Surprising

But absolutely not fascinating. Despite the numerous spikes to my blood pressure inflicted by various blog authors overpraising the relatively mundane this week, Google blog search is only aware of 721,345 instances of this abomination in whatever time frame it tracks, a drop of nearly 12% from the last time I checked.

A 50% drop would be easily achieved if Prawsblawg would just lay off. Can't something you read ever be merely interesting? Noteworthy? Insightful? Persuasive? Informative? Congratulations are also due to our runner up, who I suspect an empirical investigation would show is batting a comparable percentage on fewer substantive posts.

And let us not neglect to award Kevin Drum a boobie prize for getting it half right.

FAMILY HISTORY UPDATE....In the 1950 National Debate Tournament, my father outscored future Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter 969-964. Who knew? He also outscored famed future public policy guru James Q. Wilson, though Wilson came back to kick some serious butt the next two years running.

Fascinating, no?

No.

Update: Will Baude misunderstands the nature of my criticism. Of course fascination is in the eye of the beholder. But if we are to use others praise as a guide to what we might ourselves enjoy, more discrimination would be helpful.

It may be nice to be someone who thinks every woman in the world is beautiful, but I wouldn't trust such a man to set me up on a blind date. I realize that if you're blogging about something at all you find some merit in it. Is it really necessary to add on effusive praise to everything so that people who might choose to more closely investigate some subset of your recommendations have no idea of the relative merits? If everything is fascinating nothing is.

The real mystery is what perverse masochism causes those who dislike this blog to keep reading it.

I suppose it's the same reason I continue to speak to my mother despite the fact she has one or two personally annoying habits. I don't demand perfection or even exceptionally high achievement; I just want to be able to identify it on what would think would be the rare instances it comes along.

The "fascination" disease is pervasive throughout the serious blogging community, but seems especially rampant among academic minded lawyers. I have several theories as to why this might be, but I'm not sufficiently fascinated by the question to investigate it in too much depth.

But I did think to rate some legal (and legalish) blogging sites by their use of "fascinating":

Prawfsblawg: 91!!!
Concurring Opinions: 39
Crescat Sententia: 32
Volokh Conspiracy: 31
Althouse: 29
Instapundit: 0
How Appealing: 0

Interestingly, I'm bored with and don't read Instapundit or How Appealing. Why? Because they're just-the-facts-ma'am fact regurgitation with little commentary. I'd rather have some color and editorializing added in. Puffing every concept, case, or paper as being equally "fascinating," however, rather defeats that purpose.

Update II: In a terrible apotheosis, Time magazine has decided that we're all fascinating.