On April 23, the Save the Blogs Campaign turned a new corner. It decided to jump the shark and then jump it again. It decided that there were no limits to the number of times that a shark could be jumped over. Because, quite frankly, in Terre Haute, sharks were hard to find, while maggots were in plentiful supply.

Here is a list of notable developments over the past few weeks:

*I’m in Terre Haute, Motherfucker posted a disturbing JPEG of Richard Schickel in the nude. Geeks are currently attempting to confirm whether the dick in question matches up with Schickel’s.
*Maggot, Proud Maggot cut its staff of contributors to the bone. The one man contributing to the blog has been sacked and has been replaced with a logarithm fond of scratching its belly. There are no longer any human contributors at MPM.
*The Save the Blogs campaign has discovered YouTube five years after everybody else has. Great plans are afoot.
*Fan fiction involving Shannon Byrne, maggots and a naughty episode involving thermal underwear has been uploaded to Usenet.
*The Indiana State University has initiated a special journalism class concerning car parts. Dan Wickett is scheduled to guest lecture in November.

We will report more pedantic episodes as they come in. We never leave the house.

• Wi-fi is in rather abundant supply in the new pad. Alas, I dare not leave for coffee. Phone guys are rather finicky. They give you a three hour block. You leave for two minutes. They never come back.
• Haggis is excerpting A.M. Homes. On a similar note (and capsule still forthcoming), don’t miss this revealing A.M. Homes interview on Segundo.
• While it’s certainly true that writing sometimes pays at sweatshop levels, was there any need to turn it into an export processing zone? As Bill Peschel reveals, this selfsame exploiter also trumpets her own achievements as a freelancer. Or is that freeloader?
• The difference between bullshit and humbug. (via Books Inq.)
• Litbloggers found in school library. (via Bookshelves of Doom)
• Stephen Dixon profiled.
• The Encyclopedia Britannica? Maggots, all of them. (via Scott)
• Massacres at the Chron.
• David Ulin has details on Jim Crace’s Useless America.
• “How to Talk Mean and Influence People” (via Kenyon Review)
• “Transitory Cities” — the winner of the Boston Review short story contest. (via Laila)
• Phone guy’s here. More later.

You can always count on the evening news to be on top of these things.

[NOTE: The original ABC 4 news clip has since been taken down. I have replaced the video with a similar one from the past.]

I am currently watching a child in Park Slope cry over his Boggle board, while his mother stares into her laptop. Presumably, she’s searching for L. Ron Hubbard. The boy, as far as I can tell, is looking for someone to play Boggle and he’s surrounded by austere and humorless adults, all of them looking into laptops with similar degrees of intensity. (And just as I was preparing to engage the kid, he ran outside, presumably because he’ll have a better response from various automobiles crawling up and down 7th Avenue. Park Slope mothers. While not what a baser life form might call MILF material, you gotta love ’em.)

Don’t ask what I’m doing in Park Slope right now. I only hope the kid’s interest in words receives greater attention.

A roundup is forthcoming. But if you are a blogger at BEA, please email me your contact information. I’m assembling a master cell phone list. So let me know and I’ll get you on the list. (Incidentally, the email is ed AT edrants.com.)