Distinguished Senators, the Washington Nationals Blog That Is Great

Monday, January 23, 2006

Will Carroll: "Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta"

Will Carroll's back with more Pronouncements on Blogging, but this time he's keeping it real!

I'm pretty disappointed, actually. Watching Will compare blogging to rap should be hilarious, but it's just more of the same old drivel. He does, however, significantly up the jackass factor, a welcome addition to his usual techniques of pomposity and self-absorption.
Ice Cube called rap the "CNN of the ghetto."
No he didn't. Why can't someone do some actual reporting or at least fact-checking?
There's still some of that . . .
I guess Indiannapolis' Most Wanted would know. Moving on, homies.
[L]et's use the example of Aaron Gleeman. He's gone from a kid in a dorm room to someone read by hundreds, written a book, and developing a following.
Fun fact: Will Carroll hates Aaron Gleeman. No one knows why and, given Will's tortured logic and indecipherable prose, it's likely that no one ever will. At any rate, that's why Will goes out of his way to talk down to Gleeman, whose work Will claims to enjoy "in phases." Aaron can defend himself if he feels like bothering, but "hundreds" of readers my ass. Carroll no doubt thinks he's being clever -- gangsta-clever -- with these artful backhands. But he's just being a dick. Or, to put it in the gritty street patois Will is favoring these days, a punk-ass bitch.
Is Gleeman the blog to rap equivalent of LL Cool J? (Solid, not groundbreaking, but mass appeal.)
Is Carroll the blog to writer equivalent of James Frey? (Makes everything up, insufferable jackass.)

And since this post is pretty well content-free, I may as well take this chance to retell my favorite Will Carroll story. Will was on a roll at the end of May. Having just threatened to begin fixing baseball games if he didn't get a press pass, he really went off the deep end. In a conversation with a figment of his own imagination, he convinced himself that he was the biggest thing on the internet -- way bigger than Gleeman or even Kos -- by typing his name into a search engine and pretending every result was about him. Carroll County, Lewis Carroll -- it was all about Will, so take that Gleeman!

But really, Gleeman gets off easy, because Will's working edgy.
It's hard to wrap your head around Andrew Sullivan having something in common with Eazy E, but the comparison is right there. Sullivan's actually a bad example.
Alert the BBWAA -- nothing says "serious journalist" like AIDS jokes. Well done, Will, you insensitive bastard. You're keeping it real, dog.

"I'm straight fact-checking, yo! Y'all bitches need to stop blogging and start writing! AIDS!"

3 comments:

Harper said...

I ran into Will Carroll yesterday. He told me he wished he could carry as much weight as I do and still look that good.

Anonymous said...

If you believe Gleeman's site meter, he's had 1,676,125 visitors in about 1,275 days. That works out to about 1,314 visitors per day. Of course, Gleeman's pace has presumably risen since the days, weeks, and months after he started his blog, it is likely that his current rate is higher than that. Thus, unless Gleeman himself is visiting his blog over and over again such to comprise over 30% of his own readership, Carroll's claim would fail.

UPDATE: My common law partner, Rhetorical Adviser, notes that numbers in the thousands are technically also in the hundreds.

Ryan said...

numbers in the thousands are technically also in the hundreds.

Just like Matt Lawton is "a player we care about."