Blogging will be light the next couple of days. I'll be struggling with a time trifecta: jammed at the office, Holy Week, and NCAA basketball tournament. I hold my 16th annual basketball team auction tonight, which usually keeps me up about two hours past my bedtime, then I need to be alert at the office all day Thursday, but still groomed for Maundy Thursday. Could be rough, and this blog will be the first casualty. I'll post something, but it could be on the lame side ("Nothing new there, Scheske!").
Note: I don't post Brews You Can Use on Good Friday (at least I'm pretty sure I haven't). The point of BYCU is to get people in the mood for drinking. That's not an appropriate mood on That Friday (even though the first round of the NCAA Tournament is that day; a dastardly coincidence of events that thoroughly bums me out).
__________
I'm waiting for this post: B16 is a huge fan of Brokeback Mountain: The USCCB has launched a papal visit blog.
__________
My current blogging column is at The Register (subscription required). Excerpt:
If you want to make it in the blogosphere, you need to make a splash. In the political blogosphere, the splash probably needs to be offensive.
Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed a troubling characteristic of American writing: inflammatory prose. He said readers in America's democracy “require strong and rapid emotions, startling passages, truths or errors brilliant enough to rouse them up and to plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst of the subject.”
The prose in democracies, de Tocqueville said, “will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, almost always vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of execution more than at perfection of detail.”
Thanks to the blogosphere, de Tocqueville's observation is truer today than it was in the early 19th century.
Newspapers then and now have employed inflammatory prose, but it's nothing compared to what you can find on the partisan blogs. The prose on those sites would make a thundering Tom Paine blush.
__________
Ten ways to get kicked off a plane. Via.
__________
Tibet crisis? That's nothin': A Chinese 'army major' who dated a string of girls and cheated them out of £16,000 has allegedly been exposed as a con artist - and a woman.
