Returning from a brief hiatus, I’d like to pause for a moment to pay my last respects to the Philadelphia Eagles. I’ve written before about the sad state of Philadelphia sports. No other major city has gone as long without a championship of any kind–22 years and counting. A lot of people thought that this would be the year to end that drought. Philadelphians knew better.

When the Eagles won their 13th game this season, achieving a franchise-best mark of 13-1, we were unsurprised that Terrell Owens went down with an injury. When the heads on ESPN speculated that it looked like a sprained ankle, we laughed. Philly fans knew that Owens was done for the season.

Part of this is a Philly psychosis. On the Monday after week 15, I was driving from Philadelphia to Washington. I listened to both towns’ sports-talk radio. In Philly, the Eagles were 13-1 and both the callers and the hosts sounded like they wanted to open their veins. In Washington, the Redskins were 5-9, and the callers and hosts were giddy about what they thought were the team’s excellent chances to make the playoffs and then–who knew?–maybe the Super Bowl.

Later that week I was commiserating with Packer Super Fan Steve Hayes and I told him that the Eagles would not win another game. He laughed at me. We bet lunch on it. Who’s laughing now, Steve?

This may look like wallowing, but it isn’t; as I said, I want to pay my respects to the Eagles. They gave us a fun, entertaining season with week after week of enjoyment. I’d rather have a bunch of good seasons with no championships than a mediocre team that every once in a while hits the jackpot.

Or at least I think I would. I’m a Philly fan, so it’s really a hypothetical question.

Soxblog has a fantastic post on a strange bit of blogospheric glasnost.

The motivation behind the post is that Soxblog thinks Jim Geraghty is passing out kudos to Daily Kos undeservingly, but the best stuff is Soxblog’s deep reading of Kos:

“After reading [Kos] closely for a few months I no longer have the same impression of him that I initially had or that many conservatives still have. I’ve decided that Kos is in many ways a left wing internet version of Rush Limbaugh. Rush is first and foremost an entertainer. While I think he believes his own stuff, ideology is a distant priority compared to Rush’s number one task–shrewdly creating and maintaining a media empire. Rush has an audience he has to please, and please it he does. I think the same can be said of Kos.”

Even Coyne Maloney has a pretty tough assessment of the Nick Coleman-Power Line tussle.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. My travels up and down the Northeast corridor, first through New Jersey, and now in Connecticut, have curtailed my blogging. On the other hand, driving to New England has allowed me to reflect on the state of diners in America. On Interstate 95 past Stamford, I saw a welcoming sign for a 24-hour diner. Directly below that sign was another that read “and vegetarian enclave.” Diners are famously known for their vast array of entrees, some with meat and some without. Do vegetarians really need an “enclave” to protect them from those insufferable carnivores?

On the other hand, if you ever find yourself in bucolic Essex, I highly recommend a stopover at the Revolutionary War-era Griswold Inn, with its 15th-century firearms and original Currier-and-Ives prints adorning the walls. And what better to have at the “Gris” than a warm crock of French onion gratinée and the Inn’s trademark “1776 Sausages” with sauerkraut and warmed potatoes on the side, all the while swigging pints of John Courage. I hear they’re remodeling the Steamboat Room and turning it into a winebar. But still no word on a vegetarian enclave.

The New Republic‘s Jonathan Kiefer positively knifes Sean Penn in his review of The Assassination of Richard Nixon:

“One wonders what might have become of the real Sam Byck had he the means to take out a page in the Post instead of sending tape-recorded rants to one of its reporters, and to luminaries like Jonas Salk, Hank Aaron, and Leonard Bernstein. Conversely, one wonders what sort of trouble Penn–whose own antisocial tendencies have fortified his cult of personality–might have gotten into had talent, fame, and privilege not been bestowed on him.”

Whoa. Is this part of Beinart’s purge?

Oh come on. We kid because we love.

I’ve written nothing about the terrible earthquake or tsunamis because I simply have no words. If you wish to help, check out this clearing-house blog for help contact numbers and links to charities.

Hugh Hewitt has the first grand unified theory of the old media collapse that I’ve seen. It seems like a good place to start.

The piece ties into Hugh’s very fine new book, Blog. I’ve praised Blog <a href="before and I really do think that it’s an important book for people interested the blog world’s history and future. But it strikes me that Blog is also important as a thing: Hugh’s book is of tremendous importance to bloggers.

Print media has come to terms with the blogosphere relatively quickly–co-opting bloggers for copy, reaching out to blogs for ideas–even integrating blogs into their presence, a la the Dallas Morning News blog.

Television is also coming to grips with blogs, albeit a little more slowly. Bloggers are now swimming with the school of baby pundits for whom cable news bookers trawl. MSNBC even has their own stable of bloggers working on their website.

So the book business is the last sector of the media to figure out what to do with bloggers. A few bloggers have managed book deals from their work, but so far as I can tell, none of those books represents a conversion of online to offline the way Hugh’s book does.

If Hugh Hewitt’s Blog succeeds, it will represent the first substantive step of the Internet’s colonization of the publishing world. And subsequently, bloggers will find even more doors opening to them.

It’s just one more reason for the entire blogosphere to root for Hugh.

Tom Maguire has a post speculating that the decrease in reader complaints to the New York Times is more a function of reader frustration than Times accuracy. Maguire says that readers such as himself may have simply stopped emailing the Times with corrections since they are mostly ignored.

Let’s assume for the moment that the New York Times actually does have some sort of ostrich-like policy on corrections sent in by readers. If people like Maguire give up on pointing out the errors, doesn’t that mean that, from the Times‘s point of view, their policy has succeeded? After all, journalism functions not on Kantian principles of Truth, but on the Glass Rule: If you can’t find an error, it doesn’t exist. (And don’t forget the Kinsley Postulate: If you find the error, it doesn’t exist until you can definitively prove the writer wrong AND the New York Times sends a team of reporters to duplicate your proof.)

Maguire and others shouldn’t let a lack of feedback from the Times get them down. All writers make mistakes. And at the end of the day, all writers are better off for having their mistakes noticed.