Updating The Blog Roll = A Little Depressing

It had been awhile since I had gone through my blog roll with a fine toothed comb. Now I know why. I hadn't realized how many of my "ye olde tyme" blog friends had moved onto other things. I know that is in the nature of this type of communication, but still it can result in a kind of melancholy when you delete old links that no longer lead to anything.

Even some of the links that remain lead to sites that have not been updated for a year or more, or others that still posting but are far less active then they used to be. As if life itself isn't transient enough, I find myself affected by the hyper-transient character of the blogosphere.

Really sometimes I wonder if I was cut out to live in the times I inhabit. I know change is the perpetual state of the human condition, but in past eras the slower pace of change could supply at least a pseudo-permanence to things. Things could endure long enough for people to get used to them, and though they didn't last forever, they were around long enough to become part of the shared experience of many. For that reason, change could take on a generational aspect. Yes, change could signify ordinary decay be it physical or social in nature, but things past continued to live in the minds of older generations. For the younger generations change, because it took its time in coming, could build and grow in its significance. Thus, change could be viewed as growth or decay, and sometimes as both at the same time.

Today, however, the sheer pace of our life (technological and otherwise) makes it difficult to see change as anything other then decay pure and simple. Sure, we see the rise of things, but one could hardly sit back and take them in before they begin to crumble before our very eyes to be replaced by something else which will, all too quickly, undergo the same process.

It's this process which rubs me the wrong way. I'm simply not prone to adopting an Epicurean attitude to the things of this world. For the Epicurean, change is the only meaning possible of our existence, especially the change known as decay and death. Anything that speaks to a permanence (pseudo or otherwise) is a lie pure and simple.

Everything that makes me who I am fights against this tendency. The contemporary world seems hell bent on making our existence into nothing but a collection of ephemera. (Written ephemera being limited to 140 characters, please.) However, I think I am something more then that, just as I believe the people I've put in my blog roll are also more than that.

Blogs may not be the best place to look for pseudo-permanence, but there are precious few places in the world which offer ground much better to look.

I Know You Generally Shouldn't Eat Blue Food...

...but I want by Blue Crab!!

When I try to visit Blue Crab Boulevard I see this:

This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota

Which isn't nearly so tasty.

By George, I Think They've Got It

First Things now has a blog, and they are getting the quick hitting snarky post down: Oliver Twist, Call Your Office

Here’s a tale of woe. According to this story in the American Lawyer, lawyers in Manhattan’s elite law firms—the kinds of places where partners make $1 million a year and more—are depressed because they don’t make as much money as financial professionals. Alas, it’s true. Top investment bankers have long made a multiple of what top lawyers make, and private equity types and hedge fund managers can make considerably more than that.

Apparently the differences are becoming undeniably apparent in social settings. The article describes a fund-raising auction at a private school in Manhattan: when a home-cooked meal by a famous chef was being auctioned off, the doctors dropped out of the bidding at $7,000, the lawyers at $15,000, and then the bankers, private equity and hedge fund crowd got serious and fought it out among themselves, with the winning bid coming in at $40,000.

“‘Face it, we have no status,’ says an Am Law 100 [i.e., one of the one hundred most profitable law firms in the U.S.] partner of the pecking order at his sons’ private school. ‘We go to these school functions, and this well-heeled group looks right through you. They won’t give you the time of day. You’re just one step ahead of the doorman.’”

Indeed, there is no misery so small that it cannot fill the human heart.

Brilliant.

Now all they need to do is allow comments.

I'm A Blogging Snob

I went over to this site to read about an FEC complaint a liberal blogger filed against Fred "Is I Is Or Is I Isn't" Thompson. However, try as I might, I simply can no longer take any blogger seriously who uses that template! It is one of the basic blogger templates, and it was even the Iconic Midwest template for a few months back in 2004-05.

I know. I know. It shouldn't matter, but oddly it does. It is a subconscious thing that I have become conscious of, and I certainly wonder how many other sites I've rejected as pablum because of an outdated appearance. I should be above the whole "image over substance" thing, but I'm not.

Of course, all this could be avoided if bloggers would just update the look of their site every once and awhile.