"Second place is a set of steak knives"

First off, thanks to Scott and Rob for and asking me to join up with LGM — an offer that very nearly salves my staggering disappointment over finishing second in this year’s Baseball Challenge. I’ve been reading LGM since the middle of March 2005, when James Wolcott spent a few favorable words and directed his readers to the site. I had started a blog of my own two weeks or so earlier, and my first few visits to LGM introduced me to the fineries of Hitchens-bashing and to the agonizing selection of America’s Worst Blogger (a title captured that year by the inimitable and subliterate Kim du Toit). Since then I’ve probably clicked to this site several thousand times, for which I have been rewarded with valuable insights into the contours of abortion law and defense policy and have been exposed along the way to the depthless bovinity of Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus, Ann Althouse, and so many, many others. As a historian and educator, I hope to contribute in some small way to the intellectual integrity of the LGM experience (mostly by repeating phrases like “intellectual integrity” until readers believe I possess some); as a masochistic consumer of wingnuttery, I look forward to joining the skeet shoot; as part of the blogofascisti, I vow to enforce party discipline swiftly and without apology against errant voices in the comments section; and as a lifelong Yankee-hater (which I suspect is my most important qualification for joining this blog), I look forward this upcoming off-season to watching feral New Yorkers feast on the disarticulated corpse of Alex (.098 = “I sucked”) Rodriguez.

. . . Links fixed now. Yes, I sucked.