Iraq the Model in Pajamas
The brothers Mohammed and Omar of Iraq the Model have signed on to Pajamas. In case you missed it Baron and Dymphna are in it too. Then there is the fabulous Manolo, the shoeblogger. And more. What is really amazing about it is the variety of paths people have taken to this strange meeting of the ways. I've had a chance to talk to someone in the lineup (over VOIP, naturally, to keep the atmosphere just so ...) whose profile hasn't been posted yet and decided that truth is usually stranger than fiction. It would be hard to invent the life the man actually led.
There is about this gathering something so unlikely as makes one hesitate to look on it lest it shatter under the gaze. But it's a workaday kind of magic, the kind that inheres in ordinary people whose uniqueness we have stopped noticing until we remember it for the first time.
posted by wretchardthecat at 10/24/2005 07:04:00 PM
11 Comments:
And so far, Wretchard's the best-looking dude in the pictures.
A blogosphere groupie!
Wow, what a signup! The Iraqi dentists were our early window on postwar Iraq, and what a unique and stirring perspective they bring. "Eloquent" is an overused word, but it truly describes them.
It's fun to see each profile come up at the Pajamas site--you never know who's coming next. I'm very pleased to be associated with such a stellar bunch.
And agreed, nahncee, that the Wretchard photo was quite fine.
These are the true journalists.
People who call themselves journalists in the mainstream media are actually lowlife propagandists.
Viva la revolution!
Ah, but Wretchard, how can we ever compete with the Manolo himself?
Alas, I am overcome with the despair.
heather -- yes, Wretch is Australian Editor. Ain't it cool?
Heather,
To Baron's comment I would simply add, isn't it great to finally have an actual image of the much beloved Wretchard. Admittedly sans armor and sword, but surely these are stashed in the coach behind him.
Well Wretchard, (you will always be Wretchard to me!)
It certainly is nice to finally see the man who has contributed so much to the blogosphere in general and has helped me to hone and adjust my own thinking paradigms in particular. Of course you looked nothing like I pictured, but whoever does?
You have a tremendous gift for analysis and your prose have brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion.
Thanks for sharing.
Best Regards,
Paul
Chicago, USA
Wretchard,
Best of luck with Pajamas and the November launch! I am looking forward to seeing who else gets signed on from the far corners of the blogosphere as well as the excellent reporting that is sure to follow.
Your rise from casual blogger to the Pajamas Editorial Board is a real inspiration to us 'little fish' in the blogging community. Keep up the good work!
In "The Aviator", about 1948 Howard Hughes suffers increasing bouts of near-insanity. On a gala occasion, his inner circle leads him away muttering "wave of the future, wave of the future", apropos his vision of replacing turbo-engined Constellations with actual jets. (The first commercial jetliner was Boeing's 707, which debuted in 1960.) Hughes was nutso, but a great visionary nonetheless.
And so with blogging. Mayhap nutso in detail, but also visionary in Hughes' sense of foreseeing the inevitable. Why does no-one discern that as such networks as Wretchard's expand, we are setting templates for an emergent super-organism, indefinable but real, in cyberspace?
Beyond consensus or dissent lies a shared faculty of discriminating overt truth from falsehood, flowing like information-fluid into every channel and interstice of probability.
Galloways and Kerrys will fear and hate it, try by every means possible to stifle its expressions, deflect its obvious conclusions. It will mandate some things, absolutely preclude others. Chinese Communists, if they are still around, will gag their whole country in it; terrorist Mullahs will find their operations curtailed if not pre-empted. The world will be a better, more honest, even a safer place.
A generation or so from now,
people may well stand appalled at what passed for debate with Kos and Soros et.al. Their kind will still, of course, be very much in evidence, but far fewer strange-o types will be available to pay it any heed.
Ah Wretchard...
You da godfaddah...and the only one who looked as I had imagined him.
Nahncee is right,dude. And meme chose, just conjure up the image: Wretchard standing in a huge group of bloggers and commenters, all trying to get his autograph...or his shirt, or his shoes --ooops, that must be the Manolo.
Wretch, this is what you dreamed up, long before it was gleam in anyone else's eye. Hope that's all you have in common with Howard Hughes -- though some of his money wouldn't hurt.
They better be giving you a good cut.
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