I posted some photos of this morning’s Boulevard Bolt on Flickr. I don’t know what the official participation count was, but there were over 7,000 registered runner/walkers — and lots of others who weren’t registered but were enjoying the glorious morning. For the first time in many years, I didn’t run but stood in one spot for about 20 minutes while racers, then runners, then joggers, then walkers, passed by. It gets bigger and better every year.

Bob Garfield dropped by to respond to my glib comment regarding his article in Wired and Advertising Age.

Garfield wrote:

I’ve been writing criticism for well over 20 years, so I believe I have pretty good standing on this: what an insipid blog item you’ve written.

If there was something — even everything — you didn’t like about the piece, then say so, and be specific. What you’ve produced here is just vaguely nasty, but otherwise meaningless. Which is to say: obnoxious.

He’s right. The post was obnoxious and insipid and nasty and meaningless. But I disagree with him on one point: it was not vague. I was very precise in what I felt was the problem with his piece: Never has so much been written to say so little. It was for me (and I began with the caveat, “At least for me…”) like he was trying to explain the color blue to someone who has been blind since birth. My blog post — read by a few — was merely commenting on his piece that, I assume, was written for the great un-washed hundreds of thousands of readers of Wired and Advertising Age. I assumed the readers of this post would understand what I meant in the two sentences I wrote — it didn’t need further explanation. Apparently, I was wrong.

That said, I agree with Garfield: Mine was a cheap shot. And, I apologize (I keep forgetting that critics are real people, also.)

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