The Chron In the Blogosphere

With the advent of this Internet thingamabob, newspapers are finding themselves in quite a world of Darwinian hurt. In short, adapt or die. Lately, the Chron has been adapting by having some of their most favored writers do blogs on the SFGate side. Not a bad idea really as we're sure the idea of paying $30 a year to read Jon Carroll's cat columns is not going to bring in the cash money. How they've been getting the writers to do it is a good question as we have a feeling not many of them were that psyched on the idea. We're thinking either by gun point or with long-lost incriminating photos.

Anyways, first they started off by letting some of their hipper writers-- Peter Hartlaub, Mark Moford, and Aidan Vaziri (for the record, we're pro-Vaziri)-- let loose on the Culture Blog. That was followed by Tech Blogs and politics blogs and blogs by maybe possibly the Bay Area's suckiest sports columnist C.W. Nevius as well as blogs on the A's (helped out by the Betting Fool!) and Giants.

Last week, SFGate added to the list maybe our fave columnist, Tim Goodman, who unleashed his "The Bastard Machine." Tim is one of our favorite columnists because he championed both versions of the "Office" and "Arrested Development", he got the genius that was "Buffy", and because we too have a pair of cranky pants that we often bust out on occasion (we got ours at the Buffalo Exchange).

Our favorite bit so far has been Tim's recaps of this season's "Sopranos" episodes, adding in details and allusions and foreshadowing that we've completely missed so far, something incredibly helpful in light of this season's two-part Tony-in-a-coma dream sequence. We think this is great because while we know all this stuff is going on in the show, we've never quite seen it and Tim's pointing it out for us. Oh sure, we can break down a new episode of "Lost" as well as any non-obsessed fan could and at one point in our life we could write a twenty or thirty page thesis on the infamous "Buffy" Restless episode, but we've never been able to do it on "the Sopranos." Actually, we've come to believe that all those metaphors and allusions that people talk about being on the show doesn't actually exist, they're just something critics and fans claim exists as a way of explaining all those moments on the show when nothing actually happens. After all, there has to be something happening to explain why they're showing nothing happening.

Anyways, check it out. But just one question, though-- where's Catherine Bigelow's "Swells" blog?