Monday, December 27, 2010

All That and a Bag of Dicks

Andy Sullivan's milky loads wrangler, Patty Appel, has given up any hope of a career in journalism and has devoted his life to polishing Andy's toy trophies. Here, he's proffering a "Moore Award" to this post, which Patty would have written himself -- under Andy's signature -- if only he'd had the intelligence, wit and (Andy's artificial) testosterone necessary to craft such a masterpiece.

But being a subnormal dick is its own reward. Here's a glimpse at Patty's First and Only Life:

I get up around 8 am, check Memeorandum, and skim new items in my RSS reader until about 10 am. As I’m reading, I open around fifty posts in tabs for closer inspection. I then read through those tabs, delete most of them, and draft the best. According to Google Reader, I have 1,086 blogs in my RSS reader and have read 16,070 posts in the last 30 days. This is down from a high of about 32,000 posts during the height of the election. The blogs are sorted into different categories: politics, right partisans, left partisans, science, economics, pop culture, and so on. Depending upon the news of the day, I will focus on one folder or another. I’ll also look through the 450 or so e-mails that the Dish inbox gets everyday. I draft posts steadily until noon or 1 pm and break for lunch.

After lunch, I’ll take care of any other Dish related work I might have and then I return to reading. At this point, I will usually draft a half dozen posts for the weekend. We try to bank most of the weekend in advance, which requires finding posts and articles that will still feel fresh a couple of days down the road. Weekends consist of magazine articles, science writing, religion, out of the way pop culture items, and other fairly timeless posts. After that, I will check back in with the news of the day and will start blogging up the next morning. At 6 pm or 7 pm, I break for dinner. After dinner, I will usually return to the blog and finish scheduling posts for the next morning. Depending upon the tempo of the news, I work anywhere from ten to fourteen hours a day.

Now that's living!

If you're so inclined, you can congratulate Patty on his life's work by voting in his little contest and then leaving a comment for him on the results page. If you don't want Joe Miller to be the person most humiliated by write-in voting in 2010, that is.

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