Fat Bastard

I couldn't figure out why my referrers report for my Web logs (old kind: you know, logs of hits to your Web site) showed so much traffic from the Truly Odious Mr. Orlowsky (TOMO), a so-called "journalist" for The Register UK. (Journalists typically, Jayson Blair aside, use interviews and published information to verify that their version of reality conforms somewhat to reality itself).But I tracked it back to this hilarious rant which engages in ad hominem link insults against many prominent bloggers. One of those links is to "dangerous, faddish diets", a page on my site showing the svelte Doc Searls and Dave Sifry after bouts of Atkins dieting (not pictured: the rock-star good looks of Cory Doctorow, achieved via Atkins). Oddly, TOMO calls it dangerous and faddish the week after two peer-reviewed clinical studies indicate that Atkins is more or less as good and safe as many other diets, but it doesn't necessarily produce any better long-term results -- just better short-term ones. Why does anyone pay attention to TOMO? Because he still has link-flow, so his articles get good rankings; because The Register was formerly worth reading for bitchy, hilarious, but relatively accurate articles on subjects avoided by other publications; and because when someone loses their mind so abjectly, like Howard Beale in Network, it's just plain good entertainment -- even when you're the sideswiped subject of an article (archives not working?). Meanwhile, I'm not following a dangerous, faddish diet myself. I'm on The Zone, recommended by my svelte doctor, on which I've lost 20 pounds in two months. Oh, wait, it is faddish.