Finally, An Explanation For City Blue

Hey, remember Daniel Rubin? The Blinq guy? Well, he’s an Inquirer metro columnist now, and today he writes the best Inquirer column since… well, maybe ever.

Apparently, according to Rubin, we are the sweatsuit capital of the United States. One out of every three adults in Philadelphia have purchased a sweatsuit in Philadelphia, according to John Fetto of Simmons research, by far the most in America. New York and San Francisco lag behind with only 25 percent of the adults there owning sweatsuits.

Okay, so the column has a Rocky reference, but I’ll let that one slide. But apparently there’s a problem with Philly having lots of track suits. Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner explains:

“You watch everybody line up in the morning at the Criminal Justice Center - witnesses, complainants, defendants, family members - and you’d think these are people who are coming to watch their kids play Little League ball.”

Oh no! People want to be comfortable when they go to jury duty or are about to go to jail! How dare they!

But Lisa Bono, 44, of Limerick, says that the sweatsuits aren’t a problem at all. They’re simply an extension of our founding fathers’ love for freedom.

“When it’s your time, you want to be in what you like, not what an office dictates of you. After all, Philly is freedom and a dictatorship is not the system I want any part of.”

Preach on, Lisa. Or shall I say Thomas Paine?

Daniel Rubin | Fashion in Philly? It’s no sweat [Inquirer]

Every Time I Come Around Your City Blinq Blinq

Stunning news from blogworld! Daniel Rubin’s seminal Inquirer blog, Blinq, is being shuttered.

Rubin has been promoted to metro columnist. No longer will he summarize what people on the Internet think of a Snickers commercial or Barbaro. No, Daniel Rubin is going to fight! for! us! as a columnist in the metro section.

Lots of people are saying RIP, Blinq — or some sort of “Blinq or you’ll miss it” pun — and wondering why the Inquirer decided to close the blog instead of just have Rubin post occasionally or hire a new writer. A Summary: Community! STUPID STUPID STUPID! The shuttering of the URL, of the community that rose around Dan’s engagement at Blinq, is self-inflicted wound. Conversation! Interweb Four Point Oh! and so forth. I suppose I agree, but I can’t get riled up enough about it to post in all caps.

But anyway. Most importantly, I’ve learned that Philadelphia Will Do “just lost its only local competitor btw.” By the way indeed! Hot diggity. With Blinq gone and Philebrity’s server being down, there will be nobody to stop my reign of terror! Take that, Will Bunch! Take a kick in the knees, Jason Weitzel!

Now somebody go get me 20-odd Dyson vacuum cleaners. (I roll top-of-the-line here, none of that Oreck shit like Fumo.)

Forward, Into The Past [Blinq]
The Inquirer Closes Dan Rubin’s Blinq [Philly Future]

Blogicized: Happy Birthday To Youse

• Hey, a happy birthday to Blinq and its writer, Daniel Rubin, as it — the blog, not the writer — turns 1 today. As a prize, he gets to speak at Harvard, or something. [Blinq]

• Apparently, those touchpad voting machines are a little confusing. This is silly, since we should be able to figure out how to get people to vote without messing with their minds. Then again, this is America, and this is government. [PSoTD]

• I’ve gone a few days without reading an essay comparing bloggers to the Roman Legion. Then again, I’ve been paid to write this. (Even this pointless sentence here is earning me a very small, small, small amount of money!) [Classical Values]

Blaze Of Glory

Funny, you think they’d wait until April 20 to do the Weedend.

Blinq