IS BLOGGING OVER?

The brothel creeper is just as good as Belle de Jour ever was, maybe better. (Not to be confused with Robert Crumb's grammatically correct Belle d'un jour.) But creeper is a one-time shot. Belle was there for us every day of the year. Sad, sad that she's gone. (The Pentagon must have been reading her. It's taken the romance out of joining up. See the clamp down on prostitution.) Also gone: The Minor Fall, the Major Lift. Or was it The Minor Lift, the Major Fall. Uh, The Major Fall, the Minor Lift? I've forgotten already. Whatever, more sadness.

Yeah, yeah, the Guardian in London and the Washington Post now have "Best Blog" competitions. "There's hardly a major newspaper -- from the Observer and the Evening Standard [also in London] to the New York Times and USA Today -- that hasn't published at least one lengthy feature on the growing influence of blogs," Paul Carr writes in an article on "Why bloggers are good for profits."

Professors love blogging, too. It's caught on in academe, the Chicago Tribune reports in a recent article that rolled out the usual suspects: Law professors Eugene Volokh, Glenn Reynolds, Lawrence Lessig, and some others (Russell Arben Fox, Tim Burke, Brad DeLong). The Trib hasn't put that article online, so no link. Funny, huh? And we've heard The Wall Street Journal loves bloggers, too (some more than others). Yeah, yeah, blogging has reached sea level.

Postscript: Some have claimed the mysterious Belle is Martin Amis in drag. But according to the poet Leon Freilich, Belle is really Bella:

Bella, Bella,
Charged a fella;
He wanted gash,
Hadda pay cash.
And really, why not?
She's hot, he's hot;
When ya gotta get in,
It ain't no sin.
Guy knows virtue
Can really hurt you.
Suffer no more --
Hire a whore.

That's what St. Augustine used to say before he took the gloomy pledge.