[blog focus] consistency of style

Norman on Mars

Continued …

Pretty clear what Gavin Ayling sells – just look at his banner. And yet he’s no one-trick-pony: At the moment I am reading The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. It’s a really great book. He touches on milk intolerance and wheat intolerance quite early on. To summarise, he suggests that humans did not originally evolve to eat the seeds of grass. The seeds of grass, unlike fruit, did not evolve to take advantage of passing through the digestive tract of a mammal. Grasses do not need animals to eat their seed in order for their seed to be distributed. And so on ...

ToryDiary: Wannabe Labour leaders all less popular than Blair William Hague's statement on North Korea's nuclear weapon test. This is the no-nonsense style of Tim Montgomerie – straight-down-the-line political reporting from the Conservative camp and therefore widely read. He never deviates and has no need to. Required reading for the politicos.

Guido Fawke’s stance is ‘the parliamentary gallery observer’ but he deviates into Guido-elsewhere and is clearly deeply adored by Brits everywhere for being … well … Guido: Guido loves Google - they host this blog for free. Gmail and Google Calendar organise Guido's life. Google knows all and the scale of Google's capabilities is awesome. If you need to know about Guido, this is the blog to do it from.

When Stuart A cam [no error] get away for a while from his prime target who shall not be named, his deep research, aggressively relentless fisking style and articulate turn of phrase are like a withering blast. On Aaronovitch: Aaronovitch Watch called it “Euston: the movie”, which is a reasonable summary, although it never reached beyond the intellectual level of a pantomime. David Aaronovitch’s programme, No Excuses for Terror, was the whole absurd routine one more time – the same questions, the same pat answers, from the same monotonic commentators. If you’re going to tangle with Indecent Left, make sure you’ve done your homework first.

Of a different, softer focus are the two featured bloggers from the main page. Ellee Seymour is, quite frankly, a sweety and too soft by half. You never know what’s coming from her either but it’s always from the heart and concerns the heartland: I have an insatiable curiosity about people and their lives and for new knowledge. This one’s on horses: The UK has been losing millions of pounds in racehorse sales due to an over-stringent ban imposed by the Indian government which my MEP Robert Sturdy is hoping to have lifted. The ban has been in place for the last five years following the outbreak of a single known case of a disease called Contagious Equine Metritis.

Still learning Dave Hill, having first been attracted by his attention to the minutiae of daily life in urban Britain, I’m partial to his micro-focus, as in: Speed Stacks is a game in which you construct brightly coloured plastic beakers into sets of pyramids and collapse them all as quickly as possible. Sounds boring, yes? That, and possibly harmful. I can only report though that my fifth born, in all his joyful eightness, loves playing it. Stacking is an addition to his school's menu of clubs and he anticipates it eagerly. I sat in on last week's session, which was presided over by one of the learning mentors. You can almost feel the eightness again. A necessary blog on your blogrounding.

Another exponent of the let’s-get-down-to-our-way-of-life comes from the other side of the pond – the peerless Dymphna: This is the story of Wayne the carpenter. An average man, living an average life. Proud of his kids, dedicated to his work, a friendly man who is prepared to like the people he meets. When the contractor Wayne works for runs into a sticky situation, he sends Wayne the Peacemaker to calm the customer and arrange compromises that leave company and customer satisfied. Read it all.

Now Bryan Appleyard is definitely hard to get a line on for some people, although he enjoys quite a reputation amongst the afficionados [is that the correct spelling?]. Again, I’m quite partial to his on-the-edge-of-reality focus and this is a prime example: Schizophrenia, it seems, has suffered a bad case of semantic bloat. Scientists have decided that the term has expanded to cover so many symptoms that it is now largely meaningless and its use is interfering with the treatment of mental illness. Meanwhile, over at Tate Modern, huge slides have been installed in the Turbine Hall. A Tate curator says, yes, they are fun, but also they are art because they are beautiful.

There’s a quirkiness to Bryan Appleyard’s focus which Norman Geras would by no means associate himself with and yet Norman has sometimes been off the planet: Norman Geras informs his readers that when he views the new pictures from Mars: “I’m not sure why, but it’s maybe the feeling you get that you could be standing there and seeing it for yourself.” See the photo top left for the intrepid Mars walker himself.

Prodicus is a relative newcomer and already he has established himself as a hermit-like, labour-discontented, philosophical thinker, sometimes writing with Eugenides-type rage. My very favourite was when he simply stated: Now I’m really angry. I can just see him at his keyboard, fuming. Perhaps this is blogging in its purist form. Here he explains the difference between fools and thinkers: Roddle, on the other hand, is a clear thinker who understands, like all sane men, that one simply cannot know everything and that 'everything' is beyond the human mind to encompass.

