, well, idiots. That's not me saying that. That's what he says in the book. So the first few pages of this chapter read like a know-it-all having a big in-joke with other know-it-alls about the know-nothings around them. I hate that kind of snotty humour.
And then Moore gives me a reason to put the back down.
On page 89 of my edition -- the hardcover edition -- Moore gets smart with a list of the leaders of the the world's 50 biggest countries. Topping the list -- China. Hmm. Nope. That would be Canada. Oh well, maybe he just got a bit mixed up about who's biggest and who's not. Nope again. Canada is nowhere on his list of 50 big countries. And this is the buy who made the movie Canadian Bacon!! I thought he liked us!
So that's where Mike lost me. There's nothing more unfunny than some idiot from the Idiot Nation &trade trying to prove how smart he is and how dumb everyone else with bonehead mistakes like that. Especially at Canada's expense.

So what am I reading now?
Still plugging through Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I'm around 700 pages in with about 200 to go and he's given me plenty of reasons to plow on.
With Moore's book down, I'm starting in on Kevin Warwick's In the Mind of the Machine: The Breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence.