She who earlier this week brought Jackson Browne's "The Pretender" into the Canon of Western Literature has issued a lovely greeting to her fellow webloggers:

"But, I must say that the so-called blogosphere, liberating as it can be, is -- as I have had the misfortune of discovering in recent days -- also full of nasty riffraff and wannabe pundits who because they haven’t an earnest, original idea in their heads, fill their empty existences sniping impotently at legitimate targets. By legitimate targets I mean people who have actually had some measure of success in their professional lives, people who get published regularly in the mainstream press because, yes, they have a certain degree of talent, but moreso [sic] because they have something more to say on a weekly basis than 'boo hoo' or 'look ma, no hands.'

"Sadly, as one friend of mine put it recently, the internet is something of an 'echo chamber,' and this means that even the flimsiest vitriol gets posted and reposted, annotated and updated ad nauseam until the accumulated pettifogging becomes a kind of beslobbered palimpsest that looks and reads like a snot rag." -- Norah Vincent

Hmmm . . .

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2.)