Lake Neuron

The blog In That Number has temporarily disappeared from my list of linked blogs in the right-hand column — but it’s strictly a temporary technical glitch. Phisch has been making some changes to the blog, and in order to get to its home page you have to access a specific file. Typing in the domain name without the file takes you to a different page, related to Phisch’s business. But Bloglines, the service on which I maintain my blogroll (list of links to other blogs), insists on linking to the domain name rather than a specific file.

I forget how I stumbled onto In That Number to begin with, but it’s one of my favorite blogs. That’s one of the strange things about the blogosphere. I don’t know Phisch personally, and her blog tends to be more about personal experiences than about issues. But it’s good writing, and when she does talk about issues or ideas it’s generally from a perspective I appreciate or relate to. There are people who link to my blog who don’t know me, either, and my blog has a lot of personal-experience material.

Garrison Keillor has gotten a little too angry and political for my enjoyment, and in the process he’s lost a lot of the charm of his past work, but I still admire a lot of what he’s done, and I love the story of how he originally pitched “A Prairie Home Companion” to National Public Radio. They turned him down, saying the humor was too specific to Minnesota and wouldn’t play well elsewhere. So Minnesota Public Radio formed its own nationwide network and distributed the show independent of NPR. It became a hit. The specificity of the humor didn’t turn people away; on the contrary, it’s good crisp concrete story-telling that allows universal themes to shine through. No doubt there are some Minnesota-specific jokes that I’ve missed over the years. But the stories ring true even if you don’t “get” every reference, much more so than a bland, intentionally-universal story would. Even if I’ve never seen or smelled lutefisk, I can imagine from Keillor’s description what it’s like, and thus I can understand the irony of a specialty food which is served out of tradition in spite of the fact that some people don’t seem to like very much.

Maybe that’s part of the appeal of reading personal blogs, at least the well-written ones. Even if you don’t know the blogger, a well-written personal blog can be involving and even illuminating. That doesn’t mean that every teenager with a whiny, self-indulgent blog is worth reading. But personal blogging can be more worthwhile, and more universal, than some critics give it credit for being.