Woooooooo!!!!!!!!

I'm in favor of columnists sometimes losing their columns on general principle. Most newspapers seem to treat it like tenure....I think there should be renewable contracts, or something.

Will this cut into his precious Target-wandering time? From whom will I hear the news that SUVs are kind of annoying, modern architecture kind of sucks, ballplayers were better in the old days, and the Gnat is doomed to life in a St. Paul purdah unless we start violently pu nishing Muslims?

I'm in favor of Lileks' losing his column on the general principle that it's a bad column. The linked post has a nice example of his passive-aggressive style of suggesting a political argument in a "humor" context that makes it more difficult to point out that he's making a bad argument.

Give that, for whatever reason, John Yoo and James Lileks are the people I loathe most in the world, this really puts a smile on my face. You can tell it's really burning him up, which makes it all the sweeter. "Really," he says, as if it's so unbelievable that a war-mongering hack would be canned by one of the nation's liberal papers.

Poor guy. I wonder if it had anything to do with his being a long-winded, crashing bore.

Lileks wasn't always such a bilious, fist-waving, little priss. His Gallery of Regrettable Food was a riot and the Interior Desecrators was funny enough, but whatever 9/11 turned him into was decidedly unamusing and the polar opposite of interesting.

His slow descent into Kip Wingerville anti-idiotarianism on MetaFilter was kind of unpleasant to watch, although it did make me re-evaluate the subtext of relentless nostalgia pr0n.

You know what, Labs? I do want to read the expected cries of outrage.

Hey, James? Fuck you. I know you're the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inside of Target, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there's a picture on the front page of my local paper today: Man killed in morning commute. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: get off your ass and get a real job. You owe him.

Everybody here should definitely contact the readers' representative, whose page Lileks has thoughtfully linked to, and make some of these points to her.

Now that we're rid of Lileks' "fifth" column, it's time to go to work on Katherine Kersten. Evil! Eeeeevil!

Awesome, SP.

The Strib has never published his political rants, AFAIK. The stuff I've seen in print is blander than bland.

10 is fantastic.

9: Here's a taste: Hugh Hewitt says that this is just like "The New Yorker asking E.B. White to manage the restaurant listings," and that Lileks will quickly be snapped up by some of the country's top newspapers/magazines (Time, WaPo, etc). There's also a bunch of links at Instapundit.

I take a perverse pleasure in the Jekyll-Hyde quality of many of his posts.

[nursery chimes.]
Today, Gnat drew a picture of a ladybug wearing sneakers because, she said, "even ladies need to be able to have fun and run!"
[hardcore death metal]
DEAAAAATTTTTTH! islamistmaddrasshdmittudeIEDDDDEATH!!!!!!!!
[smashes guitar]
[nursery chimes]
Today, Gnat learned that computers do not consume grilled cheese sandwiches, even if you place them in the CD drive.
[twinkle.]

tbogg puts it nicely, comparing him to George Babbitt as written by Victor Davis Hanson.

That Nancy Nall post is excellent.

"writing straight news is a skill I lack, and I take off my hat to those who've mastered that discipline."

This quote, which Nancy Nall properly highlights, is to me the most absurd part of Lileks' whining. A) Learning the form of straight news stories is not hard -- high school students can do it in a semester. B) Like other daily papers, 90% of Strib articles are so genre-bound that it's usually no problem to pick them out of the morgue and drop in the new names and dates and voila -- new story. C) Virtually all of the Strib's columnists are talentless hacks: S/d Hartman doesn't even write his own stuff, he just drops off some scrawls on cocktail napkins a couple of times a week, and whoever the Sports department college intern happens to be knocks together a "S/d Hartman-style" column out of them. Lileks should hardly be embarassed to be leaving that less-than-august company.

S/d Hartman is responsible for the continued existence of the Lakers, and therefore a living god.

Sid Hartman was well-established when I was in HS in 1964. He's 87 years old. He has a Wiki page.

I actually appreciate the Strib, thin as it is, because their editorial page frequently says the right thing (e.g., just now, "Democrats shouldn't back down on Iraq War funding".) There are very few other US papers which ever would say that. People in Minnesota don't realize how rare that is.

Sid Hartman started working for The Minneapolic Daily Times before I was born.

10 is so, so good. For some reason, apropos of nothing that I can recall, that snark of Lileks' against Salam Pax drifted through my brain yesterday afternoon after getting out of the shower. I guess Dennis Kucinich would explain that this was a rippling karmic aftereffect, or something.

Seriously: everybody should email the readers' rep and tell her what a pleasant bit of news this has been.

It is probably a good idea, if only because it will offset the torrents of intimidating bile that are probably piling into their mailbox right now. I wouldn't believe that that technique works, if it hadn't been working for years and years.

