In the low-level war of attrition of the New York blogs, the battles between myself and Gatemouth form their own chapter.

So it's with great pleasure, if not outright glee, that I find myself in agreement with my esteemed colleague, on the subject of the Beard that Would Be King.

We all saw the gubernatorial debate. Everyone expected, I think, that the show would be about some demented ramble by anti-everything-of-goodness-and-value teabag afficionado Carl 'Horse Porn' Paladino. Instead, all the buzz - at least here in hipsterville - was about 'dude, the guy with the beard! Awesome!'.

And that's fine. For the tattoo tribes of Williamsburg, style definitely precedes substance.

But when you dig a bit deeper, it's not so glamorous. First off, the Beard has a Jew problem. For me, that's a deal-breaker right there. Then, the Beard has some really whacked ideas about 9/11, which come down to another variant of aforementioned Jew problem.

But lastly and most egregiously, the Beard has a poetry problem. The problem being that he writes it. And that, frankly, is unforgivable.

Good morning, New York. The summer is over, at least by custom, and that's the date I had set for myself, after a year or thereabouts of silence, to get back to doing what I love: blogging.

That hasn't been an easy decision, particularly not after the annus horribilis I'm closing right now. My habitual navel-gazing aside, there was one enormous contributory factor: the simple and glaring fact that New York politics, never a subject for the faint of heart or, for that matter, those possessed of a belief in the redeeming power of politics, has become the place where idealism goes to die.

And of course, politics is what we here cover. Dreary stuff. Mostly, that is.

Liza and myself sat down some time ago and talked about this dreariness and how to relieve it, if not for our readers, then at least for ourselves. Yes, we do this for pleasure.

So we're both going to be writing about things New York that are, to us, interesting. That can be, really, anything: fashion, art, sex, music, race, power, people, life, food, tech, all the stuff of the metropolitan existence.

But, again of course, you can't really escape politics. So here are some of my ground rules. There are a few candidates out there I find compelling: Doug Biviano, Mike DiSanto, Chris Owens, Jesse Strauss, Steve Behar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tony Avella, David Carlucci, just to name a few off the top of my head. They're all running for offices of, to my mind, greater or lesser importance, and in one case, they offer what I think is an interesting choice between two models of politics. Then there are those who would take a stab at fixing our terminally broken State legislature.

Not quite as mind-numbingly tedious as the rest of the lot.

However, what really compels me to re-enter the arena are two factors: one, the precarious state of our hard-won Democratic majorities in this state and the national capital, and two, the horrific spectacle unfolding near Ground Zero. Both of these are rather personal.

Now, before I go off and get started - this being just an exercise - let me offer my love and gratitude to some very important people. First, my four Jewish mothers -it's a long story - Claire, Marjorie, Cheryl and Rosalie, who happens to be Italian. Then, my partner in love and crime, Keith. Then, all the many fine folks who were there for both myself and Keith over that aforementioned last year.

Alright then. It's good to be back.

I've been meaning to do this for a while. Let me confess: I am sick and tired of people sending me shit they want posted here; and of course, and this is inevitable, now, this very instant. Like the other night when my friend Tracey Denton sends out a request to have her event with Christine Quinn, gag, for the next day. Here's a really dumb idea: don't treat bloggers like your own personal press staff. Don't assume that we just sit around waiting for your pearls of wisdom or import.

Here's another idea: how about you sign up for an account and post your own stuff? What, I need to lend my name, implying endorsement, to Quinn? Do you know what I deduce from these things? That the people making these requests just don't have much respect for us here at all. We're not trained monkeys; maybe worthwhile to point that out occasionally.

Or, say, my friend Rock, who has been sending me his stuff in Word format for years. What you see on this site under Rock's handle? T'was all me. And it's simply not the case that I don't like being helpful. But after years of this, I now need to reinstall my entire Office Suite, because the last document he sent me was infected with something. Coincidentally, our friends at Room Eight provide the same service to Mr. Hackshaw.

