writing well vs. oh what the hell ever

I will make no claims of turning out sparkling prose, but I think in general my writing is passable and I can polish it alright when I care to. And I like to believe that my logic is generally fairly sound even if sometime convoluted. I certainly have no aversion to being told my writing or reasoning is crap when it is. And sometimes it is. I think I am better off for it. I have some of the best friends in the world who wouldn't bat an eye at calling me out in public for any manner of embarrassing behavior, which keeps me on my toes and either alert to how I come across and able to correct myself before I get too ridiculous or thick skinned enough that I don't get flustered when confronted unexpectedly. Right now, if any of my friends are reading this, they are preparing to tell me that my sentences are too long and I could use fewer words to make my point.

Anyway, I think most folks in the reality base community function similarly, putting out sincere effort and welcoming deserved criticism and deflecting the ridiculous and petty gripes. So I am never suprised when I follow a link (this time from Steve Gilliard) and find something well-written and entertaining on the other end:

Miblog Weighs a Ton

I'm linking to his main page, not the specific post that had apparently already been blitzed Steve and Jesus' General because they have already passed on more traffic to him than I get in a year and the rest of his stuff is plenty good. (Nordy, if you are ever up in NYC, I'd be happy to buy you a beer.)

From there, I ended up on this fellow's site:
Shot In The Dark He needs a beer dumped on his head. It isn't so much that I disagree with him (which I do) but that his blog is bad. The writing is at the bottom end of mediocre and the logic is worse. I kind of wanted to leave some comments, but in the end, why bother? I guess if someone put a keyboard on the ground and let a chicken walk around on it, I would sit around with my friends and giggle and laugh if it managed to punch out anything coherent and probably prod it back towards the keyboard to see if it could make another word, but I don't think I would expect the chicken's gibberish to become any more humorous or enlightened if I sent it an email and tried to engage it in conversation.