Written by: Beck

I've long been a regular reader of the Onion's A.V. Club online, though almost exclusively for the Red Meat comics. The remainder of their content tends to pendulum between liberal pandering and artsy elitism. It's rare that a movie, song, or book reviewed by the A.V. Club's hypercritical critics gets an unequivocally positive review, and if you DO stumble across a rave review, it's almost certain to be for something or someone you've never heard of. But that's neither here nor there.

One thing their writers are especially fond of is declaring something inessential. Their annual "Least Essential Albums" wrap up is actually usually pretty amusing. Regardless, as a blogger, my eye quickly caught a headline from this week's edition of the Onion A.V. Club: A helpful guide to celebrity web logs. I've seen a lot of this sort of stuff lately--CBS had a guide to creating a blog, Time Magazine published a huge article about the phenomenon. It's as though the mainstream media has realized they're going to be unable to eliminate the viral scourge of bloggers, so they might as well embrace them in hopes of at least getting a few links out of Instapundit. All I can say, having read this "guide" to "celebrity" blogs is, having read a whole host of old-media blog articles, this is easily, without doubt, the most inessential guide to blogs ever written. The list of celebrities is very telling:

Billy Corgan (famous for being lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins)
Lisa Whelchel (famous for... no, wait, who the hell is she?)
Gillian Anderson (famous for being subject of countless X-Files fan solo sex fantasies)
Melanie Griffith (famous for marrying Antonio Banderas. Also, been in some movies)
Al Roker (famous for being fat)
Fred Durst (famous for shouting)

Links to these people's blogs can all be found in the original article. I'd insert links myself, but that would take at least 2 minutes, and believe me when I say that it's not worth the trouble.

Just wait until the Olsen twins have a blog. Can you even begin to imagine what their comments section would look like? On second thought, nevermind, I don't want to even think about it.