Slate: The Sultans of Stats – A Harvard professor pooh-poohs McGwire’s records. Is he right? I’ve suspected this was true; here is the best articulation of it. “Home runs can’t be as meaningful as they once were if

Steve Finley is on pace to hit more in a season than Reggie

Jackson ever did. But it is also irrelevant. Baseball history,

even as the purists who complain about today’s cheapened

offensive statistics construct it, is little more than a record of

inflated achievement. Insane numbers don’t threaten the

integrity of baseball’s historical accomplishments. They

constitute it.”

Matthew Rossi, in the excellent and maniacal (!) Once I Noticed I Was on Fire, I Decided to Relax and Enjoy the Fall, on weblogging:

Lately, it seems as though you might as soon admit to consorting with Lucifer

as maintaining one of these sites. Everyone’s tired of it, it seems. Everyone’s

sick of the link economy, or the cookie cutter nature of 9/10’s of the content of

these ‘blogs’ as people have taken to calling them. Everyone wants to get

back to the purity of maintaining a site just for them.

Well, not me, baby. Me and my diseased imagination are gonna keep on

keeping on till they pry our cold dead fingers away from the keys. Let me bare

myself to my limited readership for an instant; I am fully aware of how unique I

am, and I like it. I like that I’m smart. I like that I’m erudite. I like that I read

and think about what I read and melt my disparate reading into mental alloy. I

am, in short, not all that humble about this page, or what it is I do on it. Is it

Earth-Shattering? Nope. Does anyone care? Well, a few people do, and

they’ve been very nice about it. To everyone who has bothered to come by and

send me a nice email, I thank you kindly. Your simple generosity has been

appreciated.

But I do not do this for you, and I never did. Go back in the archives and

look. I was rampaging along the edges of the sanity borderlands well before

anyone was linked to me, before anyone read a damn thing I had to say, and

I’ll be doing it as long as there’s a cheap and easy way for me to screed out

these demented babblings without having to work too hard at coding.

vnunet.com: Deserted domains to go under the

hammer. “Hundreds of thousands of domain names that have been

abandoned by their owners will be sold in an auction next

week, and there might be some real bargains on offer.

On Wednesday, US domain name registrar Network Solutions

will run the first ever auction of its kind, which will include

.com, .net and .org domains and could be the internet sale of

the century because a ceiling of just $35 has been set on

each name.”