My old mate Chris Sheil has joined the blogging team at Troppo Armadillo. His first post is a contribution to the debate on economic rationalism.

Someone else I’ve been meaning to mention for a while is Paul Watson, whose blog is devoted to “Comedy, media commentary and general bitterness”. Paul’s general bitterness is particularly savage when it comes to reform (scare quotes intentionally omitted) of the higher education sector. Despite having managed to secure my own escape from the general shipwreck (thanks Brendan!), I share Paul’s bitterness on this topic, and his posts are well worth reading.

By force of circumstance, Ken Parish has moved yet again. This time he’s sharing digs with Scott Wickstein at Ubersportingpundit. Ken already has his first post up, about being given (undesired) ringside tickets at a divorce. The archives are still lost behind the cyberfuddle permissions shield, but we can hope that they are not permanently bloggered.

I was feeling pretty disheartened about the prospect of a blogworld without Ken and his co-bloggers, so I’m very grateful to Scott for his rescue effort. Please update your links, bookmarks etc. With amazing efficiency (for me), I’ve already fixed my blogroll.

BTW, as Gianna mentioned in a recent comments thread, Scott has joined the self-revelatory trend and posted a picture. Not what I expected either.

Along with the rest of infinitebabble, Troppo Armadillo has been inaccessible for a day or so. Hopefully, this is just a permissions error, but Ken is threatening that, if the data is lost, Troppo Armadillo will be gone for good.

I don’t know how seriously to take this – threats to swear off blogging, [and, even more so, promises to avoid particular topics] are far more common than actual departures, but I certainly hope it doesn’t come to pass.

I prodded Rob Schaap’s guilt buttons on the quiescence of his blog a while back, and he’s responded by adopting a device which I’ve occasionally used – reposting something from the Dark Ages (2002) when much of the current audience hadn’t yet discovered blogs.

Now it’s my turn to feel guilty for having said nothing for ages about the topics Rob covers so well – health and higher education. Stay tuned while I trawl through my archives and consider whether I can somehow distil a bunch of old posts into a sparkling new one, or just repost them and let you do the work.

Rob’s also put up new posts including the observation that “bearded men are rarely found in the usual course of Australian life these days”. I guess this is right, but, rather than going along with modern fashions, I’m sticking with all my hair. Once you start removing it, it seems that there is no agreed stopping point short of Brazilian-style total depilation.

Ken Parish is back from a short hiatus, with a string of excellent posts and a new co-blogger, Geoff Honnor. Also back on air is Gummo Trotsky, whose posts include the best demolition yet of Keith Windschuttle’s paean to David Stove in The Killing of History. Those still off-air, and missed by their devoted readers, include Rob Schaap and Carita Kazakoff. The dozens I haven’t mentioned in either category can flame me in the comment box, or better still by posting about and thereby supplying me with the links I crave.

Stephen Moore at National Review Online seems not to understand the way the Web works. When he’s caught in an absurd error or nailed on a misleading statement, he just alters his web columns without acknowledgement. A month ago, he was promoting “brilliant supply-side academics” like “Brian Wesbury of Chicago” as alternatives to Greg Mankiw on the Council of Economic Advisors. When I pointed out that Wesbury was not, as Moore implied, an economist at the University of Chicago, but a spokesman for a bank there, Moore edited the post to delete the word “academic”.

Now, Kevin Drum at Calpundit has caught Moore out making the basic error of adding percentages instead of multiplying them. And what do you know. Kevin reports that NRO has stealthily fixed Stephen Moore’s column. Unfortunately the fix makes nonsense of his article, which promises to show a tax rate of 70 or 80 per cent, when the corrected calculation only makes 60.

If he’s quick enough, Moore can get away with this kind of thing before the Wayback Machine or Google archives catch him. But the blogs recording his trickery won’t disappear. And next time I cite him, I’ll be sure to take a copy of the page before he changes it.

Update Brad de Long joins in the fun, pointing out yet more examples of flagrant dishonesty from Moore and the National Review team.

According to MT, this will make 1000 posts on my weblog (for reasons i can’t figure out, it’s post #1005, but no matter). I did a word count on the file I exported from blogger and I’ve typed 250 000 words in a bit less than a year.

A much more conjectural question is the number of comments from readers. An average comment thread gets about 10, with a fair number of zeros offset by the occasional 30+ comments. So I’m going to claim 10 000 comments. Unfortunately, most of them are, if not lost, inaccessible. There are about 3000 in Haloscan’s database, if they haven’t been purged, and a lot more in the one c8to set up for me after I dumped Haloscan. While these are accessible in principle, there’s no easy way of reattaching them to the posts they belong to – a project for some later date perhaps. Older comments are gone for good with the site that hosted them.

Anyway, this is a good opportunity to thank all my readers, especially those who’ve bookmarked or linked to the new site, and invite anyone who hasn’t yet posted a comment to start doing so.

After a long period of relative quiescence, Jason Soon is back with a string of interesting and lengthy posts (made lengthier by the narrowness of his blogger template!). As he implies in one of them, his long-delayed adoption of a comments facility has been a major stimulus and has implied something of a change in blogstyle.

Julian Sanchez has a nice piece in Reason on the John Lott affair as an illustration of the strengths of bloggers compared to traditional media. You can read my thoughts on the same issue here.

BTW, I’ve finally got around to adding Julian’s blog to my blogroll.

Keneth Miles has returned from hiatus with a string of interesting posts. He’s particularly good on the science of global warming (I think I’ll just point to him from now on rather than chasing down the data myself).

I’ve added Keneth to the blogroll as an Ozplogger even though his title “The UnAustralian” indicates he clearly isn’t (he’s from those other nearby islands).

This is consistent with standard Australian practice of claiming for ourselves anything creditable done by a Kiwi who has even the most tenuous link to this country (see Jane Campion, Russell Crowe, Phar Lap etc etc).