Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “The Watcher Lurks Behind My Sleeping Back”

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September 4, 2007

The Watcher Lurks Behind My Sleeping Back

Hatched by Dafydd

In a bizarre, almost Clintonian concatenation of coincidence, we once again forgot to submit nominations last week for the Watcher's thingie; this forced the Watcher to pore through Big Lizards (a chore that likely unmanned him for the rest of the day) and pick our nominee himself.

I was just saying to Sachi that it sure would be funny if...

Council

The winner of the Council vote last week was:

NYT: Analogies Are Meaningless (Unless They Favor the Left), by Big Lizards.

From now on, our plan will be to have anyone other that Dafydd pick our nominations. We will randomly call strangers and ask them to pick a post; we will spin the huge wheel of fortune in our living room with post titles in place of the numbers; we will make frequent and servile use of our Magic 8-Ball... it all seems to work better than Dafydd pondering all the posts that week and making his "informed" nomination.

(To that end, this week, RealClearPolitics put one of our posts on its front page; therefore, since this satisfies the new criterion of allowing someone else to select our nomination, we'll send that one off to the Watcher this week!)

Our post noted that the Times first argued that analogies between the Iraq war and other wars are impossible (in order to denounce the idea that withdrawing from the former would have the same terrible effects as withdrawing from the latter did) -- and then went on to draw analogies between the Iraq war and other wars that better suited the Times' taste.

As always, we are disallowed from voting for our own nominee (else we would routinely send off two votes for ourselves each week); therefore, we voted for two other excellent posts:

Victor Davis Hanson -- Why We Must Study War, by ‘Okie’ on the Lam;

The New Conspiracy Theorists, by Bookworm Room.

The first comes, as its title suggests, from the Victor Davis Hanson piece "Why Study War?", which is required reading. Oddly enough, Okie suggests that it is required reading; and since I liked both pieces, I was happy to vote for the only one available to me in this category.

The second piece looks at the new "paranoid style," which is now associated with the Left, not the Right. Sadly, neither of these worthy pieces did all that well in the voting; but they should have.

Nouncil

We batted .500 in the Nouncil vote; the winner was our first-place vote:

Like a Suppository, Only a Bit Stronger, by the Dissident Frogman.

This is a very droll post and "mime" video from a combined English-French-language blogger instructing journalists on the distinction between (a) a bullet, and (b) a cartridge.

Our second-place vote was for...

This Is What Sadness Looks Like, by Logosphilia.

This aptly named post -- alas, I was the only one to vote for it, and Logosphilia probably feels a bit sad about that... and indeed, it deserved a lot more attention than it got! -- simply comments on the sad state of most journalism, brought to the sad end of actually rooting for their own country's defeat. (Of course, one counterargument is that America is not most "American" journalists' country: They consider themselves "citizens of the world" instead.)

It was a great post; I wish more people agreed with me.

Lookee here

If you really must read all the other vote-garnering posts (the most important ones are linked right here!), you can do so here.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 4, 2007, at the time of 3:17 PM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: Bookworm

Just so you know, I'm green with envy that something you did got tagged at Real Clear Politics. The fact that you undoubtedly deserved that kind of recognition does not make my envy any easier to bear. If it weren't for the fact that you thought something I wrote was decent enough for the vote -- earning my groveling thanks, of course -- I'd be a soggy, sodden, sobbing mess in the corner of my office right this very minute.

Aside from thinking you have fantastic taste because you appreciated my post, I also agree with you that others are often better at figuring out what our good stuff is than we are. As it is, on most days, I'm just proud of myself when I get my subjects, verbs and objects all strung out in the right order in any given sentence.

The above hissed in response by: Bookworm at September 4, 2007 4:32 PM

The following hissed in response by: Fritz

A Faro (Pharo) wheel???? My word, I've never heard of a Faro wheel. I always thought it was played with a dealing box, but who am I to question the mighty lizard. Still, a little thoughtful scratching of scales might be appropriate in this instance. Then again, you might be testing us to see if we actually read what you write. Congratulations on winning.

The above hissed in response by: Fritz at September 5, 2007 11:15 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Fritz:

Whoops, my mistake; I corrected it. Thanks!

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at September 5, 2007 1:40 PM