The Blogger's Condition

"The Human Condition" exemplifies Surrealist painter René Magritte's landscapes of the mind, evoked by the juxtaposition of disparate everyday objects. (1935, oil on canvas, Simon Spierer Collection, Geneva)

"So what do you think? Have they gone too far?" asks Ann Althouse re the recent appropriation -- by Huffington's Toast's "Gang of Six" (Five men and a girl) -- of Ann herself and InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds as "disparate everyday objects" (in the Magritte sense described in the caption above) juxtaposed to plumb the depths of the twisted minds of bloggers who will do anything to be noticed. [You oughta know all about that. --ed] It helps to be clever, and the toasters are clever in spades. Only two weeks and a couple of days since they launched their take-no-prisoners parody of Arianna's The Huffington Post, and already they've moved up to #405 in the Ecosystem and bagged over 105,000 hits. It's red in tooth and claw out there.

"I dropped by Ann Althouse’s place this afternoon to see if she wanted some pie," writes "not really by Glenn Reynolds of Huffington's Toast. "I thought it’d be fun if I lurked in the garden and then surprised her by popping up outside a window. Here’s a photo taken by one of the police officers Ann invited over to have some pie with us." (Huffington's Toast photomontage using Ann Althouse photos of herself and her diningroom table reflecting redbuds in the yard, together with a Glenn Reynolds photo of himself digging into a plate of strawberry pie)

When Huffington's Toast first began relentlessly pairing Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds, Ann, while amused, admitted "It makes me a little nervous." We were ourselves both horrified and thrilled (in the "I don't care what you say about me as long as you say something about me" sense) to see a variation of our own name -- Silly Willis -- linked to our blog there on opening day.

If it were only a parody of Arianna's blog, Toast would be toast by now, but it looks like they're just sitting down to a rich and fattening dessert, a fascinating example of the Darwinian dynamics of the Ecosystem -- of the human condition itself -- with everyone trying to move on up and get a piece of the pie.

Update:  Ann links with the story behind the story.

Update II: Nearly three years later, John Hawkins of Right Wing News links in Part 2 of his "Blogging While Female" series:

A lot of bloggers have noted that Instapundit, which is one of the biggest and most popular blogs on the Right, regularly throws a lot of links Ann's way. In fact, there have even been parodies done about it.

The Ann he refers to is Ann Althouse, who reiterated to Hawkins her observation -- blogged in our post "Mugged by reality" way back when -- that she has been "treated better by people to the Right of me than people to the Left of me." As we wrote in response to that sentiment:

Those of the right, who believe government ought to get out of the way and provide incentives for citizens to become proud, contributing members of society vs. those of the left, who know what's best for us and are into squeezing the money out of the productive citizens' pockets to perpetuate dependency -- humiliation, at bottom -- for the "little people." As for leftists' trashing of a lovely human being like Ann because she writes something they disagree with, we suspect that has to do with the left's current plight of waking up to find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Unfortunately, many of them are still a little groggy.

Comments

[Arianna]

You KNOW Arianna adores you, but please do not form a habit of putting her lovely Photoshops up. Her undocumented minions work on them for days in her basement sweatshop.

Look what happened to that nasty little "Full of Crap" man.

[Sissy Willis]

Goodness. I had no idea. I myself LOVE it when other blogs pick up my Photoshops, as long as proper credit and links are given -- isn't appropriating (and recycling for one's own purposes) others' creative output the very essence of blogging? But no matter, I shall honor your wishes. Thanks for stopping by :)

[Mr.Kurtz]

Intriguing, Reynolds apparently has no reflection. Now where have I read about that?

[Bruce Hayden]

Love huffingtontoast. I read the original a couple of times just to see what it was, and if it was really as bad as everyone thought it would be - it is.

But this is far, far, better. I do feel a bit bad about Ann and Glenn, but not too bad. Fame is fame.

Today, I was reading about Tom Cruise and his trying to get Mel Gibson to give up his Catholicism for Scientology. Scary stuff (esp. if you lived through the copyright misuse by that group a decade ago).