Randomly: A few days ago, I had lunch with Lockhart Steele (fetchingly pictured here in yesterday's Times with the rest of the Gawker media crew) and the inimitable D-Nasty. As Lock and I were making our way back across Spring Street, Lock nearly got plowed down--by A FRESH DIRECT DELIVERY TRUCK.*

*If you don't know why it's funny, don't worry; it's not that funny. But, still.

Today's mb column: why bloggers don't need standards.

I was getting a little bored with the Huffington Post (too much noise--like Usenet but with celebrities) but then I noticed it...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS IS BLOGGING.

I'll be doing two readings next week with other contributors to Kevin Smokler's tech/reading anthology, Bookmark Now. (Buy it with Freakonomics and Save™!)

I'll be reading my essay from the book, titled (seriously) "Andrew Krucoff and the Amazing Paper Weblog." The piece, not surprisingly, features Andrew Krucoff. And Lockhart Steele. (And Neal Pollack. And Meg Hourihan. And Jeff Jarvis.) The piece is mostly about Krucoff trying to turn The Other Page into a print publication. (I wrote it quite a while ago.) An excerpt:

When I arrive at Krucoff's two bedroom on Stanton Street, half the lights are out because one of the electrical outlets has been inexplicably shooting sparks across the kitchen and Krucoff and [Chris] Gage, tired of tiptoeing around it, lest they be electrocuted, have cut power to that part of the room. I'm deeply curious about what this seemingly oxymoronic "print blog" is, and would like to find out before they inadvertently burn the place down. Irony, or attempted irony, infuses most of Krucoff's extracurricular activities, and his latest project has all the signs of yet another effort to be the Johnny Knoxville of the Internet. He and Gage use the word retarded as a derogatory rather than medical adjective, and dude, while sparingly used, is frequently implied. They explain that they plan to recruit people to write blog entries, which they will then edit using Quark publishing software, print ("We'll put it on resumé paper!"), photocopy, then mail to subscribers via the U.S. Postal Service. The print blog is, unbelievably, exactly what it sounds like. "The best thing," says Gage, "is that I keep telling everybody I'm trying to get involved that we want to do stories about dune buggies and the low-flying helicopters that chase them! That's so retarded, it's awesome!"

June 6: McNally/Robinson Booksellers (NYC)
52 Prince St. in Soho. 6:30 PM.
(I'll be reading with Ben Nugent and KM Soehnlein.)

June 7: Galapagos Art Space (Brooklyn)
70 N. 6th st. 7-9:45 PM.
(I'll be reading with Tom Bissell, Ben Nugent, Robert Lanham, and Stephanie Griest.)

[Also - Steal a copy if you have to, Glen David Gold's (Carter Beats the Devil) essay on self-Googling, "Your Own Personal Satan," is hilarious.]