Posted 1:43 PM by Gene

Today I encountered four complete wastes of time on the Web.

1. WASHINGTON - At a time of deepening political disaffection and intensified distress about the economy, President Obama enjoys an edge over Republicans in the battle for public support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

While the president is showing signs of vulnerability on his handling of the economy — a majority of respondents say he has yet to offer a clear plan for creating jobs — Americans blame former President George W. Bush, Wall Street and Congress much more than they do Mr. Obama for the nation’s economic problems and the budget deficit, the poll found.

They credit Mr. Obama more than Republicans with making an effort at bipartisanship, and they back the White House’s policies on a variety of disputed issues, including allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military and repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

You can almost hear the authors rubbing their hands. So why did several con-SER-va-tive bloggers emphasize His Omnipotence's low numbers? Perhaps because there are so many ways to SPIN public opinion polls. A better idea would be a simple neutral two- or three-graf summary followed by the numbers themselves. Let the readers use their own heads. But The Paper of Re-CORD doesn't think its readers have them, an argument that PINCHDOM can't go pay fast enough.

2. SLIME had a teaser on His Times site:

Brace yourself for the silliest fortnight imaginable: the 2010 Winter Olympics

And so we read and read until we got to the twenty-third of twenty-four grafs:

Of course they’re silly. They wouldn’t be sports if they weren’t silly. Silliness is an essential part of sport. If sport wasn’t silly, it would be real life, and that’s the last thing we want.

SLIME's hacks set up an expectation of satire. THE GAMES are surely overflowing with the stuff of satire, and self-parody. Instead one of His typists merely restates the obvious, and does so after he and his editors thoroughly mislead us. SLIMEDOM can't go pay fast enough.

3. Listicles are bad enough -- but some typist has come up with one better: a story about a listicle. Listicles are the eenie-meenie-minie-moe of news hackery, assigning arbitrary values to dubious subjects. That this list comes from The Econowiz does not surprise us; in more than a few ways it's a high-end version of FORBESLIST. What's more listicles have a strong PR component, reason enough to avoid them. And yes, this too is about THE GAMES, so the PR here SMELLS.

4. GRATE.COM specializes in the written equivalent of shooting the bull that's full of bull. Its round-robins of revuers are annoying because they slobber over with what they think is acidic candor. So here's another one trying to convince us nineties girl-rock was one of those BETTER-THAN-EVER!!!!! pop-culture trends. What makes it especially irritating is that AHTSJournal linked to it like this:

Whatever Happened To Riot Grrrls? In the '90s, "[it] was acceptable to be angry and sexy, and in pop culture there were finally a bunch of role models: Courtney Love, Liz Phair, and Kathleen Hanna, to name just a few. Sadly, that potent combination of female rage and sex appeal has slipped out of the mainstream." Is sexy anger in rock ripe for a comeback?

Now we know from the excerpt this will be stink-up-the-gym BAD, and it also tries to sell the notion of a "sexy" Courtney Love -- although we suppose Typhoid Mary had her lovers too. But such is its strong whiff of BS even this briefest fragment of two-left-footed writing forces the reader to hold his nose.

How much time must we waste consuming the news equivalent of zero?