I now have a blogroll

Yes, alert the media, I have a blogroll.

The reason this is the kind of news that ought to stop the world’s newspapers and television news teams from obsessing only about those silly bomb explosions on the London Underground is that throughout all the time when I was ranting away on Brian’s Culture Blog and Brian’s Education Blog (concerning which more anon) I never had a proper blogroll on either. Well, there was something vaguely like a blogroll on the Education blog, but it included many blogs I hardly ever read, and omitted many others, on account of me never updating it properly.

But there was a more fundamental problem, closely related to why I decided not to try to revive these two separate blogs, which is that I never knew exactly where to put my blogroll. My real one, I mean, the one with the blogs I constantly read. Take 2 Blowhards, for example. A culture blog, right? Well, yes, mostly, but they often had good stuff about education. So where did I put them? Did I put them in both blogrolls. Did I have a separate blogroll to which each blog would link, and if so how the hell does that work? Who do I ring to sort that out? Too much, as the great Chuck Berry sang, monkey business.

So, of course, in the end I just did nothing and let the whole situation fester. Nobody seemed to mind very much, except me. Me, because I was the one who had to whistle up google every time I wanted to read some blog I had forgotten that I liked, on account of not having a blogroll.

But, now that I only have one blog, the question of where to shove my blogroll answers itself.

What does not answer itself is how to pick them, and what order to put them in. At present, to avoid any more meaningful classification, I have simply gone with alphabetical order.

But even that method has problems. At the moment, The Big Blog Company comes just before The Hole, because the Thes, I have decided, count. If The is in the title of the blog linkee, then it begins not with B or H (as in the case of The Big Blog Company and The Hole) but T. All the blogs starting with The come just after Terrible Rubbish and just before TortureBlog. (I made those up.)

I used to be rather scornful of pop combos who called themselves Pox, instead of something like The Pox Brothers, or whatever. I mean, if the definite article was good enough for The Beatles and for The Rolling Stones, then it ought to be good enough for Oasis, but apparently it isn’t. But I probably only thought this because, being a classical fan, I never really bothered about arranging my pop music in order by name of artist. My pop just sat in a random heep, or now in a random clutch of CDs, arranged chronologically, if at all. If I had ever wanted to arrange pop musicians in alphabetical order, I would have thanked heaven for Oasis, Pox, Misery, Abba, Mud, Mouthwash, Young People These Days, Queen, Carbon Monoxide, Eurotrash, Our Daughter’s Wedding (which I did not make up by the way – that one is real) etc., and cursed The Compost Removers, The Pasadena Roof Orchestra, The Gay Communist Twats, The Exterminators, and yes, even The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. And don’t get me started on The The. As it is, I am facing this The problem for the first time, and it is a knotty problem I can tell you.

There is lots more I could say about my blogroll. But there is lots I could say about Concorde which I have never said and never will, so I see no particular problem about stopping this posting here.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog