As the lack of consistent activity on Billy Paultz Revisited may suggest, maintaining a blog can be a pain in the ass. Especially if you have a life, and double-especially if you work, and triple-especially if the work is primarily writing of a non-blog variety.
Anyway, the web lost a wondrous presence to such realities last week when Fire Joe Morgan ceased operations. This site was by three TV writers who started it to amuse themselves by making fun of bad sports journalism, mostly but not entirely about baseball. Like most excellent venture of this type, FJM worked a niche no one else did; parsing dumbness, dissecting empty cliches and applying thought to thoughtlessness ought to be growth industries, but they’re not.
Well done, fellas.
You can catch the full farewell at the link above, or check out the slightly abridged version below:
After 21 years, and almost 40 million posts (we’ll have to check those numbers, but it’s something like that), we have decided to bring FJM to an end.
Although we have not lost our borderline-sociopathic joy for meticulously criticizing bad sports journalism, the realities of our professional and personal lives make FJM a time/work luxury we can no longer afford.
We started this site with two purposes: to make each other laugh, and to aid and abet the Presidential campaign of Bob Barr. Although we failed in the latter goal, we gleefully succeeded in the first, and thanks to a grassroots internetty word-of-mouth kind of a deal, we appear to have positively affected the lives of actual citizens as well, which astonishes and delights us to this day. We really never thought FJM would be for anyone but us. We are thrilled and kind of humbled to have been proven wrong.
Perhaps the future holds another project for us on which to waste massive amounts of time. For now, we will leave the site and the archives up as a testament to the fact that if you work hard enough, and blow off enough social occasions, and stare at the internet enough, and get nerdy enough, and repeatedly ignore entreaties from your friends and loved ones to please God stop blogging about Bill Plaschke and get out of the house it’s a beautiful day!, then you, too, can…have a blog.
Again, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you. And as Joe Morgan himself might say:
“I really haven’t seen them play…slidepiece…Dave Concepcion.”
Love,
dak, Junior, and Ken
