Geoff Pullum is entirely right about what’s wrong with the Foot in Mouth award given to Donald Rumsfeld. I feel all dirty having to stick up for Rumsfeld, even this indirectly, so now I have a visceral dislike for the Plain English Campaign.

Geoff’s posts the last week (especially the Vegas postcards one two three) have been great even by his standards. Kaye Trammell spends a lot of time noting what real-world celebrities do with their blogs. I never really understood the interest in this – I don’t even know half the celebrities involved – until I realised that I’m such an academic junkie that the ‘celebrities’ whose blogs I’d care most about are leading academics who write well. So reading the latest thoughts of people like John Quiggin and Brad DeLong and Geoff is much more interesting to me than reading what Moby (or whoever) had for breakfast. Now we just need a few more top philosophers to run blogs and I’ll be in bloggy heaven.