Reconsiderations

About a week ago, with his typically deceptive straightforwardness, Rory announced that the most recent incarnation of his ongoing weblog, Walking West, was going to stop with its relatively brief fourth volume; instead, the author would devote himself to other projects long in the planning. "If you slice a cake too many times all you end up with is crumbs, and the last thing the world needs is another crumby weblog."

As usual, we read Rory with the mixed feeling that he's gotten to something important -- and something that should have been obvious -- well before we have, and expressed it better than we would have if we had gotten there. Crumbly crumminess does often seem like the State of the BlogNation (to say nothing of Blog Stagnation). And even here -- where our collective design skills have not advanced from the college days when we made cut-n-paste photocopy collages to promote unpopular bands -- we manage to waste considerable energy on the icing while the pastry goes quickly stale.

Rory's cake, however, has always been worth sampling. (Samples in fact still available.) We'll miss the very real pleasure of dropping in to grab whatever insightful commentary -- particularly on the recent international crisis and the war in Asia -- that he had time to post on a given day or week. We'll just have to look forward to enjoying the fruits of his newly concentrated labors.