Atrios on Eschaton:

I’ve long considered the basic model for this blog to be the Howard Stern Show, though with not quite as many lesbian strippers.

I am getting a lot of e-mail through this site this week, most of it very kind. If I don’t reply immediately please don’t be offended — I am reading every letter, but also traveling the next few days. Thanks.

In journalism, stories that can run any time (and which frequently repeat) are called hardy perennials. For the last week, I’ve had the pleasure of watching some real hardy perennials come back to life on my balcony. It’s as if they knew the solstice had passed, and after a few days of cautiously dusting themselves with hints of green, were called back into riotous life by some greater force than themselves. (Which is, of course, what happened, with that force being the sun.)

Spring is here with a vengeance — the naturalized daffodils in Spring Valley bloom in pert patches, trees that seemed bare just yesterday are thick with blossoms, and my pet ficus lyrata, which grows half a foot each year, has started on its annual growth spurt. Sunday, I watched its new leaves grown from morning to night, and this morning I awoke to find a new four-inch leaf that I swear still lay coiled in its one-inch bud as I went to sleep.

It’s days like these that make you wish you had the gift of Verlyn Klinkenborg, whose Editorial Observer column consistently proves that it is possible to reproduce the mental act of observation in acute, sensitive prose, and that the category of naturalist-writer did not in fact fade away with the end of the 19th century.

I suppose I need to say something about this. Having written about politics and the internet for a good three years, it’s amusing and a little bizarre to be on the other end things and part of a viral video moment that has made the jump to YouTube, been transcribed, and picked up by FDL, Atrios, Crooks & Liars, Red State, etc. etc.

There’s no need to say much about the episode itself, which has already been much commented upon. But I do want to provide some additional background to my use of the phrase “Jessica Valenti breast controversy,” which was neither intended to provoke nor chosen out of a a soup of total ignorance. In preparation for our BHTV encounter and to get a sense of Ann Althouse, since we’d never met and I mainly knew her through her New York Times columns, which I enjoyed, and the occasional persual of the cultural criticism on her blog, I watched her previous BHTV episdode with Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith. It included a segment where Althouse and Smith went into some detail discussing various blogospheric breast controversies, including how one AutoAdmit commenter calling himself “Hitler Hitler Hitler” had said of Althouse that she had a “decent rack.” In that earlier episode, Althouse and Smith talked openly about blogospheric breast commentary, much of which I agree is incredibly juvenile and stupid, with amusement and good humor and suggestions that laughing off criticism is the best response. Althouse said (forward to 4:30): “They constantly talk about me and connect me to the subject of breasts. They constantly portray me as someone who, um, is opposed to the fact that women have breasts…Which is, I guess, sort of funny.” She didn’t seem particularly thin-skinned about the issue.

As I tried to say on the show, when Althouse started talking about meanies in the liberal blogosphere, I brought up “the Jessica Valenti breast controversy” only because she had complained about this controversy in her prior BTHV episode, though without mentioning Valenti’s name, and because it was the only such controversy of which I was aware.

After the episode, Althouse brought another controversy to my attention, in the shape of a rather nasty personal spat between herself and Scott Lemieux, with whom she apparently has a long-standing beef. So between Ezra’s prior comments at his personal site about the Jessica Valenti episode and the thing with Lemieux, I suspect that’s what she was talking about when she raised the topic of my co-writers at Tapped, and then her voice.

On a lighter note, there was a funny exchange about our hairstyles in the comments over at Althouse’s place, and one commenter dubbed me a kind of “Jewish Jackie O,” which I think was intended as some kind of insult against my nose, but which I think has a kind of nice ring to it. Now where’s my Ari?

Why can’t The Washington Post do this for our city’s victims, too?

Link:

Rising temperatures fueled by global warming are causing forests of spruce trees to invade Arctic tundra faster than scientists originally thought, evicting and endangering the species that dwell there and only there, a new study concludes….

“The conventional thinking on treeline dynamics has been that advances are very slow because conditions are so harsh at these high latitudes and altitudes,” said Ryan Danby of the University of Alberta. “But what our data indicates is that there was an upslope surge of trees in response to warmer temperatures. It’s like it waited until conditions were right and then it decided to get up and run, not just walk.”

While in many places the idea of more trees is a good one, this Arctic takeover endangers species like caribou and sheep that thrive in the tundra, as well as the native people who depend on these species for their survival.