Star-gazing instead of naval-gazing

No, I won't. I simply won't comment on what has to be the dumbest cover story for the New York Times in, oh, I don't know, a couple of weeks, anyway, except to say that it was pure bait and switch. I know, I know, I'd rather see Ana Marie Cox, than Jesse and Ezra on the cover any day. But I waited in vain for some pithy or wry comment from either RW Apple or Jack Germond. I mean, what the hell were they doing on the cover other than trying to look down Cox's shirt-thing?

If you surf around the Vega's favorite sites, you're sure to find plenty of self-absorbed comments on "what it all means" and the like, particularly in light of the take-down from recently-exiled Billmon in the LATimes.

But the blog you really need to read about the whole phenomenon is by that fellow with the accent graves* in his name, Michael Bérubé.

Indeed, the search for a “Last Universal Common Ancestor,” or LUCA, may not only answer the question of how blogs first arose from inorganic media; it may also help to explain the process of evolution itself – or, as one researcher puts it, “the question of how the primitive, early Kaus became the highly intelligent Kos we know today.”

The jargon of blog-biology is daunting, with its talk of “archaea” such as “extremoblogs” and “acidoblogs” ("blogs that have been found to thrive on the gas given off by raw ‘drudge’ and that both excrete and multiply in concentrations of acid strong enough to dissolve metal and destroy entire city sewer systems"). And some of the science sounds more like the stuff of science fiction, like the distant-future NASA mission to Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons) in which unmanned spacecraft will drill into the moon’s miles-thick ice crust in order to search for the building blocks of blogs beneath. “We’d have a picture of what blogs may have been like on earth before they evolved into the modern Pharyngula of today,” says Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Of course, it’s hard to imagine the kind of environment that’s on Europa producing blogs that look anything like the blogs we have here, either Kaus or Kos-like organisms. And that’s what I find fascinating.”

Finally (yes, I said I wasn't going to write about this) it was pretty obvious from the Times' piece that the writer was living in so-yesterday's world. Why? Because not one mention was made -- not one hat tip was given -- to the Medium Lobster, Fafnir, or even Giblets -- the only opinion leaders in the blogospher worth considering.

*UPDATE: Madame Cura -- a croissant-eating surrender monkey perhaps -- tells me those aren't accents grave, but rather accents aigu. Here at the Vega, we always try to do right by our "old Europe" allies and their strange languages.