24: Absolutely. She's probably having a very, very trying day.

One of the weird things about all of this is that his supporters are conflating his paid columns, which AFAICT are mostly "observational humor" about suburbia, with his extracurricular political blogging--they're acting like the Star-Tribune's not running his columns on e.g., dead birds , is the paper's journalistic death knell.

speaking as someone who has been sacked from more columns than Lileks, I should ust want to say that any "journalist" who boasts he can't write news stories should only ever be sacked once.

7: Agreed. I laughed until I cried reading Gallery when my cousin gave it to me years ago, and the contrast between that pleasure and the crouching mean-spiritedness in his blog/columns has been a continuing source of disappointment.

Found on the Internets--another reason to love Nancy Nall just a little bit more:

Speaking of gay, though. A friend and I have an ongoing e-mail volley, with the subject line: Proof That Lileks is Gay: "Off to a boutique that sells gifts and home décor items; I found nothing. I never find anything there. But it's the kind of place that seems like it will pay off some day." You wonder, does his wife find this sort of thing attractive in a man? It does, indeed, take all kinds.

Personally I like the Institute of Official Cheer. I avoided the daily bleet forever, but I enjoyed the other stuff so much that I started reading it. Never read the column, because I got enough of life precious moments from what I did read. Guess he'll move to AZ sooner than planned.

#7 is right. But Lileks' turn--if he turned--to the right afterwards didn't surprise me as much as how profoundly unfunny he became. His political opinions aren't half as annoying as the nagging, resentful, passive-aggressive voice of his prose. "I found nothing. I never find anything there ..." is a pretty good stand-in for everything Jimbo's written since 2001.

(Random thought: If Jimbo didn't exist, Sherwood Anderson would've had to invent him.)

Perhaps Lileks contributed to his own demise by churning out, for free, more "columns" for the web than he ever did for the paper? The competitive advantage that newspapers retain is staffs of people who can actually devote their days to investigating stuff and acquiring new facts. The web has demonstrated that columnists are a dime a dozen, and most of them will work for free. Any jackass can have an opinion, or write cutesy humor pieces, and huge number of jackasses find opining to be so low-impact that they are willing do it in their leisure time.

The problem is that almost no one consistently has enough worthwhile things to write that they deserve to be paid for writing them. I can't think of a single newspaper columnist, opinion or cutesy humor, who wouldn't be doing more good reporting hard news.

I take it this is an action of the new post-McClatchy management?

At Nancy's someone said that lileks.com swamps the strib's traffic; shortly after that someone linked this, which amused me.

I can't think of a single newspaper columnist, opinion or cutesy humor, who wouldn't be doing more good reporting hard news

Let us all observe a moment of silence in memory of Erma Bombeck.

Dave Barry likes him.

Most of the commenters over there seem to have the blog confused with the column. I'm also sort of amused at the cries about the state of journalism, which seem to boil down to: "How dare they ask him to be a beat reporter? Journalism is about opinion pieces!"

I trolled that Barry thread! Making the point in 37! and was chastized. Sort of. I mean, Dave Barry is painful to me, in the way that Lileks is, so I'm not surprised that they'd share a lot of audience.

I saw! I was amused to see you as a troll.

The unpolitical crap on his site is what they invented the internet for. I'm not going to buy old cookbooks, or pictures of motels from the 70s, but I'll look at them on the internet for 10 minutes.

From Nancy's post:

Freelancing should be a breeze for you, and it will enable you to dote on your kid and bake bread and whatever else you do all day at home.

It's a little hypocritical of people (like Nancy, among many others) to snipe at Lileks for raising his kid while his wife pulls in the big bucks as a lawyer. They're impugning his masculinity and/or his work ethic, when in their next breath these same critics would probably rage about how women who do housework make their husbands' success possible and aren't compensated for the true value of their work.

If Lileks were a woman with a high-earning lawyer husband, no one would be making any snarky comments about that set-up. If you've ever wondered why men are so reluctant to take on housework and marry a woman who'll be the primary breadwinner, the threat of sniping like Nancy's is part of your answer.

But I was genuinely surprised that people like the column so much. Weird! Hewitt's his same sex partner, to judge from the blog today.

In fairness, GB, a large part of Lileks' output involves musing about the random crap he does all day. It's not the doing, but the musing, that she's reacting to, I think.

" If you've ever wondered why men are so reluctant to take on housework and marry a woman who'll be the primary breadwinner, the threat of sniping like Nancy's is part of your answer."

That is literally the wussiest thing I've ever heard. You won't vacuum the floors and/or hang out and play xbox all day because you're worried some random-ass person will make lighthearted fun of you in some random-ass newspaper? Grow a set! Even Jeff Goldstein has more intestinal fortitude than that.

41: Anyone who works out of the house has to deal with that threat, primary breadwinner or no.

