Announcing The… Warries!
: Dan Hartung corrects me on my Webby whine (below), sending me email:
Well, blogs were around for the 1999, 2000, and 2001 Webbys, and didn’t have a category then either. But some of them still won; the “Personal Web Site” category was added for 2000, and the winner was http://www.cockybastard.com/ (John ‘Halcyon’ Styn). That year, Slashdot (which fits the broad definition of a group weblog), won as a Community Site. Jim Romenesko’s Media News, often cited as a seminal single-topic weblog, won as a “Media” site. And Stile Project, a prototypical (now a sell-out) E/N site, won under the Weird category. The record in ’01 wasn’t as good — Plastic and LiveJournal being the only blog-related winners…. Bottom line? They’re dominated by Bay-area granola libs…
I guess my real complaint was that this was the year of the — pardon me, but I don’t really mind the title, considering the title of this very blog — Warloggers. And we don’t find them there. No surprise, really, for the reason Dan puts forth.
So what should we do: start our own self-serving awards?
The Warries?
I can already hear somebody complain: Why not the Peacies?
The Anti-Idiotarianies just doesn’t sing.
Categories? News & comment (nominees start with who else?). Foreign reporting & comment (Blair, Johnson…). Just comment (Layne, Welch and just about everybody).
: By the way, don’t believe the nice things Layne said about me. He’s easily bought — for the price of a book or even just a cheap paper.
New York, New York
: You can tell that New York has twice the energy in its air that either California or Europe. The measure? Nick Denton has been posting five times as much in the last week — since he moved to New York — as I’ve seen from him in months. Coincidence?
Promoting fertility
: If you thought you never wanted a kid, you’ll change your mind after watching this. Lileks will cause a population explosion.
Elie’s fatwah
: Elie Wiesel on NPR last night said two wise things (of course).
Asked whether and how Israel could come to peace with the Palestinians, Wiesel said that if Israel could come to peace with Germany, of all nations, it could do this, too.
He also called on Muslim clerics to issue a fatwah against what is happening now.
What a spectacular thought. Rather than relying on calls for Muslim clerics and leaders to merely “condemn” the 9.11 attacks and the suicide bombings in Israel, how much better it is to have them put their words where they matter. This is a religion that believes in following the dictates of their holy writings and of clerical interpretations. A fatwah means something; it has the authority of law.
We hear Muslims on TV saying again and again that the Quoran forbids suicide.
It’s time to mean it. It’s time for them to issue an order, a fatwah against suicide and suicide-murder.
So that is the challenge, that is the test, for Muslim clerics everywhere: Either you are willing to issue a fatwah against suicide and suicide-murder… or you support it. Either you are a person of Allah… or you are not.
