Updated "Blog" watch: A (selective) reader. Today, Salon. But before going any further...

A note: In building the "'blog' watch", have tried to stick to a single, repeatable method to search for entries using the word "blog" in the selected Websites: using their own search feature. The search on Salon returned 12 matches, only four of which correspond to two articles dealing with Weblogs. These are very few results, considering "we know Scott Rosenberg has been covering that beat for a good three or four years now," as has been noticed elsewhere.

After doing a Google search on Salon for "blog," didn't find many more pages using "blog." In fact, all relevant results were the same ones obtained from Salon's search engine. Conclude from this that Salon has started using the neologism "blog" very recently, even to discuss "blogs" themselves. These findings are what the "'blog' watch" is all about.

Hey, he answered back! Joe responds to Kate's comments on his departure:

she is missing the point, and doign [sic] so in a rather nasty way.

my personal sense of "dedication" is reserved for concepts that matter. i decided that my weblog doesn't matter - so why should i be dedicated to it? if i think piss tastes like cough syrup, and i am proven wrong, how long do i keep tasting piss for before i realize it's pointless?

people are stupid, indeed.

He added some more at Kate's Weblog:

your comment about was more astute (cycle). i think most people should keep their word-hole shut, and of course that includes me.

Kate responded to this last comment thusly:

Oh, poor Joe.

Can't even tell when he's being baited. It was more of a challenge than a criticism.

I have the stupidest blog on the planet, but some people like reading it. Joe has one of the most popular blogs on Salon, which means a lot of people like what he has to say and don't think it's stupid, but he's above all that, I guess.

And filed the following entry on her log:

I should apologize to Joe. I was unnecessarily nasty in this post and I've been trying to break that habit.

Sorry, Joe.

Feel like Amy Reiter reporting on this bit of gossip. Maybe should cut it out now. Have to wonder, though: is "Nothing Personal" trademarked?

Soapbox

Last Friday, The New York Times published a note on Mayor Bloomberg's push to ban smoking from all restaurants and bars in NYC. That same day, the paper published an opinion piece by Mr. Showgirls himself, Joe Eszterhas, where he discussed his new outlook on smoking and Hollywood after surviving throat cancer.

I don't think smoking is every person's right anymore. I think smoking should be as illegal as heroin. I'm no longer such a bad boy. I go to church on Sunday. I'm desperate to see my four boys grow up. I want to do everything I can to undo the damage I have done with my own big-screen words and images.

So I say to my colleagues in Hollywood: what we are doing by showing larger-than-life movie stars smoking onscreen is glamorizing smoking. What we are doing by glamorizing smoking is unconscionable.

Hollywood films have long championed civil rights and gay rights and commonly call for an end to racism and intolerance. Hollywood films espouse a belief in goodness and redemption. Yet we are the advertising agency and sales force for an industry that kills nearly 10,000 people daily.

After what he went through, including a tube fitted down his trachea for breathing, Mr. Eszterhas has every right to denounce the error of his former ways. But his born-again rhetoric just seems like a reaction of equal magnitude and opposite direction to the force with which he originally pushed his bad-boy image, an admission of having to defend himself from the opposing camp, which now is the one he used to belong to.

Smoking, I once believed, was every person's right. Efforts to stop it were politically correct, a Big Brother assault on personal freedoms. Secondhand smoke was a nonexistent problem invented by professional do-gooders...

Compare the above statements, where he describes his former "militant smoker" ways, to the behavior of the very vocal NYC smoker's rights group:

CLASH, which stands for Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment, is the only organization dedicated exclusively to protecting the rights of New York City smokers. It was founded two years ago by Audrey Silk, a thirty-eight-year-old police officer in Brooklyn's Sixty-seventh Precinct, who smokes between one and two packs a day and was, she says, "sick and tired of the government telling me how to live my life." Under Silk's leadership, CLASH has opposed the ban on smoking in restaurants, fought proposals to raise the tax on cigarettes, and worked to discredit scientific studies that link secondhand smoke to lung disease. After September 11th, CLASH called for tobacco companies to donate cigarettes to the rescue workers at Ground Zero.

A few weeks ago, as Mayor Bloomberg prepared to sign a bill to increase the city's cigarette tax from eight cents to a dollar-fifty, a public hearing was held at City Hall, and Silk showed up in a T-shirt with the words "Smoking Section" emblazoned on the front. She told the Mayor, "I know you love to eat chunky peanut butter with bacon and bananas. How about I start a campaign to tax that bacon that's going to cause heart disease, and tax that super-chunky peanut butter that's going to kill you?"

Despite these efforts, the tax increase went into effect the next day, and New York City became the most expensive place in the country to buy a pack of cigarettes. In retaliation, CLASH began distributing flyers urging smokers to boycott the tax increase by purchasing their smokes tax-free from the Indian tribes upstate.

This scribbler is not a smoker. My father is a smoker, and wish he would cut down his daily fix. Have several smoker friends which have seen go through hurdles to find the time and place to light up. One of my aunts died from emphysema, brought on by her smoking habit. From this position, allow me to state my belief adults should anyway be allowed space to smoke whenever they please, while at the same time non-smokers should have alternative smoke-free spaces. Personally believe it's a matter of moderation, and militant approaches, though sometimes necessary to reach a solution, are not the answer themselves.