Several years ago, I was back in my grandparents' home town of Tapiola, Michigan and I met up with an old friend of mine at the Sportsmen's Club (It's a bar next to, and largely run by, the volunteer fireman's department, which is adjacent to the little league baseball diamond...let's just say things are different in rural Upper Michigan). This friend's brother had just lost his eyesight in a tragic accident, so naturally the first topic of our conversation was his well-being. My friend was surprisingly cheerful as he said, "We do all of the same things we used to do together. We go to basketball games, we do archery, we go downhill skiing, we even eat spaghetti!"
Upon seeing my surprise that such a mundane task would be included in a list of accomplishments by a person with no sight, he said, "Well YOU try eating spaghetti with your eyes shut, and tell me how that works out for ya!"
Earlier, a commenter on The Deets said it was too hard to keep all the bloggers in NoMi straight, so a post that does so seemed appropriate. Telling the story of the NoMi blogosphere will be like my friend's vignette; sometimes poignant, sometimes irreverent, and often more than a little messy. I'm going to divide our bloggers into several categories: "The Big Three," "Role Players," "Switzerland," "The Wild Card," and "The Adversaries."
While there were almost certainly bloggers of some kind before him, the tactic really took off when John Hoff came into the neighborhood under the name "Johnny Northside." John got his start in an online tit-for-tat about mortgage fraud involving...