Whilst on the other side of the ocean but a little further north, Canadian Neocon ruminates: So smoking pot does make you smarter. When I was younger, and bear in mind we're going back 30 something years here, I had a friend who insisted that smoking dope made you smarter. Trouble is, he didn't have ready access to a gazillion dollars worth of lab equipment and a dedicated cadre of grad students who could make that brainwave scientifically credible. Well, I guess it was only a matter of time. THC, the key compound in marijuana, may also be the key to new drugs for Alzheimer's disease. That's because the marijuana compound blocks the formation of brain-clogging Alzheimer's plaques better than current Alzheimer's drugs. And so on …

Still over on that side, Vox Day is a one man demolition team. You either like this sort of thing or you don’t. I do. After disposing of Malkin, he went for the gay molesters: There are somewhere between 36x and 49x more normal men than gay men [and that] means that despite there being more girls being molested by men than boys, a gay man is between 8 and 11 times more likely to prey on children. This is why there is no heterosexual equivalent to NAMBLA and the worldwide push to drive the age of consent lower is almost uniformly led by gay men. No beg pardons and no quarter given and that’s why he regularly gets upwards of 150 comments per post.

Johnathan Pearce, at Samizdata, one of the oldest liberarian blogs, is also of the hard-hitting school: Compelling people to pay into pension funds is borne out of the idea that economists and other supposedly clever people know better than we benighted citizens how we should arrange our affairs …I have several problems with this way of thinking. First off, if we are so lazy, short-sighted or plain thick to run things like our long-term savings, isn’t that rather corrosive of the idea of a nation of free citizens with the right to vote in elections? If a person is deemed incapable of saving for his dotage, should he be allowed to decide which careerist should get the keys to 10 Downing Street or the White House? It’s a neat piece on ‘soft paternalism’.

Some bloggers are part of the ‘swearing club’, of which notable members include DK and Mr. Eugenides and this style splits the blogosphere in twain like no other, not even over political differences. Hard to see how any of these gents could ever reject a comment for being offensive and besides, one would have to be pretty professional at it to beat the Kitchen at its own game. This is one of Reactionary Snob’s milder pieces: Alec Salmond has called [Straw] a 'narrow-minded bigot' which, coming from a Nationalist, is a bit rich. All sorts of 'Muslim leaders' have come out and told us that it is a woman's right to wear the veil. Again, a tad rich for non-elected Muslim 'leaders' to lecture us on women's rights. Liberals all over the country are telling us that these sorts of comments are further alienating the Muslim community. Does no one stop to think that, in the UK, wearing a dress that completely obscures the face might just alienate people anyway?

Euro-serf is a perfect example of ‘identify the product and don’t deviate from it’. You want Euro-scepticism – you know where to go. Style? Tongue-in-cheek is the way for Serf: I wish to apologise to my readers for leading them astray. I have repented. The EU is very important and we couldn't live without it. I mean, what would we do without work like this. Are we not lucky to have such people working on our behalf, what would we do without them?

Tim Worstall is famous for the short, pithy fisk and scathing, heavily linked, minimal-word debunking. One of his latest: Your Tax Money At Work This was paid for by you. And this. No, really, they even have a blog on that page (not written by Dave Mili though). You really are paying for this. Details and more details. Tim acknowledges that most people don't like following links but that's the way he does it. I like to have the option, personally.

Another in the ‘scathing’ camp is the inimitable and erudite Pedant-General, who’s branched out, it seems or perhaps returned to, select roots. However, I am exceedingly miffed by this: It must be time to introduce an occasional and somewhat shady Russian Correspondent to those gathered around the mantelpiece With varying degrees of enthusiasm - and, often, no enthusiasm at all - Russia has long wrestled with the business of bribery, in which citizens are compelled to fork over payments for everything from admission to “free” public universities to lucrative commercial contracts. He has a perfectly good Russian correspondent sitting right now at this computer and the slight is difficult to bear.

I can’t reduce Chris Dillow to a paragraph because his pieces are ‘whole concept’. He has an easy way of reducing any topic to its constituent parts, always in economic terms: At the brilliant Sports Economist, EclectEcon simplifies too much: I keep telling my students that economics can be summarized with the phrase, "People respond to incentives." This is not quite right. People respond to incentives at the margin. The qualifier matters, because not everyone is at the margin. For example, you can increase the Nobel prize money as much as you like, but I'll never win one, coz I ain't clever enough. And however much you cut the price of James Blunt CDs, I'll not buy them. The point is obvious, but it matters. First, it suggests a popular justification for bosses' big pay - that it's necessary to incentivize them - might not work. What if bosses just don't have the cognitive resources to manage complex entities well? Incentives can bring out abilities. But they can't bring out what God didn't put in. Second, it means there's a limit to what economics can achieve. He loves his ‘firstlies’ and ‘secondlies’, Chris.

I wanted to give my regulars a rest this week but then caught this and the mind simply boggled: Hmmm, all being well, your humble Devil will be modelling menswear on Wednesday and Thursday, possibly in the Highlands, so posting may be light. Obviously there is a crying need for the dark, lanky type with a big nose in the market right now ... Still, anything for a spot of cash, eh?

Back on Sunday with Kamm, Pollard, Davis, Quinlan, Dale, Newton, L’Ombre, Marrin, Phillips and a few new names as well.