How the mediocre have fallen… James Lileks was fired from his job at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  FINALLY!  Well, not technically fired, but they terminated his column and assigned him to local news, which roughly translates to, "Please go find a job somewhere else you useless parasite."  To think that two days passed before I heard this wonderful news.

Lileks' Bleat (as Lileks calls his weblog) represents everything terrible that falls under the label "blogging":  the incessant chatter not of someone who has something witty, clever, or intelligent to say, but of a compulsive gabber who just likes to hear himself talk.  And talk he does:  about his shrieking, spoiled child, about the inanities he saw on TV last night, about the indolent drive-thru clerk who got his order wrong – no filters.  If his diseased synapses can produce the thought, out it comes in all its narcissistic glory.

But the swollen repository of fatuity and vanity that is the Bleat is merely a throat-clearing exercise for this gargantuan bore.  There is also:

• His podcast (any bore must have one of those), formerly a cancelled radio show
• An online matchbook museum – Lileks loves any crappy old kitsch from the past, and his matchbooks are but a prefatory excerpt of Lileks' vast and perverse copro-nostalgia, with which his web site bulges
• A meandering pseudo-period serial called Joe Ohio that reads like Garrison Keillor fan fiction
• Homemade copy-and-paste electronica with "funny" sound bites that every nerd with a Mac seems compelled to make
• About a billion other web pages full of miscellaneous useless garbage

And of course his precious column, which used to be a weekly called "The Backfence" but was changed to the shorter and possibly even more insufferable "The Daily Quirk".  Here's a sample:

I like Pepto-Bismol. There. I said it. When I have a gut full of battery acid and barbed-wire shards, I reach for the big pink bottle, and I glug it straight. You feel it descending on your stomach lining, like a curtain falling on a bad play. It never seems to cure anything, but it's a comfort; I always have a bottle in reserve, and it's Maximum Strength, too, baby. Sure, it's overkill, but once they admitted the existence of Maximum Strength, Regular was off the table. I think Maximum was like their private reserve, something they bottled for popes and astronauts. Now we all have access, and I'm not going back.*

One might say that Lileks glugs clichés straight, to be absorbed by the tumorous biomass that sits in place of his brain, and which through some miracle of processed writing results in paragraphs like the above.  If writing could smell boring, this would.

As I have long said, if nothing else weblogs will finally rid us of local columnists, those largely unread, untalented yokels who are asked to supply copy – virtually anything will do – to fill the space above the car and lawnmower ads in the newspaper's back pages.  The irony then is that Lileks is two, two bores in one, with both his own local column and his own weblog – and finally the Star Tribune realized that his fans could just read his weblog (for which the Star Tribune doesn't have to pay him).  Perhaps room was being made for a recipe column or reprints of old Ann Landers letters.

Unlike Steven Den Beste, Lileks does his best to dry his tears before announcing his terrible news, but I think I detect an echo of the incontinent, panicked sobbing that must have filled his weekend:

My column will end a week from this Friday. (There’s a series of pieces I can’t wait to write.) [Please try –Udolpho] After that, it's just-the-facts-ma'am - and I'll no longer be telecommuting, either. This means I will start burning my share of hydrocarbons like a good American. Hell, I may leave the vehicle running all day outside the building just to make up for lost time. Maybe I will put a green roof on the car to balance things out. Some turf, some switchgrass. It's murder on the paint but we all must do our part.

Well, don't we all feel sorry for you, you have to drive into work now, here, let it all out in one big snotty bawl.  You fucking loser.

Think I'm being hard on Professor Purpleprick?  Here is another passage from the same weblog entry:

If I can get my column back and / or a nice big Online gig, that would be a satisfactory conclusion. Reporting on internet start-ups as opposed to joining an internet start-up – eh, not so much.

 

And let that be the last time the phrase "not so much" is used here. It’s old. We’ve all had a jolly laugh, but I heard Jeff Foxworthy use it on an oil-change commercial, which is like the UN-approved international standard for something being over.

Desperately he tries to scrabble back up the edifice of his minor career – his self-indulgent lifestyle demands that no humiliation be spared.  He even knows he writes in tired clichés and just doesn't care.  "Not so much" was stale at least five years ago.  Here comes the sentence surgeon with his buzzsaw, chopping out everything but the malignant tissue and looking pleased with himself doing it.  Christ, the man is lame.

The good news is that being at the office all day will make it easier for his wife to conceal the torrid affair she is having from this misshapen twerp.  As seen here:

Speaking of which, don't forget to turn in your old Coke bottles for the deposit.

I'm not the only one to conclude that Lileks' assignment to local news is the equivalent to giving his office to the new intern and making him work out of a folding chair in the lobby.  One fan writes,

As someone who was always baffled by how the Strib used Lileks – from the "Backfence" to the "Quirk", with no long(er) form feature writing or, better yet, off-beat right-wing political punditry in between – this "reassignment" smells like the familiar tactic of humiliating someone to the point they leave on their own.

Be baffled no longer, Brian Lambert.  Lileks is simply a terrible writer, easily replaced with "Quote for Today" or "150 Years Ago" fillers.  Failing that, passages of Lorem Ipsum.