Re my 41, see, for example, 10, and the praise for it in 12, 14, and 23.

Also a tad hypocritical is the general sentiment in this thread to the effect that, "Yeah, Lileks was a pretty funny guy, until he started contradicting my political positions. Then he suddenly wasn't funny anymore."

GB, you know that 10 is a parody of Lileks' famous "fuck you" to Salam Pax for being insufficiently macho, right?

No, actually I did not know that.

I'm one of those people, GB, and I've never thought about that sniping, much less thought about it as a threat. Nancy Nall was spot-on. Instead of whining, Lileks should be grateful for every paycheck he received for writing the useless crap he does.

Yeah, follow the link in 14 down to the end of the bleat for the original.

Once you read the original, gb, the parody in 10 is quite funny; but without the original in mind, it's a little nonsensical.

It's not that he contradicted political positions, so much as it is that he did so without actually being funny.

That is a pretty dead-on parody, I have to admit.

Actually, I thought 10 was fine on the merits, but I might be a little vindictive at this point in the war.

Lileks' original comment was pretty terrible. "Hey, screw you, Iraqi dude-- someone from my state died, ok?"

Also, I have confirmed that I find Dave Barry painfully unfunny. At his site there's a collection of old columns, one of which uses the word "abreast" in the title. You guessed it: it's about bras. Wacky.

It was even worse than that: screw you, Iraqi dude, because you never lead a revolution so we had to.

The line of argument being that Sadaam was so terrible & dangerous that we had to take him out, but also not so terrible & dangerous that you couldn't have done it yourselves.

Dave Barry used to be like a god to me. I don't want to say it was just because I was a kid. When I reread his old stuff, it still amuses me, but the newer stuff seems tired.

I think that's the definition of how you feel about embarrassing tastes from your youth.

But my parents liked the hell out of him, and were at least reasonably sophisticated. This may be a cusp-of-irony situation. Dave Barry's stuff in 1982 was a lot more interesting and unexpected than it is now.

Lileks never did shit for me, except that his images from the turkey-shaped motel (The Gobbler!) are in rotation on my desktop. Where have you gone, Helmut Ajango? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you!

I like Dave Barry, kind of. "Big Trouble" was a funny novel.

Still, he's always been middlebrow, and thus susceptible to Lileks-fandom.

I have a few Dave Barry books from the mid-90's, and that's how I remember him. Haven't read his new stuff. For my money, there is no better author for killing time in an airport and subsequent flight, with the possible exception of Scott Adams. Straightforward laughs, making it easy to tune out into air-travel-hypersleep mode, with nothing to stress or depress you. When I went through airports in that era, I always picked up a Dave Barry or a Dilbert in the airport bookshop.

Yet on heading back to Tokyo via JFK recently, I noticed: No more Barry and Adams! What happened to these guys, or at least to their books? Were they squashed by some evil airport publisher mafia?

Dave Barry's stuff in 1982 was a lot more interesting and unexpected than it is now.

I think the Internet severely damaged his "here's a weird thing a reader mailed to me" schtick. You can find so much weird stuff on the 'net these days, you don't need an aggregator like Barry to serve it up to you, let alone printed on paper.

GB, might I recommend David Sedaris for airport browsing?

Such a young crowd. Where are the Art Buckwald fans?!!?!?! Back in my day....

no better author for killing time in an airport

Carl Hiassen is pretty good for this.

Even if he doesn't spell his name that way.

I useta read Buchwald in the Chronicle and thought he was funny. But I was quite young. I seem to remember noticing around 12 or 13 years old that it wasn't actually that hilarious, I seem to recall noticing that it looked like warmed-over Thurber.

Thanks for the recommendations. I will have to give Sedaris and Hiassen a try. But at first glance, their books do look suspiciously like real novels with plots and stuff.

All novels cause pressure, even if only the pressure of needing to finish the damn thing to see how it ends, and hence are less-than-ideal airport reading material. (For that reason, the one novel author I do read in airports from time to time is Michael Crichton, because you know how his books will end.)

Dave Barry realized he was tired and quit writing columns, though. I think he deserves a lot of credit for stopping of his own accord, even if it wasn't at the same point that everyone else was tired of him.

67: I always read the ends of novels first. Then, if I still want to read the book, I can do so without anxiety. If I find that I don't want to read the book once I know the end, hurray! A crappy book I didn't waste time reading! (Of course, at the airport, this usually means you need to buy several books.)

Or, you could read the ends in the bookshop for free...

Sedaris writes funny short stories/essays, although I feel like they lack a little something without him reading them. (You may insert an objectifying comment about his crushworthy sister here.)

"Me Talk Pretty One Day" is the funniest essay ever, at least if you've ever tried to learn a foreign language.