I started reading Lileks in January 2001, and really admired his ability to make the mundane somewhat less mundane. As everyone has said, he does have the potential to write well.

I noticed post-9/11 he really went away from that and used The Bleat as a place to rant and rave about the state of the world. I found this stuff off-putting and not particularly insightful.

I keep trying to break the habit of reading The Bleat over my morning coffee, but like cigarettes I can’t stop even tough I know it’s no good for me.

He wrote something about month ago, where he went off on a tangent about an Israeli suicide bombing victim, now his daughter has no daddy, but one day you’ll look at her and realize she has daddy’s eyes…

It was awful, and I looked at my screen and said “Wow, that’s awful. Wow.”

But of course the blogosphere hailed it as an example of “how it’s done”. Instapundit, et al. cannot get enough of this guy, and it just feeds the hype machine.

Anyway, I still read him, in fact I’ll go there next. Is there a Lileks patch I can put on my arm?

And he’s married to a lawyer, so he has no soul, and deserves the same fate as Steve Bartman.

And he’s married to a lawyer, so he has no soul, and deserves the same fate as Steve Bartman.

Plus, he is rather funny, although less so than he thinks, and less frequently than before his daughter was born.

That being said:

Hitting Lileks’ tip jar is like paying extra for Windows. You could…but why?

OK, I’ll bite. What’s a Stickley breakfront? Some kind of china cabinet or something?

But since you mention her, it reminds me of the last time a Lileks entry made me want to break crockery: Mrs. Lileks was laid off from her job as a lawyer for the state of Minnesota earlier this summer. This was reported by Lileks Himself as an economic calamity (even though only days before he’d casually mentioned that he banks one-third of his paycheck in straight savings). There would have to be belt-tightening, he said; they would have to let go “the woman who comes in to do the woodwork,” but the lawn service could probably be spared. I’m thinking, shoot me when I can write something like that about myself with a straight face, but OK, I guess everyone measures hardship in a different way.

Well. None other than John Scalzi suggested we all hit James’ Amazon tip jar on his site, and this idea was picked up and trumpeted around the internet, and lo, it came to pass. There was so much hitting of the tip jar the system crashed. James wrote about it later, of course; he COMPLAINED about the crash, which deprived him of some of his money. But he was gracious. He thanked everyone, and said the mortgage on his enormous house was paid through the summer, so I guess we can estimate he netted a few grand of spontaneous donations to ease his poverty.

OK? OK. So the thing anyone could have seen coming has come to pass — his wife is working again, at least part-time. And James just unwrapped a brand new computer, which he bought as soon as it came out. He buys most Apple products as soon as they came out. He bought a Stickley breakfront last year, and then there was the TiVo, and the enormous TV, and the this, and the that, all exhaustively catalogued on his site, aka the Shopping News. But has the woodwork-doer been spared? We want to know!