Living in the Blogosphere

It is easy to be surfeited with blogs. But then I recall my gradual realization in 2001 and after of how ineffably wonderful was this explosion of ideas, attitudes, information, and humor. My world would be strikingly poorer without Lileks, Powerline, Shot in the Dark, Fraters Libertas, SCSU Scholars (to name the local blogs that I read regularly), or Tim Blair, The Paragraph Farmer, the Anchoress, First Things, The Corner, The Belmont Club, Small Dead Animals, Tom McGuire, Scrappleface, and on and on. What riches. (I had a glimpse into these possibilities in 1994 with AOL, the walled Internet garden. But now it's a world.)

And in what unexpected directions I can be taken. Lileks, for instance, was writing about Bob and Ray, which reminded me that my older sister used to listen to them on the radio in New York (along with Jean Shepherd). I caught the tail end of radio humor; after that, it was wall-to-wall rock and roll for me. But the clips Lileks provided brought me back to Wally Ballou, and Mary Backstage, Noble Wife, and the rest--their whole, addicting, satiric take on things.

Another direction: Powerline was writing about Barack Obama's embrace of the comparable worth idea for jobs and wages. They dismissed it as a feminist idea from the 70s. But it reminded me of my time at a subsidiary of Control Data in the 80s. The company had set up a consulting business to help small companies survive. It didn't work very well, mostly because small businesses are unable to pay for much in the way of consulting. The problem was compounded by the company's decision to transfer dozens of HR staffers from HQ to the consulting firm. The only hope that all these people could actually be turned into consultants with tons of billable hours lay in the passage of federal legislation mandating comparable worth pay. The great model was the ERISA law of 1974, which helped employ armies of accountants. A comparable worth law would require the services of HR consultants who would analyze jobs and come up with some numerical value for each. Control Data had taken some job-analysis software developed by the Air Force and enhanced it for internal use. Now it would supposedly become a huge source of revenue--another case of the company doing well by doing good, its favorite public narrative. Alas, the law was never passed, and the dream died along with the consulting division.