In addition, since, again, I try to be helpful, I've laid out to Rock several times, in detail, how this site works. I'm the first to grant that this site has an asinine architecture. But five-year-olds can do this. This is basic literacy in 2009, one would think. It's like having someone read you the newspaper because you can't read, or, in Rock's case, simply can't be bothered to figure shit out.

So here we go. I know that Rock isn't the only one who has had problems with this bizarre site, true enough. So this isn't just for him.

If you don't have an account, create one. That seems to work fine for most people, even if this site produces the craziest errors I've ever seen. Ignore them; TDG just does that to annoy the fuck out of everyone.

Once you have the account, log in. Provide your password to do so.

Look at the top right-hand corner of the page. Ignore everything except the "Post a blog entry" link. Click on that.

Great. Now you're in the screen I'm looking at right now. Ignore everything - especially the forest of categories; more on that in a bit - except this: the title field, and the larger field called Body. That's your blog post. Give it a title, and write or cut'n'paste your diary in the container marked body. That's it.You should also go to the top "categories" field and give some tags to describe your content. This allows Google, for example, to help find your content. Just don't go nuts with the eight data fields. You only need one. Some accounts have a little HTML toolbar that lets you do some nifty things like bold stuff; nice, but not essential.

When you're done, hit preview. If everything's okay, great: hit submit.

And that's it. The site will occasionally have the hiccups, but this is how it works. Like I said, five-year-olds can do this. Candidates for City Council shouldn't be any less resourceful.  read more »

I don’t know why my friend Michael Bouldin from the Daily Gotham website/blog, chose to lock down his comment section, after an out of the ordinary column entitled The tormented egos of blogdom, on 8th June, 2008. Too many lattes in the in the dog days of June, I guess. Or could it be that sitting in the sun too long -in some overly pretentious Park Slope sidewalk café- shifts your thinking cap somewhat? Well, for whatever the reason, the bourgeois Bouldin isn’t exactly known for shying away from lively threads, so it was -to say the least- a bit surprising, to see him immediately close up shop; and after hanging me out there to dry like that. But I have been thinking about that column ever since, because it raised for me the spectre of MB agonizing over the central question here: why the fuck do I blog?

Bouldin paid me a compliment of sorts when he was refreshingly honest about his knowledge (or lack) of black politics, as it plays out in the hood. He even went further when he said that he knows much more than the average white boy cares to know about the politics of the black communities; and that he got that knowledge frown Chris Owens and myself. Herein lies one of the big political problems of this naked city: the average white person doesn’t give a damn about the problems of the average black person in this naked city. It starts with the mayor and goes all the way down the totem pole.

Look, let’s hold that for another column (maybe); let’s just try to answer the central question here. It would be easy for anyone of you to say: it’s your ego stupid; but I won’t let you off the hook that easily or so cheaply. And the reason I won’t is because it is much more complicated that that. At least for me.  read more »

Okay, I know I've been picking on self-appointed machine loyalty enforcer Gatemouth rather often recently, but his newest offenses do deserve some comment.

The more obvious observation about the flood the man whom Pete Sikora describes as toxic released this weekend is this: if one posts material under a given alias, such as Gatemouth, and then decides to post more or less the same material under a different alias, presumably to have some safe harbor from a powerful United States Senator dissed therein, it's known as sockpuppetry. This is generally frowned upon as dishonest. Further, if one nonetheless essays to do this, it's wise to not use the exact same formatting that characterizes one's usual cut-and-pasted-from-Word-Perfect effluvia, because that's kind of a dead giveaway. One could go further and note that it's also considered bad form, when one obviously would like to remain anonymous, as evidenced by posting under an unacknowledged handle, to publish other people's private emails, email addresses, and phone numbers. That's just not done, in part because it invites spam, but in larger part because it's thuggish.

Going further, there's also a (signed and attributed) piece, which really takes several cakes. The length of this effort provides an effective safeguard against its being read. That said, somewhere in the bog is this:  read more »