Taking the Stick to Tim Blair
Posted by Jacques Chester on Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Update: Take a swipe at Tim Blair and everything comes to a halt. Evidently our server is a Blairite.
I first met Tim Blair at a pissup function for the Australian Liberal Students Federation. It was a pretty swanky evening — a great cocktail bar, a piano, people taking turns to see who could sing God Save The Queen and Advance Australia Fair loudest. Yours truly took home the gong for Most Improved Club (the improvement was to have existed for 2 years without warning — a 100% improvement on the first year!). Even though the venue was named for a famous Labor Prime Minister, life was grand.
It was about two-and-a-half of bottles of wine into the evening that a curious little fellow appeared on stage and read out one of the most scathing, wittiest, sharpest and funniest speeches I’ve heard. It turns out he was Tim Blair. Later he was surrounded by adoring fans, the wisest of whom had cigars ready to light. I didn’t have a cigar, but flush with the glory of being More Improved than the merely Somewhat Improved, I ventured to swap one-liners with Blair. I don’t recall really much of what I said, according to my lawyers.
But today I come to shake my fist at Mr Blair for making two utterly unfounded claims, which I will dispense with below.
The first claim is that Mark Steyn is funnier that PJ O’Rourke. I don’t know if this deserves an answer. O’Rourke is Irish for gossake, or at least he says he is whenever he makes fun of US senators from Michigan Massachusetts. His book Parliament of Whores stands as a monument to humourists being trumped by an utterly bizarre reality; a world so stupid that he essentially only had to point and crack one-liners and still produce one of the saddest and most powerful books I’ve ever read.
For contrast, Mark Steyn has some sort of bee in his bonnet about people who pray 5 times a day, I dunno.
His second claim is much more troublesome, and I quote:
Heres how blogging works. First you run a site for four or five years, then one day John Malkovich turns up at your house.
Poppycock, and for several reasons. Ken here is into his fifth year, but there’s no danger of being quizzed by a master actor. Depending how you measure these things I’m into my 7th or 8th year of this caper; amongst geeks I have the cachet of having held down a sub-5000 Slashdot user id. No baldies oozing with pathos have darkened my door (unless you count my friend who was a buddhist monk, but that’s neither here nor there).
Quite aside from the fact that it’s utterly impossible. Technorati lists tens of millions of blogs. At any particular moment millions of them are in or beyond their fifth year of operation, but very few Malkovitch Moments have been reported. A simple calculation, which can be performed by any 5 year old with double degrees in maths and physics, is that by now Malkovitch must be moving faster than light to make these appointments. At such speeds his sonic boom is laying waste to whole cities; the heat generated incinerating his hosts and raising global mean surface temperature by several degrees (and damn that carbon dioxide business).
So what’s it to be, Tim? Don’t make me get an ARC grant to prove you wrong, because I will if you don’t come clean.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 9:49 AM and filed under Humour, IT and Internet, Metablogging.
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To state Mark Steyn is funnier then PJ O’Rourke is a big steyn on anyone’s character!
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 10:08 am | PermalinkEight years? So you hopped on the bandwagon *after* it became cool?
On the hand, sub-5000? Jebus.
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 10:18 am | PermalinkAgree passionately Jacques.
I suspect Blair has gone cold on PJ because PJ *has* kinda mellowed with age. But he was always a happy warrior even in his younger days. Mark Steyn seem angry all the time. Funny he is not.
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 10:20 am | PermalinkIt’s when I got a frontpage at k5.
I timed myself perfectly: between the first wave of Slashdot and the second wave of Everyone Else.
Ad for my /. id, I signed up in 1997, about a week after they created the accounts system.
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 10:40 am | PermalinkTim Blair was funny?
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 12:55 pm | PermalinkDepends how you grade funny. For instance: No blogger is funnier that the dumb brother from Everyone Loves Raymond.
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 12:57 pm | PermalinkI agree that O’Rourke has mellowed beyond all recognition, but you have to look at the man’s total body of work.
And as for “four or five years”, well. I’ve been running my blog for over four years, and remember back when I started thinking how it was all so common nowadays and I wish I’d been an early adopter…
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 3:13 pm | PermalinkALSF sounds cool. Do they sing that “I still call myself left’ song I’ve heard at uni?
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 4:00 pm | PermalinkThe thing with PJ is even in his younger days he had a pretty affable outlook. He could never be a genuine RWDB. You don’t get the sense in his writings that he’s ever really rabidly hated his political enemies. Poked fun at them yes, ridiculed them certainly. Irritation perhaps, but not hatred or paranoia. He’s not mean spirited like Steyn seems to be at times. And he’s certainly never had a bee in his bonnet about that strange cult that prays 5 times a day. In the age of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh he has become a bit of a dinosaur on the rabid right.
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 4:01 pm | PermalinkI would be most put out if they didn’t.
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 4:49 pm | PermalinkPJ titled one of his essays “How to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and not spill your drink”. Steyn did not.
PJ, legend.
Are we done now?
Posted on 26-Feb-08 at 11:42 pm | Permalink[...] Club Troppo: “I first met Tim Blair at a pissup function for the Australian Liberal Students Federation. [...]
Posted on 27-Feb-08 at 11:16 am | PermalinkO’Rourke has the gift of being able to have a lend of the Left, in a genuinely witty and funny way, on the basis of our actual weaknesses, blind spots and internal contradictions, without having to set up a straw TEH LEFT to belabour. He is also capable of having a lend of the official Right when required (witness his prophetic chapter on US policy in Afghanistan in hs Parliament of Whores). With all due respect, I’ve yet to come across an Australian right-of-centre commentator or blogger with those gifts.
Posted on 27-Feb-08 at 3:07 pm | PermalinkActually Paul, its not hard to see that the hard left, which you have supported, are a bunch of intellectual lightweights.
I remember once campaigning close to members of the left at uni, and one of them told me to move off because I was standing on their ground.
I smirked and pointed to Stephen Martin: “But he doesn’t believe in private property”.
All Steve could do was shout back “It exists!”
It wouldn’t if he had it his way.
Posted on 27-Feb-08 at 8:17 pm | Permalink